DIY at Bard Graduate Center is a public festival that explores different approaches to making. DIY@BGC gathers together thinkers, curators, and artists to reflect on their own immersive approaches to creating scholarship, writing, visual art, and choreography. This interdisciplinary event takes inspiration from our current exhibitions, Fabricating Power with Balinese Textiles and The Codex and Crafts in Late Antiquity, in which each curator’s research explores craft processes as experiential and devotional acts.

Full Festival Schedule:

Monday, May 7
6:30 pm
Creativity, Choreography, and Embodied Knowledge
Timothy Ingold and Stephen Petronio in Conversation
Moderated by Dean Peter N. Miller

Thursday, May 10
6:30 pm
Resistance, Power, and Transformation
Tanya Aguiñiga and Sheila Pepe in Conversation
Moderated by Elissa Auther

Friday, May 11
6:30 pm
Some Methodologies of Making
Thomas Thwaites, Janine di Giovanni, and others in conversation

Saturday May 12
2–4 pm
Biocentric Interconnectedness: We All Contribute to the Web
A participatory performance in with artist-in-residence Neil Goss
Drop in any point and stay as long as you like


Tanya Aguiñiga is a Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture, and gender while creating community.

Sheila Pepe
is best known for her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture made from domestic and industrial materials. Since the mid-1990s Pepe has used feminist and craft traditions to investigate received notions concerning the production of canonical artwork as well as the artist’s relationship to museum display and the art institution itself.

Elissa Auther
is a curator and scholar of modern and contemporary art as well as the founder and co-director of the program Feminism & Co.: Art, Sex, Politics. Currently, Auther is the Windgate Research and Collections Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design and a Visiting Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center.