Bard College Art History and Visual Culture Program

06/01/2026

04/27/2026

⭐AHVC Faculty Highlight ⭐ Prof. Katherine Boivin participated in a study day focused on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition of medieval drawings, Gothic by Design.

03/31/2026

We like to hear from our alums and share news from our community!

Alumni Highlight: India Borghese
“I’m a 2025 Bard graduate, now working as a Gallery Assistant at Templon, a gallery with almost 60 years of history. I’ve had the chance to support exhibitions by Omar Ba and Chiharu Shiota, two artists whose practices inspire me deeply. Outside the gallery, I’m part of Mothers & Artists, a non-profit devoted to supporting emerging and mid-career artists who identify as mothers—a cause that feels close to my heart. This fall, I will be attending NYC for Museum studies to become a curator.”
.borghese

03/23/2026

Did you know that there is an 4,500 year old Mesopotamian board game that you can still play today? The Royal Game of Ur is the oldest board game in the world. The game is from c. 2500 BCE and students can learn about the culture it comes from in the Bard AHVC program!

03/13/2026

Recently, a piece of Bard AHVC history was permanently installed in the new Keith Haring Wing at the Center for Curatorial Studies; a mural made by Haring himself on the wall of (Professor Emeritus) Tom Wolf’s office, made spontaneously before a talk given in 1981.

Here’s what Tom had to say about the incident:

“I heard about Keith Haring many years ago, around the time he was a student at the School of Visual Arts, so I invited him to Bard to speak about his work. We hung out in my office for a while before the talk, and he asked if he could do a drawing on the wall. I said OK, and he whipped out a fat magic marker from his backpack and drew five crawling babies, perfectly proportioned, in less than two minutes. Several years later my office was expanded into the slide library and the wall was taken down. Laura Battle, who was Chair of the Art Department, preserved [the Haring drawing] and moved it to my new office in Fisher Annex. There it stayed for several decades, until it was installed in its present location in the Center for Curatorial Studies, after being restored by Abigail Mack, a professional Objects Conservator who has her practice in the Hudson Valley and specializes in the repair and preservation of modern and contemporary sculpture.

One thing I remember from Haring’s Bard talk was his statement that he would not draw on private property—only on sites that were not owned by individuals, like empty advertising panels in subways, or public walls. The same ethic was behind his asking my permission to draw on the wall of my office, to create the work that is now enshrined at CCS.”

03/09/2026

Daniel Peacock (‘11)
Since graduating from Bard’s Art History and Visual Culture department in 2011, Daniel has gone on to complete his M.A. at Princeton in 2017 and is currently a PhD candidate in their Department of Art & Archaeology, completing his dissertation Living Pictures: Pictorial Photography and the Illustration of Fiction. At Princeton, Daniel curated the two-part survey Photography and Belonging at the Princeton University Art Museum. Since 2023, Daniel has been assistant curator in the Department of Photography at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. At the George Eastman Museum, Daniel’s projects have included the anniversary exhibition Life with Photographs: 75 Years of the Eastman Museum (co-curated with Jamie M. Allen, Phil Taylor, and Louis Chavez) and Erica Baum: the bite in the ribbon—a paper show, on view through June 7, 2026.

[2-4] Life with Photographs: 75 Years of the Eastman Museum
[5-7] Erica Baum: the bite in the ribbon—a paper show
Photos by Elizabeth Chiang, courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

03/06/2026

On February 21st, AHVC students and professors took a day trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. Here’s some of the art that they saw based on their studies including the history of photography, Roman art, Renaissance art, Latin American art, Ancient Indian art, and World art!

Additionally, students from Prof. Olga Touloumi’s Situating Architecture: Colonialism class went on a scavenger hunt around the city, landing at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. Under the leadership of its first minister Henry Ward Beecher, the church played a notable role in the abolitionist movement, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1966.

03/02/2026

Students from Kitchens: Food, Culture, Aesthetics, taught by AHVC Prof Julia Rosenbaum and Anthropology Prof Sucharita Kanjilal went to Bard at Montgomery Place, a National Historic site and sometimes classroom for Bard students. Built in 1805, Montgomery Place is a time capsule of 19th and 20th century manor life and the ways in which food and dining evolved through both social and technological advances.
Bard College

02/16/2026

Happy President’s Day from Bard AHVC! Celebrated on the third Monday of February, President’s Day (also known as Washington’s Birthday) was first enacted as a federal holiday in 1879. Pictured are two of the many portraits of President Lincoln done by Matthew B. Brady, one of America’s earliest photographers and owner of a photography studio, over the course of 1860 - 1864. Photos such as these, would have been reproduced as cartes de vistes (small photographs mounted to cardstock), and held in photo albums. These reproductions became powerful political tools, allowing the American public to visually see their candidates for the first time.

Images:
[1] Mathew B. Brady. Abraham Lincoln. 1860. National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.
[2] Mathew B. Brady (studio of). President Lincoln.c. 1862. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

02/13/2026

AHVC Senior Charlotte Behren’s (‘26) summer research for Prof. Anne Chen’s IDEA (International (Digital) Dura-Europos Archive) is featured on Dr. Camille Angelo’s syllabus for her graduate seminar “Methods for the Digital Study of Religion” at the University of Alabama! Within the IDEA_Lab@EH, Charlotte’s research focused on the creation and enhancement of metadata of House L7-A, a residential and military-occupied home in the city. Establishing a Wikidata page with linkable pages for each room within the house, Charlotte was able to connect archival materials to their corresponding Wikidata items, creating “an interconnected, multilingual record of the house and its contents.” Anne Hunnell Chen Bard College