The Bard Graduate Center has contributed approximately 2,600 exhibition installation photographs to the Artstor Digital Library.

The Bard Graduate Center is an academic unit of Bard College that offers advanced degrees in decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Founded in 1993 in New York City, it is comprised of MA and PhD programs, a Gallery, and an acclaimed Research Institute. Located in a six story townhouse half a block from Central Park, the Gallery is an intimate environment for viewing loan exhibitions curated by the Center’s faculty, staff, students, or specialized curatorial consultants, frequently in collaboration with renowned institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum, and the New-York Historical Society.

The Gallery presents three to four exhibitions annually, including two Focus Projects: small-scale academically rigorous exhibitions and publications that are developed and executed by Bard Graduate Center faculty and postdoctoral fellows in collaboration with students in the graduate programs. Many exhibitions consider issues and ideas outside the established canons of art history. For example, Bard Graduate Center Gallery has organized recent exhibitions that have examined the styles of scientific imagery, the making of Chinese cloisonné, and the role of women in the history of 20th-century design. With a commitment to investigating under-recognized topics in the history of design, Gallery exhibitions provide a critical framework for understanding the context in which historical and contemporary objects were made, used, collected, and displayed.

Bard Graduate Center is committed to innovative exhibition practices that stimulate scholarly discourse, encouraging curators, faculty, and fellows, working in different disciplines, to explore the exhibition as a medium to illustrate the central arguments of their scholarship. As an institute for advanced study of the cultural history of the material world, it is defined by the way it relates teaching, research, and exhibitions.