Bard Graduate Center Gallery

A conversation with Fred Myers (NYU), Healoha Johnston (Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum), and Albert Refiti (Auckland University of Technology), moderated by Maia Nuku (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Following the recent refurbishment of the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bard Graduate Center invites leading scholars to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities for international museums in presenting the arts and cultures of the Pacific. Dr. Maia Nuku (Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Curator for Oceanic Art in the Metropolitan Museum), who coordinated the reinstallation of the galleries of Oceanic art, will moderate. Taking the new exhibition as a starting point, the panelists will raise issues about art and architecture and discuss the rich conceptual values that inform the distinctive visual output and built environment produced by Indigenous Pacific and Islander communities who live and work in the vast region known as Oceania. Challenges include overcoming cultural unfamiliarity and the persistence of stereotypes, confronting the consequences of past and present colonialism, and addressing the resilience of Oceanic identities in what Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa called “Our Sea of Islands.” An Indigenous Arts in Transition Event. Read more about the event and the speakers at https://www.bgc.bard.edu/events/1584/12-nov-2025-exhibiting-oceania.

An Alumni Spotlight Lecture by Rebecca Jumper Matheson (BGC PhD ’22, Fashion Institute of Technology) William and Elizabeth Phelps began their leathergoods and sportswear brand, Phelps Associates, as a craft workshop in a Washington Square basement, making custom belts and bags for an intimate circle of clients. Their leathergoods drew inspiration from the handcraft traditions of decorative horse harness, the functional shapes of historic military gear, and the repurposed shine of vintage brass insignia. The Phelpses sought to slow the pace of fashion change by creating quality goods and keeping designs in production for years. Clients responded by “collecting” and repairing their work, and sometimes handing down their Phelps pieces. Over the years, they expanded their workshop and added the ready-to-wear Phelps Deep Country Clothes line, reaching a wider range of consumers. This alumni spotlight lecture by Rebecca Jumper Matheson will consider the artisanship of Elizabeth and William Phelps, highlighting extant objects and specific clients, including actress Lauren Bacall and photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Rebecca Jumper Matheson (JD, University of Texas at Austin; MA, Fashion Institute of Technology; PhD, Bard Graduate Center) is a fashion historian. Matheson’s research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American women’s dress, using interdisciplinary approaches to discover women’s narratives as designers, makers, sellers, and consumers. Her recent projects have dealt with accessories, advertising, everyday dress, teenage fashion, and long-distance train travel. Matheson is the author of three monographs, _The Sunbonnet: An American Icon in Texas_ (2009), _Young Originals: Emily Wilkens and the Teen Sophisticate_ (2015), and _Artisans and Designers: American Fashion Through Elizabeth and William Phelps_ (2025), among other publications. She is an adjunct instructor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in the MA program in fashion and textile studies.

A Lecture by Eric Anderson (Rhode Island School of Design) In this lecture, design historian Eric Anderson presents new research based on unpublished archival documents from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, dating to the 1960s and concerned with design for development in the Third World. The materials include diploma projects on development themes by Ulm students from India, Chile, Egypt, and Liberia, as well as reports of faculty consulting projects for the government of post-independence India. This little-studied body of work illustrates an approach to design for development that the West German school taught to its international student body. Ulm’s development pedagogy emphasized systems-based design methods applied to economic and social programs for poverty alleviation and nation-building. Existing scholarship on the short-lived but enduringly influential school has focused on Ulm’s role in remaking postwar German culture in the political context of Western alliances, but Anderson will draw attention to Ulm’s status as a global center for development education attuned to the politics of the Third World. A Modern Design History Lecture. Eric Anderson is professor and chair of the theory and history of art and design department at Rhode Island School of Design. As a historian of modern design his research interests include interiors and domesticity, exhibitions and media, the cultural history of Vienna and psychoanalysis, and the global history of modernism. He recently completed a manuscript titled The Chromatic Unconscious, on Sigmund Freud and Viennese design before 1900, and is currently beginning a new project, Ulm in the World, on the West German school’s transnational networks, development pedagogy, and geopolitical engagements in the 1960s.

A lecture by Emma Cormack (BGC) Depictions of department store shopgirls were common in early twentieth-century silent films in the United States. Socially and professionally, shopgirls occupied a precarious position in the world of commerce, and anxieties about these working girls played out in the era’s silent cinema. The integral role that fashion plays in films such as _Shoes_ (1916) and _Manhandled_ (1924) makes clear that what shopgirls wore—on screen and in real life—was a matrix onto which contemporary ideas about class, respectability, gender, commerce, and consumption were often overlaid. In this lecture (based on her chapter in _Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film,_ a forthcoming BGC exhibition catalogue), Cormack will screen selections from the silent period to analyze the figure of the shopgirl, whose shifting identity as worker and consumer is constructed through fashion. Emma Cormack is associate curator for exhibitions and Study Collection curator at Bard Graduate Center. With a background in decorative arts, design history, and material culture, her research specialties include the history of fashion and textiles with a special interest in department stores, consumer culture, and print advertising in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France and the United States. At BGC, she was the cocurator of _Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen_ (2022) and coeditor of the accompanying publication; assistant curator of _French Fashion, Women, and the First World War_ (2019); and curatorial and editorial assistant for _Eileen Gray_ (2020). With Michelle Finamore, she is coeditor of BGC’s forthcoming _Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in American Silent Film_ (2026).

A lecture duet by Caroline Dakers (University of the Arts London) and Neil Burton (Architectural History Practice) In this lecture duet, partners in life and in research Caroline Dakers and Neil Burton explore another partnership—between architect, decorator, and color theorist Owen Jones and the wealthy Victorian collector Alfred Morrison. Alfred Morrison (1821–1897) was one of the most important yet least-known Victorian collectors. He filled his houses at Fonthill in Wiltshire and Carlton House Terrace in London with Chinese Imperial porcelain, Old Masters and modern paintings, engraved portraits of famous men and women, coins and medals, autograph manuscripts and objets d’art by Europe’s leading enamelists and metalworkers. From the early 1860s he was the most significant private patron of the architect, designer, and color theorist Owen Jones and employed him to decorate the interior of his London and country houses. Owen Jones (1809–1874) is now known only as the author of the _Grammar of Ornament,_ published in 1856, but in his lifetime he was known as “Alhambra Jones” for his detailed and highly colored studies of the Moorish Alhambra Palace in Spain, published in the 1840s, and as the man responsible for the painted decoration of the 1851 Great Exhibition building. He trained as an architect and embraced the modern technology of the mid-nineteenth century in his use of iron, glass, and fibrous plaster, but his real skill was as an interior designer, and he produced several spectacular interiors, now all lost apart from the London mansion of Alfred Morrison in Carlton House Terrace. While working for Morrison at Fonthill, Jones was able to study the fabulous collection of Chinese porcelain and his study bore fruit in _Examples of Chinese Ornament,_ which he published in 1867. After this pair of talks, Dakers and Burton will discuss what happened to the reputations of Morrison and Jones after their deaths. Dr. Caroline Dakers is professor emerita in cultural history at the University of the Arts London. She is currently working on _British Artists: The Popular View 1850–1950_ for Princeton University Press and is a contributor to the forthcoming exhibition catalogue on Philip Webb (Bard Graduate Center). She edited and contributed to _Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History_ (UCLPress, 2018) and contributed to a conference on Owen Jones in Oxford (October 2024). She has written three books for Yale University Press— _Clouds: The Biography of a Country House_ (1993); _The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society_ (1999); and _A Genius for Money: Business, Art and the Morrisons_ (2011). She is a fellow of the Society for Antiquaries and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Neil Burton is currently a director of the Architectural History Practice. He was previously a historian with the Greater London Council Historic Buildings Division, an inspector of Historic Buildings with English Heritage, and the secretary of the Georgian Group. His books include _Life in the Georgian City_ (with Dan Cruikshank, published by Viking) and _Behind the Façade: The London Town House Plan, 1660–1840_ (with Peter Guillery, published by Spire Books). He contributed a chapter on Alfred Morrison’s architectural works in _Fonthill Recovered_ (UCL Press, 2018) and contributed to a conference on Owen Jones in Oxford (October 2024). He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.

A lecture by Esclarmonde Monteil (Ministère de la Culture) For over three centuries, the textile industry held immense economic and social importance in France. Before its collapse in the late twentieth century, governments endeavored to control, understand, and encourage the production of French textiles. Based on the exhibition _Made in France_ and the rich collection of samples preserved at the National Archives, this lecture will explore the great diversity of a now-vanished production, from the most popular to the most luxurious fabrics. They represent an indispensable source for understanding the history of France, from the mid-seventeenth century to the present day, and the lives of those who contributed to this industry—from the production of raw materials to final consumption. A Dress and Textile History lecture. Esclarmonde Monteil is a French curator, specializing in textile and fashion history. She has directed the Toile de Jouy Museum and the Musée des Tissus in Lyon. She has curated many textile and fashion exhibitions, the latest being _Made in France, une histoire du textile_ at the National Archives last year. An alumna from the École du Louvre and the University of Saint Andrews, she is a knight in the Ordre des arts et lettres.