April Issue 2001
Duke University Museum of Art in Durham, NC, Features Homegrown Exhibitions
Duke University Museum of Art (DUMA) is presenting three homegrown exhibitions which will be on view during the month of Apr. The three offerings include: Academic Eye: Reynolds Price Collects, Made in Asia? Student Curated Exhibition XII, and SAVy Selects: New Acquisitions.
DUMA is initiating a new exhibition program in 2001. The Academic Eye series will give a prominent Duke faculty member the chance to curate a small exhibition that will be showcased in the museum's Upper Foyer Gallery. DUMA is pleased to announce that Professor of English and award-winning writer, Reynolds Price, has accepted the museum's invitation to be the first "curator" to inaugurate the series. Academic Eye: Reynolds Price Collects, will be on view through May 27.
One of Duke's best known figures, Professor Price has enthusiastically agreed to take on the challenge, deciding to focus on the work of one artist, Danny Robinette, a figurative painter who lives in NC. "Four of Danny Robinette's paintings hang in the room where I live the better part of my life, writing fiction, poems, plays and essays," says Price.
Price's paintings by Robinette are skillfully rendered views of the Piedmont South: a small frame house and flower garden; thunder clouds in an azure sky with bolts of lightning and a wire of traffic lights; a summer sunset behind a farm. "I loved each picture the moment I saw it," he informs us, "I wanted them near me."
Through Professor Price's generosity, the DUMA community will live with his paintings, supplemented with a few others he has selected to complement those from his private collection. Moreover, we will learn why Professor Price so admires this particular artist's works, how he sees them, and what they mean to him.
Thanks to support from the Duke-Semans Foundation, a full-color brochure will be published chronicling the exhibit. It will feature an essay on the artist by Price, composed after an additional seven years living with these pictures, and inspired by the opportunity to place them in a university museum context.
Additional support has been provided by Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wilsey, Atherton, CA.
Made in Asia? Student Curated Exhibition XII will be on view in DUMA's Main Gallery, Apr. 6 through June 10.
This year's student curated exhibition, organized by Randi Reiner and Philip Tinari will address the theme of transnationalism in contemporary Asian art. In the age of global culture and commodity flows, it has become cliché to note that artistic production is transitional. Still, in a borderless aesthetic world, notions of place - perhaps more viciously than ever - become powerful mechanisms for making sense of texts and images.
In drawing together works by contemporary artists who are viewed as "Asian", this show will examine the contradiction between the destabilization of the local/global dichotomy on one hand and the need for these artists to address their Asian-ness aesthetically on the other. While much attention has been given recently to such themes and artists, this show remains unique in its eagerness to juxtapose works from three different traditions (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) and multiple media (sculpture, painting, video-installation, and collage).
Funding for the catalog and exhibition have been provided by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, the Friends of the Art Museum, Mr. and Mrs. Yukio Nakayama, and Mr. and Mrs. Michael Wilsey, Atherton, CA.
The third homegrown exhibition offered at DUMA is SAVy Selects: New Acquisitions, which will be on view in the North Wing Gallery from Apr. 18 through May 13.
Under the leadership of Education Outreach Coordinator Adera Causey, the students select the artworks, spend time examining them, conduct research,and then prepare text panels and discursive labels. They write about particular pieces and about the pieces in context with one another, using their own research and from their engagement with the work of art through close visual analysis. After this extensive research phase, the students install the pieces, publicize the exhibition, and plan the opening reception. In this way, the Student Art Volunteers provide a means for the viewer to experience the works in a new way.
The works selected for this year's show include DUMA acquisitions from 1999 and 2000 and represent many styles and nationalities; from pieces acquired after popular DUMA exhibitions such as those by Don Eddy and Uri Katzenstein, to a print by pop artist Andy Warhol, to pre-Columbian artifacts and contemporary Russian photographs. One of the artworks exhibited will be a rare Aztec Obsidian Disk, acquired in memory of the late DUMA volunteer Reigh Ashton.
This exhibition allows Duke undergraduate volunteers to curate a show from beginning to end and to work intimately with museum objects. The SAVy curators are: Victoria Calvert, sophomore; Christine Gesick, sophomore; Justin Gilanyi, freshman; Sarah Hunsberger, junior; Alexandra Jones, sophomore; Vicki Kaplan, freshman; Noah Lewkowitz, junior; Erin Thayer, senior; Katie Thorpe, freshman; Amy Vyas, senior; and Stephanie Yeh, sophomore.
This show is generously supported by Mr. and Mrs. Yukio Nakayama.
For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call the Museum at 919/684-5135.
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