Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

Nasher in the News

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Lawrence J. Wheeler, director of the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA), will be presented with the inaugural Mary D.B.T. Semans Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts.

The award, created by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in celebration of its fifth anniversary this fall, will be presented Nov. 13 at the museum's annual benefit gala.

"We are thrilled to name a special award for Mary Semans, who with her husband, Dr. James H. Semans, transformed the arts at Duke, in Durham and across the state. We believe that the Mary D.B.T. Semans Award truly represents what a passion for the arts and arts advocacy can achieve," said Kimerly Rorschach, the James H. and Mary D.B.T. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum.

"Larry Wheeler was our natural choice as the first recipient of this award," Rorschach added. "His leadership of the NCMA, culminating in a beautiful new building and 164-acre park, has made that museum one of the region's most popular and dynamic centers for the visual and performing arts."

Mary D.B.T. Semans, a 1939 graduate of Duke's Woman's College, has been a longtime supporter of the Nasher Museum. The museum's great hall bears her name, and the museum directorship and the annual Semans Lecture are named for both Semans and her husband. During the 1960s and '70s, while serving on the Duke Board of Trustees, Semans advocated for an art museum on campus and worked closely with the late Raymond D. Nasher, a 1943 graduate of Duke, to establish the Nasher Museum. She is a member of the Nasher Museum's national board of advisors.

Wheeler has been director of the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh since October 1994. During his tenure, blockbuster exhibitions, including "Rodin: Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation" (2000) and "Monet in Normandy," (2006) have attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors to the NCMA. Under Wheeler's leadership, the NCMA expanded in April with a new 127,000-square-foot building to house the permanent collection with numerous new acquisitions including the gift of 29 Rodin sculptures and commissioned works by El Anatsui, Patrick Dougherty and Ursula von Rydingsvard.

In December 2000, Wheeler was named Tar Heel of the Year by The (Raleigh) News and Observer, which called him "the godfather of the Triangle's cultural boom" and cited his skill at melding "arts, politics and commerce into a powerful new cultural force." His recent awards include the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters from the Republic of France, the Medal of Arts from the city of Raleigh, the Legacy Leadership Award from The Triangle Business Journal, the Design Guild Award from the North Carolina State University College of Design and the Thad Eure Memorial Award from the Greater Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau.

In 2007, Wheeler accepted the Attraction of the Year Award from the North Carolina Travel Industry Association in recognition of the 214,000 visitors who attended the 2006-07 "Monet" exhibition.

IMAGE: Photo of Larry Wheeler by Dathan Kazsuk, TBJ

March 25 - July 25, 2010
Spring Lectures and Events

The Three Gorges Dam on the Yangzi River in China is the world's largest generator of hydro-electric power. When it was built, it displaced more than one million people and submerged more than 1,200 towns. This spring, the Nasher Museum presents "Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art," in which four leading contemporary Chinese artists—Chen Qiulin, Yun-Fei Ji, Liu Xiaodong and Zhuang Hui—respond to the dam project.

March 25 Exhibition Opens to the public, 10 AM. Curator Conversation, 7 PM with exhibition curator Wu Hung, Smart Museum Consulting Curator, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago. Reception to follow.

April 1 Artist Talk, 7 PM Chen Qiulin
April 7 "Displacement" Roundtable on the Three Gorges Dam, 7 PM with Duke faculty across disciplines
April 18 Free Family Day, 12-4 PM
April 22 "Sounds. Distant" 7 PM musical performance with violin and guzheng

Displacement Film Series, co-sponsored by Duke's Program in the Arts of the Moving Image and Duke University Libraries, Thursdays, 7 PM
April 15 "Rainclouds Over Wushan" (Wushan Yunyu), (Zhang Ming, 1996, 96 minutes)
April 29 "Still Life (Sanzia Haoren)" (Jia Zhangke, 2006, 108 minutes)
May 13 "Bing Ai" (Feng Yan, 2007, 114 minutes)
May 27 "Up the Yangtze" (Yung Chang, 2007, 93 minutes)

Every Thursday night the museum is free and open to the public, 5-9 PM, courtesy of SunTrust Bank and The Independent Weekly.

"Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art" is organized by the Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago. The exhibition is curated by Wu Hung, Smart Museum Consulting Curator, Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, and Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia, University of Chicago, in consultation with Jessica Moss, Smart Museum Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art, and Stephanie Smith, Smart Museum Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Contemporary Art. The exhibition and related programs have been supported by Dan Bo, the Elizabeth F. Cheney Foundation, the University of Chicago Women's Board, and the Center for East Asian Studies. The accompanying publication was made possible by a generous gift from Fred Eychaner and Tommy Yang Guo.

At the Nasher Museum, the exhibition is supported by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Asian/Pacific Studies Institute Duke University, Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment, the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina, Diane Evia-Lanevi and Ingemar Lanevi in honor of their daughter Sammy Lanevi, and the North Carolina Chinese Business Association (as of March 1, 2010).

Nasher Museum exhibitions and programs are generously supported by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Mary D.B.T. Semans and the late James H. Semans, The Duke Endowment, the Nancy Hanks Endowment, the K. Brantley and Maxine E. Watson Endowment Fund, the James Hustead Semans Memorial Fund, the Marilyn M. Arthur Fund, the Victor and Lenore Behar Endowment Fund, the George W. and Viola Mitchell Fearnside Endowment Fund, the Sarah Schroth Fund, the Margaret Elizabeth Collett Fund, North Carolina Arts Council, the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost, Duke University, and the Friends of the Nasher Museum of Art.

IMAGE: Chen Qiulin, still from "Color Line," 2006. Video, 9 minutes. Courtesy of the artist andMax Protetch Gallery, New York.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded a $100,000 grant to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University to support the upcoming exhibition, "The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl."

"The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl" will bring together 32 artists from around the world who have worked with records, as both subject and medium, from the 1960s to the present. It will be on view Sept. 2, 2010, through Feb. 6, 2011.

"We are grateful to the Andy Warhol Foundation for supporting 'The Record,' which is the first museum exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art," said Kimerly Rorschach, the Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the museum. "This award will help the museum to share rarely seen works of art with new audiences."

"The Record" will include sound work, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, video and performance. The exhibition is organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, the Nasher Museum's curator of contemporary art.

A partial list of artists includes Laurie Anderson (USA), Felipe Barbosa (Brazil), David Byrne (Scotland), William Cordova (Peru), Jeroen Diepenmaat (Netherlands), Satch Hoyt (UK), Jasper Johns (USA), Taiyo Kimura (Japan), Tim Lee (Korea), Christian Marclay (USA), Mingering Mike (USA), Dave Muller (USA), Robin Rhode (South Africa), Dario Robleto (USA), Ed Ruscha (USA), Malick Sidibe (Mali), Xaviera Simmons (USA), Su-Mei Tse (Luxembourg), Fatimah Tuggar (Nigeria) and Carrie Mae Weems (USA).

Additional information is available here.

IMAGE: Jeroen Diepenmaat, "Pour des dents d'un blanc eclatant et saines," 2005. © Jeroen Diepenmaat.

Presenting
The Barbra and Andrew Rothschild Lecture
DAVE HICKEY

Thursday, January 14, 7 PM

"His writing is exhilarating and deeply engaging" - Newsweek

He was there with Andy Warhol at The Factory. He ran art galleries in New York and Austin, became executive editor of Art in America magazine and received a MacArthur "Genius" award. Meet art critic and culture theorist Dave Hickey, who will present the annual Barbra and Andrew Rothschild Lecture as a complement to the exhibition Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids. His 1993 collection of essays, The Invisible Dragon, made him a hero among artists and reviled among some art critics for his theory that the experience of looking at art should be pleasurable. Hickey is an authority on such celebrated contemporary artists as Robert Gober, Ann Hamilton, Sol Lewitt, Joan Mitchell, Edward Ruscha, Richard Serra and Andy Warhol. Rolling Stone called his 1998 collection of critical essays, Air Guitar, as "enjoyable and provocative a book of criticism as anyone has published in years." He contributes to numerous publications, including Rolling Stone, Art News, Artforum and The New York Times. As professor of art criticism and theory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Hickey lectures all over the country and is the author of forthcoming books on women artists, essays on art and democracy, a collection of his Art in America columns and a collection of stories with drawings by artist John DeFazio.

The lecture is made possible by Barbra and Andrew Rothschild.

IMAGE: Photo of Dave Hickey by Peden+Munk.

Come to the party for "Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids" this Thursday, November 12, from 7-9 p.m. at the Nasher Museum. We're rolling out our colorful new Warhol T-shirts, inspired by the original box for the Polaroid Big Shot camera. Partygoers who wear the T-shirt (designed by McKinney and available at the Nasher Museum Store) can pose for Polaroid-style portraits with our photographer.

It's a fun way to pay homage to Warhol and celebrate the opening of "Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids," an exhibition that gives rare insight into the mind of the artist who wanted to capture the world like a camera. The show includes about 250 Polaroids and 70 silver gelatin black-and-white prints taken by Warhol from 1969 to 1986. Many of them are on public view for the first time.

"Big Shots: Andy Warhol Polaroids" is organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. All three institutions received gifts of about 100 original Polaroid photographs and 50 gelatin silver black-and-white prints in 2008, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program, a division of the Andy Warhol Foundation in New York.

At the Nasher Museum, major support for the exhibition is provided by .

Many of you tuned in to the webcast, "Office Hours," on November 6, when Nasher Museum Director Kimerly Rorschach answered questions about modern and contemporary art during a live, online conversation. Watch the video.

7:30 PM Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Free and open to the public.

American artist Fred Wilson questions—and asks us to question—how museum curators present history and artistic value, and how cultural institutions express biases. Wilson creates new contexts for the display of art and artifacts found in museum collections, along with wall labels, sound, lighting and non-traditional pairings of objects. In his talk, "The Silent Message of the Museum," he discussed his work in relation to museums as environments of cultural production, and how the museum has shaped his practice as an artist.

Wilson was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1954, and lives and works in New York. He is the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Achievement Award (1999), the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award (2003) and the 2009 Cheek Medal. He is the Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Object, Exhibition and Knowledge at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY.

The Annual Semans Lecture is funded by the Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Lecture Series Endowment Fund.

Satch Hoyt, an internationally acclaimed artist and musician based in Berlin, produced a monumental new sculptural work during his residency with the Nasher Museum. Hoyt and a team of assistants constructed an 18-foot canoe titled "Celestial Vessel," which will be part of the upcoming Nasher Museum exhibition, "The Record" (opening August 19, 2010). Materials for the work include a metal armature and vintage RCA Victor Red Seal 45-rpm records from the 1950s that Hoyt has collected. The work also includes an original soundscape composed by the artist. This project was made possible by a Visiting Artist Grant from the Council for the Arts, Office of the Provost, Duke University. Liberty Arts, 401-B Foster St. Durham's Central Park. See a slide show of the event.

A bronze sculpture by Henry Moore that once greeted visitors to the Dallas home of the late Raymond D. Nasher has arrived at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, along with six other sculptures on loan from the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

The loan includes works by European modernists Moore, Gaston Lachaise, Marino Marini and Mimmo Paladino and are on view in the museum's Mary D.B.T. Semans Great Hall. Two sculptures by Pablo Picasso are part of the museum's ongoing exhibition, "Picasso and the Allure of Language."

Since the Nasher Museum opened at Duke in 2005, the Nasher Sculpture Center, founded in 2003 by the late Raymond D. Nasher and his family, has lent more than 100 works to the museum.

"My father and I believed it was important to establish an ongoing relationship between the two institutions to share significant works from the Raymond and Patsy Nasher Collection with students, faculty and employees of Duke, as well as residents and visitors to Durham, the Triangle community and North Carolina," said Nancy Nasher, a 1979 graduate of Duke Law School and a member of Duke's Board of Trustees.

IMAGE: Photo by Michelle Cho

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The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $500,000 four-year grant to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. The grant will enable the Nasher Museum to collaborate further with students and faculty from a wide variety of disciplines in teaching, exhibitions and research.

Recent faculty collaborations include "The Past is Present: Classical Antiquities at the Nasher Museum" (on view), with Carla Antonaccio, chair of the Department of Clasical Studies, and Sheila Dillon, professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. The exhibition meets the Association of Art Museum Directors' guidelines for acquiring ancient antiquities (revised 2008).

Learn what students think about "The Past is Present: Classical Antiquities at the Nasher Museum" by listening to student-created podcasts. "We are all excited and very grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their support of our efforts to involve Duke faculty--the brain trust of the university," said Kimerly Rorschach, the Mary D.B.T and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum. Hear more 'From the Director' about the Mellon Grant and how it will benefit Duke students and museum visitors alike.

One bright spot in the sour economy is that some museums are able to shop for art. Most museums have funds that are restricted to the purchase of art, and now their money goes a lot farther than before, says Nasher Museum Director Kimerly Rorschach.

"Art dealers seem more willing to negotiate," Rorschach says. "We are seeing less of the wild speculation that drove up art prices in recent years."

Although budgets are tight, the Nasher Museum has recently made several noteworthy acquisitions for the permanent collection. The works-by artists Dario Robleto, Hank Willis Thomas and Carrie Mae Weems-reflect the Nasher Museum's focus on modern and contemporary art. These are significant works by international artists and represent a variety of media: sculpture, mixed-media, video and photography.

The museum has also received several important gifts of art, including a sculpture by Claes Oldenburg and a portfolio of photographs by Andy Warhol.

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