Browse Exhibits (24 total)

Muhheakantuck ("river that flows both ways") is a tidal estuary that we know today as the Hudson River. For thousands of years, it has defined the lives of the humans who have come into contact with its waters, wetlands, bluffs and uplands. Today, Bard College takes its turn on the Muhheakantuck shore, in the unique and bountiful environment of the Tivoli Bays. This exhibit tells the story of those who came before and of a relationship with the land that has lasted millennia.

Note: Photographs by Tom Danz, unless otherwise indicated. 

Acknowledgements: thanks to Professor Christopher Lindner, Bard's Archaeologist in Residence, for information in this presentation. Articles by Dr. Lindner, his former students Elizabeth Chilton and Bethia Waterman, and State Archaeologist Emeritus Robert E. Funk can be read by googling Bard Archaeology

Bard College, formerly known as St. Stephen's College, had fraternities on campus for over 80 years. It is a surprising fact for many people who hear it, which makes the existence of these societies all the more interesting. The fraternities at Bard only lasted as long as the values of both school and the societies were aligned and this ensured that the fraternities were all disbanded by the end of the 1940s. Dissolving the fraternities was a means of committing to the new progressive goals and values of the college rather than keeping with the old ideas and beliefs of the fraternal system. 

Located in the heart of the Hudson River National Historic Landmark District, Blithewood Garden was designed circa 1903 by Francis L. V. Hoppin (1867–1941) of the architectural firm Hoppin & Koen. It is a classic example of a walled Italianate garden. Blithewood Garden today remains breathtakingly beautiful, including its awe-inspiring backdrop of the Catskill Mountains and Hudson River.

In keeping with the turn-of-the-century trend toward Romanticism, the formal Italian garden acts as an extension of the Georgian-style mansion. Hoppin designed the house in 1900 for Captain Andrew C. Zabriskie (1853–1916) and his wife, Frances Hunter Zabriskie (d. 1951), who owned the Blithewood estate from 1899 to 1951, when their son, Christian Zabriskie, donated it to Bard College.

Blithewood garden is quintessentially an architectural garden. It is a garden set upon the land, set apart from the landscape —
except where views are specifically allowed for. The garden is determined by its architectural bones…

– Wendy Joy Darby, for Lepera and Ward, Architects, “The Blithewood Garden at Bard College Historic Landscape Report,”
September 1989, p. 29

Above photographs by Suki Sekula '19

The Montgomery Place Collections at Bard College contain hundreds of mushroom drawings by Violetta Delafield, most of which are watercolors with specimen data describing each species she collected. This exhibit displays a small collection of these drawings and notations. Accompanying this selection are descriptions of the work written by the students in the Experimental Humanities/Art History course, “The History of the Experiment (ARTH 252).” Having little more than an unpublished biography of Violetta (written by her husband), the students reflected on her catalog of mushrooms, considered its qualities as a database in the original analog form, and then created a digitized version for this exhibit.

To view the entire catalog of mushrooms visit the Violetta White Delafield Mushroom Drawings Collection in Artstor.

Gilsonfest was a Bard College–led collaboration including Historic Red Hook, the Dutchess County Historical Society, and the Red Hook Quilters, funded by the Lumina Foundation, that focused on the life of Alexander Gilson (c. 1824–89). Gilson was an African American who labored for 50 years at Montgomery Place, eventually becoming the head gardener. Gilsonfest featured lectures, exhibitions at the Historic Red Hook Annex and Bard's Montgomery Place Campus, new signage, a commissioned quilt, an artistic digital display, and a brochure. Bard students in Professor Myra Young Armstead's spring 2019 course “The Window at Montgomery Place,” an Engaged Liberal Arts and Sciences offering, conducted historical research and assisted in developing the exhibition in partnership with historians and Bard staff. Gilsonfest focused on and interpreted the life of Gilson, which allowed the project to illuminate the contributions of African Americans in 19th-century New York and the Hudson Valley, including the experiences of slaves, indentured servants, and free-born blacks.