Posts Tagged ‘Nasher Museum of Art’
Work of the Week: Outside Amarillo by MJ Sharp
The Nasher Museum recently welcomed MJ Sharp for a lecture and we got to learn a little about her love of the South, her nighttime photography techniques, and everything else…including her kitchen sink.
Impressions of Matisse
We are still smiling over Geoffrey Mock’s story about his encounter, at age 9, with Matisse’s The Pink Nude. We’re thrilled that students from all over the Triangle are creating and sharing their drawings and paintings of work by Matisse and Picasso for NBC17′s “Cool Schools” morning segment, as part of the station’s partnership with the museum.
His Baltimore Ladies
Matisse’s relationship with Claribel and Etta was intense and enduring. He called them, “my two Baltimore ladies”. They were remarkable women. Matisse’s ladies became major benefactors from his early struggling days when the work was considered radical to the mid 20th century when Etta died. And he was not the only artist to attract their attention. Their collection includes works by Van Gogh, Gauguin and of course Picasso.
Working with Wonder
For the second year in a row, we decided to do an installation in our Education Gallery inspired by Duke’s summer reading book. Patchett’s novel State of Wonder offered a particularly challenging set of ideas to capture with art from the permanent collection. How do you exhibit teacher-student relationships, drug-induced nightmares and cutting-edge medical advances? How can an installation translate the words off a page into a coherent display that captures the mystery, anxiety, and beauty of an entire book?
Baltimore Ladies
The Cone sisters lived like two Victorian ladies, but they were clearly ahead of their time. Their taste in avant-garde art amazed their contemporaries. Art critics disparaged Matisse at the time, and Pablo Picasso was virtually unknown. Undaunted, the Cones followed their passions.
Have you made a discovery that’s too futuristic for most to understand? A new sport, work of art, fashion statement, piece of music — leave us a comment about what might “catch on” someday.
Time Capsule: Thomas Ruff
When I spoke with collector and curator of Time Capsule Jason Rubell, before he gave his recent tour of the Nasher Museum of Art, I explained that ‘s piece Blah was my favorite in the show. The fact that he echoed this sentiment astonished me, so I held my tongue when I changed my mind after he told the background story of Thomas Ruff’s Porträts.
Time Capsule: Keith Haring
When you first think about art collectors, do bar mitzvah age boys come to mind? No, not for most people. But, to Duke alum (T ’91), Jason Rubell, there seemed no better way to spend birthday or holiday money as a young teen than to purchase art. Living in a decade of phenomenal contemporary art growth, Rubell spent eight years assembling what would serendipitously become his senior project in 1990 — A Duke Student Collects: Contemporary Art from Jason Rubell. Twenty-one years later, the impressive conglomerate of over eighty works of art returns to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University as Time Capsule, Age 13 to 21: The Contemporary Art Collection of Jason Rubell.
Parakeets
Congratulations to Nasher Summer intern Danya Devine’s. Her watercolor Parakeets was recently selected for the 2012 Duke Children’s Hospital All-Occasion Cards! The press conference with Honorary Chairman Duke’s Coach K is November 7 at 10 AM at Duke Children’s Hospital. . Danya is a senior at Jordan High School and Parakeets was her first final project that she did with watercolor.
Proletarian Art Collectors
In late July of this year, noted collector Herbert “Herb” Vogel passed away. He and his wife Dorothy were civil servants of modest means liiving in New York City who managed to build a most impressive contemporary art collection. Their story was told in Megumi Sasaki’s documentary Herb & Dorothy, which screened at the Nasher Museum in 2009.