by Katie Zaborsky
THE CHRONICLE
After its immensely successful infancy, the Nasher Museum of Art is seeking to diversify with age.
Beginning March 10, the Nasher will open Building the Contemporary Collection: Five Years of Acquisitions, part of a yearlong celebration of its fifth birthday. With a strong focus on the African diaspora, the exhibition features the work of 42 artists acquired since the museum’s founding and will include photography, drawing, painting, sculpture, video and installation.
Assembled from donations by Duke alumni and through museum purchases, the exhibition came together in the fall of 2010. Wendy Livingston, the Nasher’s manager of marketing and communications, elaborated on the museum’s vision and methodology for collecting contemporary art.
“We focus on global emerging artists of color,” said Livingston. “We want to include artists who have been overlooked, female artists and artists from around the world.”
Nasher Director Kimerly Rorschach, Senior Curator Sarah Stroth and Curator of Contemporary Art Trevor Schoonmaker were instrumental in collecting works for the exhibit.
The Nasher currently has permanent collections of medieval and renaissance art, as well as antiquities from Greece and Rome, but their focus since opening in 2005 is on collecting more contemporary pieces.
“It is all a brand new enterprise,” Schoonmaker said. “There wasn’t much of a contemporary collection before.”
With this collection, the Nasher sought to acquire high-quality work from artists with whom museum patrons may not be familiar now, but who might be household names in the future.
“We want to keep building the collection and make it known to the public, and this will mean collaboration with other institutions as well,” said Schoonmaker.
At other museums, Schoonmaker explains, the collections are much narrower, but the emphasis for the upcoming show was compiling the contemporary artwork of American and international artists alike.
“This collection is one of a kind in that in that it can have this focus of the African diaspora while integrating works from all over the world,” says Schoonmaker.
Michael Levine, Trinity ’84 and member of the Nasher Board of Advisors, echoed the contemporary curator’s sentiment about the importance of diversity in the exhibition.
“The collection shows a better range of what’s really going on in contemporary art nowadays,” said Levine.
Levine added that the new acquisitions will also increase the popularity of the museum, attracting more visitors as well as more funding for future acquisitions.
“Contemporary art is more interesting to more people, which could draw more interest and then more donations,” Levine said.
One of the featured artists is William Cordova, an Afro-Peruvian artist who also contributed many works to the museum’s The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl in the fall. His series of drawings, many of which emphasize the vinyl motif, will be one of the contemporary works on display.
For Cordova, the public’s interaction with his art is essential, even if his work is more abstract.
“The general public is the only entity that can activate a work of art,” he wrote in an e-mail. “All creative modes of expression require an exchange between the producer of that media and an audience.”
Cordova is one of a growing number of artists who count the Nasher as an attractive option for displaying their work. The museum has become a staple in his travels, if only to stop by and revisit the permanent collections.
“It’s like a phrase from a poem that you repeat over and over again,” Cordova wrote.
Building the Contemporary Collection: Five Years of Acquistions will be on display at the Nasher Museum of Art from March 10 to Aug. 14, 2011.
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