Nearly a century ago, the Bloomsbury group took hold of the cultural imagination, their name becoming synonymous with wit, intelligence, political activism and avant-garde art and literature in the Anglo-American world. "Bloomsbury", named for a then slightly unfashionable neighborhood surrounding the University of London, was centered on writers such as Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell; economist John Maynard Keynes; artists Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant and Dora Carrington; and other notable personalities who circulated in their orbit including E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and Wyndham Lewis.

"A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections", organized to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of Bloomsbury's beginnings, will examine the American reception of the art produced between 1910 and the 1970s by the Bloomsbury artists and their associates and collaborators. The exhibition will include paintings, works on paper, decorative arts and book arts borrowed from public and private collections throughout the United States, and will focus on how this small group of artists made its imprint on the cultural thinking of their day.

To complement the exhibition, Duke has organized a campuswide program, "Vision and Design: A Year of Bloomsbury", that includes panel discussions, theatrical performances, a film series, an online book chat, a "Duke in Depth" symposium and a related exhibition at Duke Library's Perkins Gallery. These events all take place between September 2008 and April 2009.

Interactive

Listen to the Nasher Museum's podcast with Craufurd Goodwin, the James B. Duke Professor of Economics at Duke University. IMAGE: Nancy and Craufurd Goodwin visit "A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections" at the Nasher Museum. Photo by Dr. J Caldwell.

The exhibition was organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, in conjunction with the Nasher Museum. The exhibition premiered at the Nasher Museum, then traveled to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell. It will also travel to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; the Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; and the Palmer Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

"A Room of Their Own" was made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the Nasher Museum, the exhibition and related programs are sponsored by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the Duke University Provost's Common Fund, the Graduate Liberal Studies program of Duke University, the Wachovia Foundation and the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, Inc.

The year of Bloomsbury-related programming was sponsored in part by the Duke University Provost Common Fund, the Henry Luce Foundation, the May Duke Biddle Foundation, and the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation, Inc. Within Duke, support has also come from the Nasher Museum of Art, the Alumni Association, the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, the Office for International Affairs, the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, the Women Studies Program and the Program in the Study of Sexualities, the Center for International Studies, the Economics Department, the Center for the History of Political Economy, and the Graduate Liberal Studies Program. More information: "Vision and Design: A Year of Bloomsbury".

Learn more about a related exhibition at Perkins Library, "How full of life those days seemed: New Approaches to Art, Literature, Sexuality, and Society in Bloomsbury"