Bard Breakfast 2007
The 2007 Bard Birthday Breakfast Benefit
With guest speaker Michele Bogart
New York City's Art Commission: Art "Police" and Keeper of the Treasure
This lecture by Michele Bogart, author of The Politics of Urban Beauty: New York and Its Art Commission (University of Chicago Press, 2006) reflected upon the history of the Art Commission of the City of New York—the city's design review board— and offered perspectives upon its importance in the present day. To that end, the talk also discussed the Commission's extraordinary archivements and its significance for historic preservation.
About the speaker: Michele H. Bogart is Professor of Art History and Director of Graduate Studies at Stony Brook University. Her areas of expertise are urban design and commercial culture. She has published on public art, memorials, animation, parks, landscape and garden history, photography, illustration, and advertising. Bogart received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is also the author of Artists, Advertising, and the Borders of Art (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1989), which received the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Charles C. Eldredge Prize in 1991. Bogart has been the recipient of fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 1998 through 2003 she was a member of the Art Commission of the City of New York, and for four years was its Vice President. Currently she is Vice President of the Fine Arts Federation of New York and serves on the Art Commission's Conservation Advisory Group.