The Bard Graduate Center
The BGC is a graduate research institute committed to studying the cultural history of the material world. Our
degree programs,
research projects and
exhibition program together work to suggest a new field of questions at the crossroads where decorative arts, design history and material culture studies meet.
"Object of the Month" is a new web column. Each month an invited
guest "curator" will discuss—from any number of perspectives—an object currently on view in the BGC Gallery.
"Even before the advent of electricity, candlesticks were a luxurious – perhaps even inessential – implement. In his Directions to Servants (1745) Jonathan Swift pointed out that it was just as easy to “stick your candle in a bottle, or with a lump of butter against the wainscot, in a powder-horn, or in an old shoe..."
writes Shax Riegler.
