Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
2001 Campus Drive, Durham, NC, 27705
Mailing address: Box 90732, Durham, NC, 27708
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Exhibitions

Angels, Devils and the Electric Slide: Outsider Art from the Permanent Collection

Containing Antiquity

Events

Angels, Devils and the Electric Slide: Outsider Art from the Permanent Collection
December 10, 2011 – July 8, 2012

The Nasher Museum presents an installation of works from the permanent collection by Outsider artists, including Minnie Black, the Rev. Howard Finster, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Mose Tolliver and Purvis Young. Outsider art refers to the visionary work of contemporary artists who have never had formal training. The artists in the exhibition hail from across the Southeastern United States, and their art ranges from painting to ceramics to sculpture in wood or metal. All of their works give voice to an interior world—those personal fantasies, meditations on everyday life and unspoken fears—that most people cannot put into words or images.

In every case, the artists used unique materials and creative processes to make their art. Whereas Jimmy Lee Sudduth finger-painted with pigment-tinted mud, Hubert Walters fashioned his Passenger Ship out of discarded furniture pieces and Bondo—an industrial putty that is a staple of auto body shops and carpenter tool sheds.

The artists on view in Outsider Art also share something beyond their often improvisational methods of art-making: Their works are woven together by common threads such as religion, the mystical world of animals, pop culture and icons of American history. While Howard Finster and Fred Webster give us folksy depictions of the Angel Gabriel, Mose Tolliver delivers an unprecedented interpretation of George Washington. Artists Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Charles Kinney and Annie Lucas, meanwhile, capture the magic of crowing roosters, wild cats and fantastic beasts native only to the mind’s eye.

Outsider Art demonstrates the innovative strategies and imaginative visual languages that result when Outsider artists follow their irrepressible artistic impulses. It includes gifts and promised gifts from Bruce Lineker, New York, and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami.

Containing Antiquity
Ongoing

“Containing Antiquity” highlights the great variety of vessels–storage jars, perfume bottles, serving bowls and drinking cups–made and used in the ancient Greek cultural sphere throughout the Mediterranean region, and the decoration and function of these containers. These qualities demonstrate both the unity and the diversity of Greek culture and the interactions of Greek communities with each other and with other Mediterranean cultures, such as the Phoenicians to the east. Themes of the exhibition include the development of types of vessels over time in the major production centers of Athens and Corinth; the use of containers in ritual and everyday contexts; mutual influences of container shapes and decoration in a variety of media, including gold, glass, and bronze; and the importance of decorative schemes for conveying Greek myth and reality.

One of the benefits of university museums to students is the chance to work directly with objects and to contribute meaningfully to our understanding and knowledge of this material. This exhibition was designed by undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in a seminar taught in the spring of 2010 by professor Carla Antonaccio, Duke’s Department of Classical Studies. The aim of the course was to introduce students to working directly with antiquities, teaching them how to look at, record, and analyze objects, how to understand style and manufacture, how to assign a date and trace possible origins and uses for the objects, and how to present them to the university community and public. The course also engaged with current debates about the market that brings antiquities to institutions like the Nasher Museum, and the current legal and ethical issues surrounding their acquisition. Every student conducted independent research on selected objects that informed the choices that went into this gallery. Everyone in the seminar collaborated on selecting the objects, creating the groupings and the overarching theme of the exhibition, and drafting the text panels that you will read as you view the objects.

Support for the exhibition and catalogue comes from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, an anonymous donor, the Teasley Family Classical Antiquities Endowment Fund, the Department of Classical Studies at Duke University, the John O. and Jeanne Miles Blackburn Endowment, and the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation.

Nasher Museum exhibitions and programs are generously supported by the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Mary D.B.T. Semans and the late James H. Semans, the late Frank E. Hanscom III, The Duke Endowment, the Nancy Hanks Endowment, the James Hustead Semans Memorial Fund, the K. Brantley and Maxine E. Watson Endowment Fund, the Neely Family Fund, the Janine and J. Tomilson Hill Family Fund, the Marilyn M. Arthur Fund, the E. T. Rollins, Jr. and Frances P. Rollins Fund, the Victor and Lenore Behar Endowment Fund, the George W. and Viola Mitchell Fearnside Endowment Fund, the Sarah Schroth Fund, the Margaret Elizabeth Collett Fund, the Nasher Museum of Art General Endowment, the Office of the President and the Office of the Provost, Duke University, and the Friends of the Nasher Museum of Art.

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