Building a Vision: Nasher Museum at 20

6:30 PM Lecture Hall Doors Open

7 – 8 PM Building a Vision Conversation

8 – 9 PM Reception

Join Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art & Art History, and Trevor Schoonmaker, Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum, for a conversation about how the museum’s bold collecting vision and groundbreaking exhibitions quickly established a young university museum as a leader within the global art world.

Over the past two decades, the Nasher Museum has uniquely focused on supporting historically underrepresented artists and has traveled its exhibitions to major museums across the country, from the Studio Museum in Harlem to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Learn how the museum arrived at its distinctive identity and where it is going from here.

The Nasher Museum and Café will be open late for this event—make a reservation to enjoy dinner before the conversation!

Richard J. Powell is internationally recognized as a leading authority on Black art and culture. Along with teaching courses in American art, the arts of the African Diaspora, and contemporary visual studies, Powell has published extensively and organized numerous art exhibitions, most notably: The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989); Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997); To Conserve A Legacy: American Art at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1999); and Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary (2005). Powell has taught at Duke since 1989, has been a regular collaborator and strategic advisor to the Nasher Museum since its opening, and curated the museum’s 2014 traveling exhibition Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist.

Since joining the Nasher Museum as its first curator of contemporary art in 2006, Trevor Schoonmaker has been instrumental in shaping the museum’s collection and artistic program, focused on diversifying the artistic canon and connecting with broad audiences. From Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2003) to Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool (2008), Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey (2013), Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art (2016), Naama Tsabar: Composition 21 (2019), and Spirit in the Land (2023) at the Nasher Museum, Schoonmaker’s curatorial practice has consistently introduced new voices and explored storytelling, music, the natural world, social justice and community.