Our Students

Spring Sculpture Exhibit

“Bard sculpture students sited their final projects of the spring semester throughout the grounds of Montgomery Place. They chose not to compete with the landscape/architecture but to work within it:  balloon bird houses, a burial shrine, a spilled oversized martini glass, a tethered line of voile flags between two trees, a steel viewing box, a curtain of mirrors, a sound tube for transmitting the voice to a confession booth and a pair of steel spiders crawling near a pond. Well done!” —Arthur Gibbons, Professor of Sculpture, Bard College 

Who Counts?

The Past in the Present, an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences course taught by Myra Young Armstead in the fall of 2020, focused on the relationship between one’s positionality in the present and truth-telling about the past. The class culminated in an audiovisual performance of an original graphic novel that considers the question, “Who counts, and why?” It introduces the audience to the politics underlying decadal population enumerations and their relationship to democracy in the United States. The federal census of 1820 and 2020 are compared on issues pertaining to race, citizenship rights, and equality.

Gilsonfest: The Exceptional Journey of Alexander Gilson

This digital presentation was produced by students in a Bard College course entitled The Window at Montgomery Place, taught by Professor Myra Young Armstead during the spring of 2019. As a combined History and Experimental Humanities course, the class provided students with the opportunity to think creatively and artistically of ways to use visual electronic media technologies to present historical narratives. Using Alexander Gilson's life as a reference, the images address the themes of slavery, gardening at Montgomery Place, business and property ownership, and family/community connections.

The Curiosity Cabinet

The Curiosity Cabinet class, taught by Associate Professor of Art History Susan Merriam, met regularly in the basement of the mansion at Montgomery Place during the fall 2021 semester to study some of the fascinating objects in the collection, which boasts well over 8,000 items. Students researched objects that illuminate the historical phenomenon of the curiosity cabinet. These collections of oddities, as small as a box or as large as a room, are precursors to the modern museum. Students became familiar with the collections, learning about collections management, and doing original research. An exhibition of Montgomery Place objects and student research took place at Stevenson Library over the winter of 2021, with an opening reception on December 10.

History in 3D: Art History Major Lin Barnett ’19 Maps Cedar Hill

The Hudson Valley Apple Project

Over two weeks during the 2017 winter break, five Bard students in Experimental Humanities conceived, designed, and built an interactive website that includes a database of more than 800 cultivars grown in New York State, including about 60 varieties grown in the orchards on Bard’s Montgomery Place Campus. The students enriched their project, connecting it to place and their experience, by building relationships with local historians at Historic Red Hook as they worked in their archives, as well as a community of Dutchess County apple growers, informally interviewing them on visits to their farms. Funding for this project was made possible through a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and from Bard's Center for Civic Engagement (CCE).