CCS Bard's permanent collection of contemporary art includes more than 3,000 works by over 570 of the most prominent artists of the late 20th and 21st centuries.

The foundation of the permanent collection is the Marieluise Hessel Collection, which has been the resident collection of CCS Bard since 1992. The Hessel Collection is international in scope and ranges from the 1960s to the present, including notable representations from many of the foremost movements in contemporary art; Minimalism, Arte Povera, Neo-expressionism, Pattern and Decoration, the Chicago Imagists, the Pictures Generation, Post-minimalism, as well as time-based media. Drawings and works on paper are of particular focus along with attention to the work of individual artists over time like Paul Chan, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Robert Kushner, Robert Mapplethorpe, Gabriel Orozco, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson, Rosemarie Trockel, and others. Over the past ten years, there has been an intensive focus on the acquisition of works by African and African American artists particularly those who have emerged in recent decades.

The CCS Bard Collection, as a companion collection to the Marieluise Hessel Collection, is developed through gifts to Bard College from collectors, trustees, artists, and individuals who support CCS Bard in many ways. It corresponds with and expands upon the range of the Hessel Collection and provides an opportunity to develop a parallel collection that amplifies curatorial interests and programmatic concerns of the Center for Curatorial Studies. Together the collections are managed by professional museum staff.