Last month was a sad month for me and the core group that worked for three years to save West House, the elegant, if quirky, brick house with an enclosed, serpentine-walled garden built by Kenneth Tanner in 1935 on private property for his son and four other students to use as a dormitory while they […]
Michele Natale
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Trompe la cité
French artist Georges Rousse arrived in Durham last week to transform four downtown buildings slated for renovation. Nearly equal parts architecture, architectural history, conceptual art, painting and photography, Rousse’s “warehouse interventions” use as their raw material buildings in the process of being demolished or renovated. To Frank Konhaus, an audio-video systems designer, and local architect […]
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Live(ly) discussions at museums and galleries
Eve Sussman and The Rufus Corporation Thursday, Sept. 7, 5:30 p.m. Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University campus, 2001 Campus Drive, Durham Video artist Eve Sussman and members of The Rufus Corporation–musician Algis Kizys and actors Walter Sipser and Annette Previti–will discuss their newest project, The Rape of the Sabine Women. This international, improvisational collective […]
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Solitaire with pictures
On Sunday, Sept. 3, the North Carolina Museum of Art will launch Contemporary North Carolina Photography from the Museum’s Collection, a show of work by 10 North Carolina photographers. Though the first photograph entered the NCMA’s collection in 1974, the museum only recently began actively acquiring photographs, in 2003 under the aegis of Linda Johnson […]
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The power of thread
The Heart of Perfect Wisdom Sutra, one of the most beloved texts of Buddhism, says, “All dharmas are marked with emptiness,” and “Form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form.” The words of the Heart Sutra are often found printed on the fabrics in Jan-Ru Wan’s artwork and illumine qualities of her aesthetic, which […]
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Nine stories
The Nasher Museum of Art hosts Memorials of Identity: New Media from the Rubell Family Collection, a selection of nine videos by seven international artists. Co-curated by Mark Coetzee and Luisa Lagos, the videos are thoughtfully matched to the complex explorations of identity and nationalism and do not shy away from difficult, even painful, subject […]
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Dark flight of the soul
Though newly tenured ECU professor Scott Eagle has been represented by Tyndall Galleries for several years, this summer’s exhibit is his first solo show at the Chapel Hill space. Eagle’s new paintings, elaborately crafted mixed media works from the Falling Man series, are sourced in dreams remembered from childhood, the myth of Icarus and Daedalus, […]
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Books of life
In two shows in Raleigh, similar media and themes play out with radically differing results in the hands of two artists. Both work with the format of the book, and both explore the delicate yet insistent life of plants as a metaphor for human life–but here they take divergent paths. Lesley Patterson-Marx, an MFA graduate […]
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Spotlight: Changing of the guard
“Large Typewriter Eraser,” Claes Oldenburg’s pop icon, has left the building. A recent visit to the Nasher found curator Sarah Schroth working with museum preparators to place two recent arrivals to the Nasher Museum. The two sculptures are on loan from the extensive modern art collection of the museum’s namesake, Raymond D. Nasher. The works […]
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Much ado about Nasher
Eve Sussman seems to be hedging her bets. The 90-minute version of the video artist’s new work, The Rape of the Sabine Women, currently on view at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art, is in a state that has been carefully described as a “preview.” Myriad changes could transform the work by the time of its […]