Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum of Art

Photo credit: Letitia Smith

The Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard) is a 38,000-square-foot exhibition, research, and study facility that was founded in 1990 through a generous gift by Marieluise Hessel and Richard Black. It is the home of Bard's graduate program in curatorial studies. The Center conducts a varied exhibition program exploring aspects of the presentation of the contemporary visual arts. The exhibitions may draw on the Center's permanent collection, the Marieluise Hessel Collection. The Center's library has an exceptional collection of exhibition catalogues and reference works, an archive of materials on the contemporary visual arts, and a slide collection. Artists, scholars, curators, and other museum professionals regularly take part in lectures and conferences that are open to undergraduates and the public.

In November 2006 CCS Bard inaugurated the Hessel Museum of Art, a 17,000-square-foot building for exhibitions curated from the Marieluise Hessel Collection. The Hessel Museum extends the reach of the CCS Bard exhibition program, providing a place to test out the possibilities for exhibition making, using the remarkable resources of the collection as a whole. Designed by architect Jim Goettsch and Nada Andric, who designed the original CCS building, the new museum was conceived specifically with the Hessel Collection in mind, and has been scaled and organized so that approximately 10 to 15 percent of the collection can be shown at any one time.

For more information: http://www.bard.edu/ccs

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