With no ceremony and minimal regret, the Duke University Museum of Art shut its East Campus doors for the last time Wednesday as it prepares to sculpt a new future down Campus Drive at the Nasher Museum of Art.
For the next year, Duke will be without a visitable art museum, and the programs DUMA offers to the Durham community are on hiatus until the 65,000 square foot, state-of-the-art Nasher building opens in October 2005.
"Today just sort of signals a full transition to getting in the mood for packing and a full transition to the Nasher," Brad Johnson, relocation project manager, said Wednesday. Everyone affiliated with the museum will now devote full attention to readying for the move: stowing away art, increasing connections with faculty and planning outreach opportunities.
"We're focused on meeting our deadlines for moving to the building and setting up the installations and planning activities for the new museum," Associate Curator Anne Schroder said.
Curators are working to increase the museum's profile and to enlarge its collection, which will grow particularly in its depth of modern and contemporary art.
"Today is bittersweet, especially for people who've been connected with the museum since the '60s," Interim Communications Coordinator Wendy Hower Livingston said Wednesday. "But the rest of the staff is so excited about the new building that they don't feel very sad about the building closing."
The museum has been scaling back its programs for several years. The main gallery closed in summer 2001 so that packing could begin. Even though the doors have been open for University academic groups, no area school groups have toured the facility since January. Administrators noted that outreach efforts will return and expand when the move is over.
A banquet last Saturday served as the DUMA's final hurrah, with 50 long-time affiliates sharing stories of the museum's history and its significance as they gathered in the former science building been home to the DUMA since 1969.
"There are a lot of us who see the intimacy of the old museum and the excitement of the new museum as very special," said Barbara Smith, who has been involved with the museum in various capacities for more than a decade.
But on its final day, the DUMA's guest log book remained empty and most of the people coming in and out were members of academic departments housed in the building or workers packing up the collection.
So much attention of late has been concentrated on the relocation effort that even closing day was business as usual for Johnson. "It's an ordinary day of packing, which has been going on for a while," he said. He and his team will wrap and box every one of the 13,000 works of art in the collection before the Old Master paintings, Mayan ceramics, Medieval iconography and the rest get carted down Campus Drive to Nasher.
Many pieces of the collection have already been moved to an off-site storage facility, but some of the art will stay in its long-time home on East until spring 2005, when the Nasher Museum--with an outdoor garden, a café, three airy galleries, classroom space and an auditorium--can support the art. Construction will likely be completed in November, but there is a lag period while officials set up climate control and limited lighting for the collection.
When the new facility opens, the museum hopes to use the Rafael Viñoly-designed building to expand its scope beyond just Duke and Durham. "People who love museums will drive to come and see them," Smith said.
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