If we are to speak of the Cultural Sciences in the twenty-first century we need to recognize that museums are key locations for their study. At the BGC we link the history of museums as collections and intellectual institutions, with practical questions about the way these institutions make knowledge. Like the program in "History & Theory of Architecture" at Princeton we do not offer a vocational degree, but rather a sophisticated second-order context in which to examine the various areas where practice and theory intersect.
The concentration in History and Theory of Museums has two components. Students can take classes in the history of the museum from the Renaissance to the present, the history of collecting, the sociology of the museum in contemporary culture, and the exhibition experience.
The concentration also connects to the Cultural Sciences Campus through an ongoing series of collaborative exhibitions with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New-York Historical Society, and the American Museum of Natural History. One type of exhibition in this program involves a multi-semester initiative in which students study the content of the exhibition and then participate in the exhibition's progress as a checklist is created, a narrative is established, and the physical dimension takes form in the Bard Graduate Center Gallery. A second type of exhibition is programmed to take place in our more intimate Study Gallery (opening Fall 2009), following a one-semester course. The Study Gallery exhibitions ideally focus on a single object or a small group of releated objects which can be examined from a variety of perpsectives by students in thte class.
The larger and more long-term exhibtions generally result in catalogues that are published by Yale. Students may write entries for these catalogues. The Study Gallery publications will be written entirely by faculty and students and will be produced in-house by our publications team.
