The Nasher Museum of Art is the art museum of Duke University, and is located on Duke's campus in Durham, North Carolina, United States. The $24 million museum was designed by architect Rafael Viñoly and opened on October 2, 2005. Annual attendance is about 100,000 visitors.
The museum, named for Raymond Nasher, is currently led by Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director Sarah Schroth, the former Nancy Hanks Senior Curator. The collection contains more than 13,000 works of art, including works by Ai Weiwei, Sanford Biggers, Christian Boltanski, William Cordova, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, DarÃo Escobar, Deborah Grant, Hassan Hajjaj, David Hammons, Barkley L. Hendricks, Thomas Hirschhorn, Taiyo Kimura, Sean Landers, Glenn Ligon, Christian Marclay, Kerry James Marshall, Zanele Muholi, Wangechi Mutu, Dan Perjovschi, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robin Rhode, Dario Robleto, Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, Xaviera Simmons, Lorna Simpson, Jeff Sonhouse, Eve Sussman, Alma Thomas, Hank Willis Thomas, Mickalene Thomas, Bob Thompson, Kara Walker, Nari Ward, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems, Kehinde Wiley, Fred Wilson and Lynette Yiadom Boakye. The museum is dedicated to presenting contemporary art from around the world, with particular attention given to those who have been historically underrepresented. Founding director Kimberly Rorschach left for Seattle Art Museum in November 2012.
The museum has a strong collection of Pre-Columbian art (3,300 objects), with particularly significant holdings of Mayan ceramics and Peruvian textiles.
In the 1940s, Duke turned down the bequest of art collector William Hayes Ackland (1855-1940) to build an art museum on campus; his donation went instead to the nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for its Ackland Art Museum.
Selected exhibitions
Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey
March 21, 2013 â€" July 21, 2013
The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University has organized Wangechi Mutu’s first survey in the United States, the most comprehensive and innovative show yet for this internationally renowned, multidisciplinary artist. Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey presents more than 50 works from the mid-1990s to the present, including collage, drawing, sculpture, installation and video. The exhibition features many of the artist’s most iconic collages drawn from major international collections, rarely seen early works and new creations. The exhibition also unveils the artist’s sketchbooks of intimate drawings that reveal her creative process and inspirations, on public view for the first time. Other new highlights include Mutu’s first-ever animated video, The End of eating Everything, created in collaboration with Santigold, commissioned by the Nasher Museum. Mutu also will transform the gallery into an environmental installation, including a monumental wall drawing, which allows visitors to immerse themselves in the artist's work. The exhibition is curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, Chief Curator and Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasher Curator of Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum.
The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl
September 2, 2010 â€" February 6, 2011
This is the first museum exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art. Bringing together forty-one artists from around the world who have worked with records as their subject or medium, this groundbreaking exhibition examines the record’s transformative power in the years from the 1960s to the present. Through sound work, sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, video, and performance, The Record combines contemporary art with outsider art, audio with visual, fine art with popular culture, and established artists with those exhibiting in a U.S. museum for the first time. The 41 artists in the exhibition include Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, Janet Cardiff, William Cordova, Jeroen Diepenmaat, Jasper Johns, Jack Goldstein, Taiyo Kimura, Ralph Lemon, Christian Marclay, Mingering Mike, Dave Muller, Vik Muniz, 9th Wonder, DJ Rekha, Robin Rhode, Dario Robleto, Ed Ruscha, Malick Sidibe, Xaviera Simmons, Su-Mei Tse, and Carrie Mae Weems. The exhibition is curated by Trevor Schoonmaker.
Barkley L. Hendricks: Birth of the Cool
February 7, 2008 â€" July 13, 2008
This exhibit is the first career painting retrospective of renowned American artist Barkley L. Hendricks. Born in 1945 in Philadelphia, Hendricks' unique work resides at the nexus of American realism and post-modernism, a space somewhere between portraitists Chuck Close and Alex Katz and pioneering black conceptualists David Hammons and Adrian Piper. He is best known for his stunning, life-sized portraits of people of color from the urban northeast. Cool, empowering and sometimes confrontational, Hendricks' artistic privileging of a culturally complex black body has paved the way for today's younger generation of artists who are deeply indebted to him. This exhibition of Hendricks' paintings includes work from 1964 to the present. The exhibition will travel to the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Santa Monica Museum (Los Angeles,)the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. There is a definitive full-color exhibition catalogue with over 160 reproductions, edited by the Nasher Museum's curator of contemporary art Trevor Schoonmaker.
El Greco to Velazquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III
August 21, 2008 â€" November 9, 2008
The Nasher Museum collaborated with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to present this groundbreaking exhibition â€" the first in the US to focus on Spanish art of the period between 1598 and 1621. The show examines a fascinating period bookended by the two giants of Spanish painting: the late works of El Greco and the early paintings of Velázquez. The exhibition is the culmination of 20 years of research by Sarah Schroth, the Nasher Museum's senior curator.
This exhibition includes some 120 paintings, sculptures and decorative art pieces, representing 20 artists. The masters will be seen in context with lesser-known artists working during this time in Spain. The show will bring together works of art from museums around the world, some of which rarely travel outside of their countries, creating a unique opportunity for American audiences. Key loans from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museo del Prado, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, and the National Gallery of Art, among other institutions and private lenders, were secured.
References
External links
- Nasher Museum of Art website
- ArtDaily coverage of the Nasher's opening
