The two-year graduate program at CCS Bard is designed to deepen students’ understanding of the practical tasks of curating and balances a rigorous academic curriculum with an emphasis on curatorial practice.
The curriculum approaches the field of art today as porous at its borders, with many artistic practices taking up economics, technology, politics, philosophy, identity, the environment and the like as their subjects. In this way, the graduate program is concerned with charting the various trajectories of art’s conception, distribution, circulation, and display as they have been manifested in institutional and alternative settings, interrogating and theorizing the character and role of art both today and in the decades ahead.
The graduate program is housed within the larger Center for Curatorial Studies, with peerless resources for the exhibition and study of contemporary art and culture. While pursuing a master’s degree, graduate students have access to the CCS Bard Library and Archives, the Hessel Museum of Art, and the Marieluise Hessel Collection.
The CCS Bard curriculum prepares students to meaningfully contribute to and lead in a global curatorial field.
Graduate students gain a strong foundation in exhibition histories, art historical frameworks, theory, and practice. Through a variety of practicums, students organize museum exhibitions that draw from the expansive Hessel Collection, collections of partner institutions such as ISLAA, and temporary loans from across the globe, as well as new commissions and collaboration with artists.
On the job training is a significant component of the degree, through the work placement program, and students travel internationally during the course of the two years. The aims of the academic curriculum are 1) to situate the students within the curatorial landscape of current debates and their historical roots through a focus on exhibition histories and 2) to develop an expansive approach to the theoretical and critical work that has become central to contemporary artistic and curatorial practices.
Core seminars in contemporary art, exhibition-making, theory, and art histories focus on debates of the recent past while also attending to deeper institutional, political, and social histories from the 18th century forward. In each seminar, students develop their reading and writing skills, improve their research practices by working closely with primary sources, and participate in animated debates. Students read and respond to work that addresses postcolonial and decolonial theory and history; Black studies; Native American and Indigenous studies; Latin American Studies; queer and feminist studies; ecology and infrastructure; media theory and technology; and embodiment and performance studies; among other areas.
Along the way, student-driven case studies touch on major historic exhibitions, international biennials, and experimental initiatives and commissions. Through onsite access to the extensive research holdings of the CCS Bard Archives, CCS Bard Library and Special Collections, students are able to develop their own innovative research platforms that build upon the histories of international exhibition practices, institutionally-affiliated and independent curatorial models, and lineages of the moving image, institutional critique, conceptual art practices, performance, artists’ publishing, and much more.
Electives (samples below) build on areas of interest and strengths within the curriculum.
CCS Bard benefits from close collaborations with Bard College and actively develops new courses and cross-lists with Art History and Visual Culture; Africana Studies; the American and Indigenous Program; Film and Electronic Arts; Human Rights Program; Middle Eastern Studies; and more.
CCS presents the ISLAA Artist Seminar Initiative supported by the Institute for the Studies of Latin American Art. This initiative supports graduate seminars on key figures and periods of Latin American art with a focus on living artists who participate in conversations with students or on historical figures represented in the ISLAA collection. Students collaborate to produce a public-facing exhibition that aims to expand art historical narratives and provide a platform for emerging curators.
The CCS Bard Faculty includes leading and luminary scholars, curators, artists, architects, and more. A CCS Bard Forge Fellow in Indigenous Art and Curatorial Studies holds courses at the Forge Project and around the organization’s collection and contributes actively to programming and onsite resources.
Graduate students curate two significant exhibitions at the Hessel Museum.
• In their first year, students work in groups to organize an exhibition from the Hessel Collection which is presented to the public at the end of the first semester. The challenge is to select and install a selection of works that offers a fresh argument on art and a new window into the Hessel Collection.
• Over the course of their degree, each student prepares a final master’s degree project, consisting of a thesis exhibition presented at the Hessel Museum (or similarly ambitious curatorial project) and a related scholarly paper (6,000-9,000 words) which is supervised by the student’s Faculty Advisor and commented on by multiple readers. The exhibition or curated component can consist of works from the Hessel Collection, temporary loans, new commissions, or performance or time-based works—it is open to the design and ideas of each graduate student. Students are able to produce publications and events alongside their thesis exhibition.
Both exhibitions allow students to conceptualize and present an original curatorial project in a full-scale contemporary art museum that is open to the public, demonstrating the skills, knowledge, and creativity they will bring to future projects and roles. Past thesis exhibitions and student-curated projects are available to view online here, and written theses are archived for the public in the CCS Bard Library.
In their second year, students work with partner institutions to organize performance and public programs. Past partnering institutions have included EMPAC, The Kitchen, Brief Histories, Giorno Poetry Systems, and Triple Canopy, all New York.
During the summer between their first and second years, each student conducts direct, project-based work at an art institution of their choosing and receives mentoring from a curator, scholar, critic, or other arts professional.
The Professional Development and Work Placement Program was initiated to expand students’ existing base of curatorial research, professional connections, and practical skills. Through a concentrated period of hands-on work, students are introduced to projects and institutional contexts that align with their personal interests and career goals.
In addition to broadening students’ existing frames of knowledge to holistically develop their own curatorial practice, we also hope to encourage existing practices of collegiality and collaboration within the curatorial field, by way of interpersonal, cross-cultural, and intergenerational exchange. Some of the organizations that have hosted work placements include: Dia Art Foundation (New York), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), New Museum (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), SculptureCenter (New York), and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art (Atlanta). A complete list can be found on the Student Activities page.
Specialized courses led by core faculty, as well as visiting curators, artists, and scholars, offer studies of art in an expanded context and touch on timely and interdisciplinary debate and issues. The following are a selection of electives offered in recent years:
• Blackness in Abstraction - Led by Kobena Mercer (Spring 2024)
• Temporalities of Encounter - Led by Lara Fresko Madra (Spring 2024)
• Unfolding a Story - Led by Suki Kim (Spring 2024)
• Embodiment: Practice as Research - Led by Cori Olinghouse (Fall 2023)
• Dreams of Our Queer Past: Trans Traces in Latin American Archives - Led by Mariano López Seoane (Fall 2023)
• Space-Time Art: Curating Experimental Sound - Led by Sarah Hennies (Fall 2023)
• On Quotation - Instructed by Haytham El-Wardany (Spring 2023)
• Native Art and Artists: Forge Project Collection - Instructed by Candice Hopkins (Spring 2023)
• New Perspectives on Latin American Art: Roberto Jacoby and Social Institutions - Instructed by Karin Schneider (Fall 2022)
• Independent Publishing - Instructed by Ann Butler (Fall 2022)
• Disability Art & Aesthetics: Extra-Visuality & Non-Locality - Instructed by Constantina Zavitsanos (Spring 2022)
• Asian American and Asian Diasporic Art and Visual Cultures - Instructed by Alexandra Chang (Spring 2022)
• Contemporary Black Atlantic - Instructed by Kobena Mercer (Spring 2022)
• Contemporary African Art: An Exhibition History - Instructed by Serubiri Moses (Fall 2021)
• Feliciano Centurión and New Perspectives on Latin American Art - Instructed by Karin Schneider (Fall 2021)
• Beyond Colonial Distinctions: Concerning Human – Non-Human Allyship - Instructed by Ama Josephine B. Johnstone (Spring 2021)
• Melancholia as Critical Practice - Instructed by Nana Adusei Poku (Spring 2021)
Candidacy for the Master of Arts in Curatorial Studies degree requires satisfactory completion of a total of 40 course credits, in addition to the execution and completion of both the written and curated components of the final master’s thesis project.
• 24 credits from 10 required courses (four seminars, four practicums, and two independent research courses)
• 10 credits from 5 elective courses
• 6 credits from the required professional development and mentorship placement, undertaken at the end of the first year of study
• The two-part master’s degree project (written thesis and curated component)
Two Year Academic Schedule
The typical course schedule for a student in the graduate program is outlined below. Required seminars, proseminars, and practicums are taken in the semesters indicated. All courses typically meet for two and a half hours once a week, although some will have additional discussion sessions, as well as meetings in other locations, typically in institutions or studios in New York City.
• Seminar: Theory and Criticism in Contemporary Art I (2 Credits)
• First Year Curatorial Practice I (3 Credits)
• Elective Course (2 Credits)
• Seminar: Theory and Criticism in Contemporary Art II (2 Credits)
• First Year Curatorial Practice II (3 Credits)
• Elective Course (2 Credits)
• Professional Development and Mentorship Placement (6 Credits)
• Second Year Curatorial Practice I (3 Credits)
• Elective Course (2 Credits)
• Elective course - Second elective may be taken in either the Fall or Spring term of the second year (2 Credits)
• Second Year Curatorial Practice II (3 Credits)
• Elective Course (2 Credits)