​Dream bigger in promoting the arts

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Nasher Museum of Art’s opening at its current location. Since the museum’s founding as the Duke University Museum of Art in 1969, it has sought to “promote engagement with the visual arts” in the Duke community and broader Triangle region. Exposure of students to the arts at Duke starts for most with the Night at the Nasher event of Orientation Week. Although the growth of the arts at Duke has been noticeable in recent years, many students remain to be reached by art programs after that first-year evening celebration.

The root of the issue is that the proliferation of arts opportunities on campus have largely attracted students already predisposed to the arts. This year of course saw the launch of Project Arts, a new pre-orientation program focused on engaging incoming first-years with Durham’s art community and themes of social justice. We also note the constant work of duARTS and Arts Annex in planning and hosting arts events and movie screenings to stir up student interest.

The greatest obstacle facing the promotion of the arts is the question of how to attract students who simply are not thinking of the arts with all the other interests they have going on. The solution, as evidenced in past events, is to seek out ways to integrate the arts with other interests or simply to present the arts creatively. This can be anything from encouraging more professors to spend a lecture or two at the Nasher to the building of a temporary smokehouse behind the Allen Building. The smokehouse event last year featured a meeting of the culinary arts with science and tie-ins by the Romance Studies, Women’s Studies and Classical Studies departments.

In this way, students can find themselves participating in the arts community in ways they never expected to, and the arts stand to gain from this. Programs like next week’s Duke Arts Festival that partners organizations across campus are just the type of opportunity that should be made smaller but more frequent through the course of the year. The combination of big ticket and more casual events, like pianos at the bus stops, draw in students who would otherwise go about their normal day. Beyond attending to the needs of students of the arts, campus arts organization should push programs on students who just are not going to make the first move.

An obvious barrier is access to arts resources. The Arts Annex and Center for Documentary Studies are fantastic places for supplies, but many students are hesitant to go out of their way to make use of them. A future development that could change that attitude, however, is the new 68,000-square-foot Arts Building slated to start construction on Campus Drive this fall. Although still off of both East and West campus, the sheer size of the building—a few thousand square feet larger than the Nasher itself—and the plans for its facilities promise to create a proper student center for the arts.

And of course looking beyond Duke, we can identify with the arts an interesting culture in Durham beyond its food culture. Durham’s arts scene is burgeoning, and exhibitions at the 21C Museum Hotel with the Centerfest Arts Festival downtown are classy but accessible opportunities that students simply neglect to explore. Support in the form of transportation and publicity on campus would go a long way in strengthening the arts connection between Duke and Durham.

Duke’s Council for the Arts separates the arts at Duke into the categories of music, theater, dance, visual and media arts and creative writing. Each of these art forms stands to gain from pushing itself on students and branching out its connections to other disciplines and venues. We encourage to do their part and check out the arts scene all around.