NASHER10 UNPLUGGED: DOWNTOWN DURHAM BLOCK PARTY
Saturday, Oct. 10, 3–8 p.m., free
Downtown Durham YMCA
218 W. Morgan St., Durham
919-684-5135
Twenty years ago, talking about the Triangle’s art scene would have been like talking about its great public transit system or its plentiful vegetarian restaurantsmore aspirational than accurate.
A lot has changed. The number of artists in the region, and the number of places they can showfrom small, flexible galleries to large, world-class facilitieshas skyrocketed. Now the problem isn’t finding something good to see; it’s finding time to see everything good.
With its relatively low cost of living and relatively large amount of cultural opportunities, the Triangle was primed to nuture a thriving art scene long before it had one. The missing element was venues to get work into the public sphere and galvanize communities around it.
In our cover story this week, we look at two indispensable spaces that are celebrating milestone yearsone that has helped build the scene from the top down, the other from the bottom up. Between them, we get a well-rounded picture of how local art has matured, startlingly fast, over the last two decades.
The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University feels like such a permanent fixture of Durham that it’s easy to forget it has been there for only 10 years. We delve into the story of its humble origins as an obscure campus museum and how it developed its unique collection area in the art of the African diaspora.
Lump has held down its Raleigh spot for an astonishing 20 years. As grassroots and grungy as the Nasher is grand, Lump’s gallery and collective model feels more like Durham in 2015 than Raleigh in 1995. The little gallery that could’s contributions to local life cannot be overstated, and its innovative shows continue to challenge, confound and confront. In celebrating the birthdays of Nasher and Lump, we celebrate the Triangle’s artistic growth, and we can’t wait to see what the next 20 years will bring. —Brian Howe
According to the lore, the botanist threatened the art collector with either a firearm or a gardening tool. It depends on whom you ask.
“That’s how urban legends start,” Nasher Museum of Art director Sarah Schroth says, laughing. “I heard shovel. Like he would hit him over the head with a shovel.”
Wendy Hower, the Nasher’s longtime outreach director, says she once asked Raymond Nasher if the botany professor really chased him off the future site of his museum with a shotgun.
“He said, ‘I’m going to stick with that story,’” Hower says. “I couldn’t confirm this, so I couldn’t put it in the book,” meaning the detailed history of the museum she compiled this year for its 10th anniversary celebration.
Reporting from The News & Observer and The Chronicle provides a less mythological record of the dispute. In 1989, professor Janis Antonovics encountered Raymond Nasher, Michael Mezzatesta and an associate on the 8.8-acre meadow at Duke University Road and Anderson Street where the esteemed botanist kept his research plants. He ran up to the trio, demanding to know what they were doing in his field.
In fact, they were scouting it as the location for a new museum to replace the small, ad hoc Duke University Museum of Art, stashed in a science building on East Campus. Mezzatesta was its director. Nasher was the Duke alumnus who was prepared to donate millions to replace it.
By 1990, after much public debate, the botanist and the museum had agreed to share the site. Landscape architect Peter Rolland drew a map, and the board of trustees, to which Nasher belonged, approved it. But by 1991, the compromise had collapsed in the museum’s favor, and Antonovics decamped for a distinguished career at other universities.
More than a simple land dispute, the incident was symbolic of a turning point, between old Duke and new Duke, in the institutional status of the arts at a research institution that prided itself on science and medicine.
“Duke as a whole didn’t support the arts until this project,” says Schroth. “President Brodhead says it all the time: In the arts initiative at Duke, the milestone was the building of the Nasher.”
Ten years and one million visitors later, the Nasher has added about 1,000 pieces, mostly contemporary, to DUMA’s collection of about 13,000 pieces, mostly from antiquity. It has launched touring exhibitions into prominent urban arts institutions throughout the country, a rarity for academic museums, bringing accolades to Durham from the likes of The New York Times and Artforum. And it has pulled ahead of many larger, older, better-funded institutions in collecting the art of the contemporary African diaspora, its defining strength.
“We’ve been able to lead in that area, no question about it,” Schroth says.
The museum has accomplished this with many kinds of support: from the university, from the donors and board members whose names adorn its pavilions, and from its unique staff. But it all started with the drive of Raymond Nasher and Michael Mezzatesta.
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Duke didn’t have an art museum at all until 1969. It almost got one 30 years earlier, but that fell through in circumstances as idiosyncratic as those that would threaten the Nasher.
In 1936, a lawyer named William Hayes Ackland wrote to several universities, including Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, offering a $1.25 million bequest for a museum. Initially, Duke took him up on it. But after his death, the board of trustees voted the plan down.
“The story goes that [Ackland’s] condition that he must be buried in the museum was the deal breaker,” Hower says. But UNC didn’t mind. After Ackland’s bequest (and his final resting place) spent a while in legal limbo, it gave us the Chapel Hill museum where his tomb can be seen.
“I think there were a lot of people who sincerely felt that Duke probably never would have a good museum, because of what they did in turning the Ackland down,” Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, the late philanthropist whose name adorns the Nasher’s atrium, told the INDY in 2003. “But they just didn’t have enough people interested in the arts to ever make a go of it.”
One exception was Raymond D. Nasher, who argued for the arts in his campus newspaper column in the early ’40s. After graduating, he became a real estate developer in Texas and, with his wife, Patsy, built a significant collection of contemporary sculpture. They donated a piece to Duke’s embryonic museum.
DUMA was founded on the purchase of the Ernest Brummer Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Art. Over its 36-year existence, the museum grew strong in that area and three others: Classical art, traditional African art and pre-Columbian American art, including Mayan artifacts that are newly on display in the Nasher’s Wilson Pavilion.
“[DUMA] was small, it didn’t have temperature controls you’d find in a contemporary art museum, it had small doorways, it had four parking spots,” Hower says. “It was science classrooms retrofitted for art.”
For years, art historians presided over DUMA, and it had little traction in public life. That changed when Mezzatesta came along in 1987. He was the first director with a museum backgroundfrom the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas, where he knew Raymond Nasher. In fact, he came to Duke because of Nasher’s commitment to building a new museum there.
The current staff credits Mezzatesta with raising the museum’s profile and professionalizing its operations, hiring curators to catalog its holdings, graphic designers and a PR agent.
“He invited Duke faculty and students to organize exhibitions based on their research. That’s such a key to success for university art museums,” Hower says.
In the early ’90s, with the Antonovics dispute resolved and new university president Nan Keohane showing strong support, it looked like Mezzatesta’s dream would finally come true. In 1998, Raymond Nasher donated $7.5 million, supplemented by $2.5 million from his foundation; donors made up the difference for a $24 million facility.
But two years before it opened, the university declined to renew Mezzatesta’s contract, naming him director emeritus. Schroth, then a curator, became interim director until a nationwide search brought in Kim Rorschach. The university couched its decision as a standard personnel review, though clearly, it was felt that the new museum needed new blood.
Mezzatesta deserves much credit for laying the groundwork for a serious museum at Duke. He didn’t get to see it through, but Raymond Nasher, who lived until 2007, did. One of the first exhibits at his namesake museum drew on his world-class sculpture collection.
His daughter, Nancy Nasher, an art collector who currently chairs the museum’s board, keeps the family’s benefaction alive. Planned for next year is A Material Legacy: The Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Collection of Contemporary Art, a collection strong on global artists of African descent, which includes the water towers you can see now in the Nasher’s soaring atrium.
“I think this show will be something of a benchmark, not only for me but for the institution as well,” says its curator, Marshall Price. “It’s a way we can look back at the past 10 years and the legacy that Ray Nasher has left, but also look to the future, with Nancy at the helm. It’s a perfect turning point into the next decade.”
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As a sculpture lover, Raymond Nasher was interested in public spaces. He displayed a Frank Stella sculpture at a mall he built in Texas, and his foundation spent $70 million to open the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, in a Renzo Piano-designed building, in 2003.
The Nasher Museum of Art opened Oct. 2, 2005, in a building by Uruguay’s Rafael Viñoly, a future finalist in the competition to design the World Trade Center monument. His postmodern structure at Duke, with five concrete boxes torqued around a courtyard canopied in steel and glass, is a far cry from the humble DUMA. From above, it looks part starfish, part conch shell. As you climb the grassy rise toward it, its grandeur is sleek, modern and inviting.
What had been a sleepy academic museum quickly burst onto the national scene. In 2007, Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China earned second place in the AICA Awards. Dan and Lia Perjovschi drew all over the walls the same year they did so at MoMA. The Nasher would go on to show substantial Picasso, Rauschenberg and Miró exhibits.
In the museum’s early years, touring exhibits were its focus, though that shifted as Rorschach set out to build the contemporary collection. The museum has sent shows to institutions such as the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Santa Monica Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. A notable number of these exhibits feature or star artists of color, including Barkley L. Hendricks, Archibald Motley and Wangechi Mutu.
The Nasher has had a strong foundation in modern and contemporary African-American art from the beginning. In its first year, it showcased the collection of Duke alumnus and NBA star Grant Hill. Its first major exhibit was 2006’s Conjuring Bearden, a retrospective of Romare Bearden’s paintings inspired by African-American spirituality. It was curated by Richard J. Powell, the Duke art professor and Dean of Humanities who has authored seminal works on African-American art and who later co-curated the Archibald Motley show.
This foundation was strengthened in 2006 with the appointment of Trevor Schoonmaker, who is renowned for his work on the art of the African diaspora, as contemporary curator. He made his name at the New Museum with 2003’s Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Some of his benchmarks at the Nasher include Hendricks’ first career retrospective and The Record: Contemporary Art & Vinyl, which drew in music fans who didn’t often visit museums.
“With his specialty, it was very clear that Trevor would be perfect for this museum and region,” Schroth says. “Our emphasis on artists of color is unique; we’re ahead of other university art museums because of Trevor. Our program fits perfectly into the heritage of Durham.”
Not only does the Nasher’s strength in African-American art reflect its region, it also makes financial sense for a museum whose endowment is a fraction of those at the institutionsPrinceton, Harvard, U.C.L.A.it considers its peers.
“Our collecting focus is rare among them, and we’re proud of it,” Hower says. “MoMA just hired a curator [for black art]; all these very big urban museums are now talking about that. But we did it first, from the very beginning. We want visitors to see themselves on the walls, and many of these artists of color are emerging in the marketplace, so they’re affordableundervalued and overlooked. Now, of course, some have really hit the big time.”
After the Nasher made its name in contemporary art, Schroth thought it was time to recalibrate a bit. She was named director in 2013, the same year Price was appointed contemporary curator.
Schroth moved from the Ackland to DUMA in 1995. She knew Mezzatesta and the Nasher family from her time in Texas, and was interested in their plans for a new building at Duke. Also, Mezzatesta was keen on her El Greco exhibit; the Ackland was not.
“Of course, the new building took 10 years, and El Greco didn’t happen until 2008,” she says “But it didn’t feel like that long of a time because we kept moving forward.”
El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III was the culmination of Schroth’s lifelong scholarship. It remains the Nasher’s most popular show ever. The Wall Street Journal and Time named it one of the top 10 exhibits of 2008. In 11 weeks, it brought 74,000 visitors into a museum that usually gets about 100,000 per year.
“It reached people who don’t relate to contemporary art, a world Kim [Rorschach] got us into,” Schroth says. “I love contemporary, and we have brilliant curators in Trevor and Marshall, but I’m emphasizing the permanent collection a bit more in our new galleries.”
The New Galleries: A Collection Come to Light, on view in the recently redesigned Wilson Pavilion, shows the results of Schroth’s directive. It showcases some of the early artifacts collected by DUMA and exhumes forgotten corners of the collection. According to Hower, 70 percent of the Nasher’s gallery space is devoted to the permanent collection after the redesign.
“We went through 13,000 works of art and picked the best ones,” Schroth says. “It was a very big effort. I know what’s in the collection because I’ve been here for 20 years, but people didn’t know. We had the George Harley collection of African art, for examplea very important collection. I want us all to be proud of what we have, the community and the university.”
As the Nasher refocuses on the broad range of its holdings, it continues to pursue a leading role in contemporary art, with Schoonmaker and Price both planning major exhibitions. Contemporary art will usually have its own pavilion going forward, starting with the Schoonmaker show that recently opened, Reality of My Surroundings. He is also at work on Southern Accent, a major group exhibit of Southern artists planned for 2017.
Meanwhile, for February of next year, Price is at work on the first solo museum show for Nina Chanel Abney, an African-American artist who is the youngest person in the 30 Americans show that is still traveling the country.
Price, a highly regarded Americanist, knew Schoonmaker from the art world while Price was working as a curator at the National Academy Museum, but he knew little about Durham. Still, when he saw the job posting for the Nasher, after 11 years in New York, he wanted to try an academic museum.
“Believe it or not, intellectual inquiry is not always encouraged at museums, especially those not connected with universities,” Price says. “I had to come to terms with leaving New York City, but I’ve been surprised how active arts community is here. Bill [Thelen of Lump] is a great example; he’s been such a catalyzing force in the artist community. When I arrived, we started working on the Area 919 show, so immediately I was thrown in to meeting the artists.”
Area 919 was the Nasher’s first major show of local work; Schroth says she wants to start doing it every three years or so. It featured many leading lights of the local art sceneincluding Thelen, Casey Cook, Harrison Haynes and Stacy Lynn Waddellthat had grown up around the Nasher. The museum deserves some credit for the scene’s growth over the last decade, as its striking building and serious exhibits make being an artist here feel more viable, even aspirational. But it also feels challenged to measure up to its energetic city.
“Among the staff, we talk about trying to keep up with Durham in terms of creativity,” Hower says. “You’re constantly running into somebody who’s inventing something cool.”
Schroth remembers how different things used to be. When she moved here in 1990, she wanted to live where the artists lived. So she called around to ask who they were. The only name she got back was Chapel Hill’s Patrick Dougherty.
“I called him and asked where I should live,” she recalls. “He was laughing, and said, ‘I have no idea where the artists live; I live in the country.’ There were no artists here except the ones teaching at UNC and Duke. At least, that was the impression you got as a young art historian. Now, it’s 360 degrees different. There are more places to show, though there should be morethere should be more Lumps. But that will come. It’s the ambition this place always has.”
Price’s first coup at the Nasher was Colour Correction, a show of British and American screen prints that he dug out of the permanent collection. He expected it to be minor, but now it’s moving on to the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts in November.
“I discovered we had this great strength in that area that folks didn’t really know about,” he says. “I was amazed by the supportive response I got not only from our staff, but also the general public and our board.”
This institutional support is something all the staff credits as a large part of the museum’s success.
“Duke is 150 percent behind this place, and that’s very rare in university art museums,” Schroth says. “Our president comes to almost every one of our openings, and he speaks. We don’t ask him to do that; he wants to do it!”
“One of the things that brought me here was the recognition that the institution has aspirations to be more than simply a university museum,” Price says. “That’s what’s allowed it to send shows to places like the Whitney and the Brooklyn, which most university museums don’t do. Dick Brodhead recognizes the role the arts play in the university curriculum and lifestyle, which is a rare thing. As is the support of our boardBlake Byrne lives in Los Angeles, Nancy in Dallas, but they’re here for every board meeting.” (Byrne has been an important donor to the Nasher’s contemporary collection.)
In the end, it is hard to imagine the Nasher residing anywhere but that contested grassy knoll at Duke.
“Mr. Nasher really wanted this spot because it’s in between East and West Campus, on two city streets,” says Hower. “It’s a gateway to the community.” This goal is incarnated in a pair of prismatic new murals by a major black artist, Philadelphia’s Odili Donald Odita, which the Nasher commissioned to celebrate its 10th birthday.
At the museum, “Shadow of Light (For Julian Francis Abele)” honors the black architect who built many of Duke’s Georgian buildings. “Time Bridge,” on the Foster Street wall of the Durham YMCA, creates a visual link from campus to downtown. The latter will be christened at the Nasher10 Unplugged block party this Saturday.
“We’re not doing this [celebration] to eat cake,” Hower says. “It’s to make a statement about how far we’ve come in a pretty short time.” How much further will it go in the next 10 years? For the Nasher with this staff, and in this placethe future is wide open.
This article appeared in print with the headline “Visual art vanguard”
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