ART SPACE

There's a building on East Campus that has a one-way mirror in place of a door. Most students don't notice it, only staring blankly ahead as they walk past. Some, who are quick enough to catch glimpses of their own reflections in the mirror, absently tug at their shirts and smooth unruly hair. I watched from the other side of the glass in the lobby where few passersby have entered--the Duke University Museum of Art.

Today, I'm not at the museum to see the galleries, but to find out what happens when DUMA, the ostensible focal point for art at Duke, permanently shuts down--with no alternative outlet for a year. After three-and-a-half decades, DUMA is packing its figurative bags and moving from its East Campus location. Eventually, pieces from DUMA--both the physical works of art as well as the more intangible components of Duke's arts education outreach programs--will relocate to the Nasher Museum of Art, currently under construction. But the big question remains: what will happen to art at Duke between May 25, when DUMA shuts its doors, and when the highly-anticipated Nasher Museum of Art opens its own doors in October 2005?

First, thousands of pieces of art need to be prepared for the major move down Campus Drive to the new facility.

Standing in what once was the main gallery of DUMA, I find no temporary student-run shows where they were usually displayed. Instead, all I see are shelves and boxes standing in for museum patrons and paintings that lean, rather than hang, along the walls. The windows near the ceiling, opened for the first time in the building's 35 years as a museum, allow a dust-refracted light into the chilly room, where the mingling of particles and sunshine settle among the boxed masterpieces and treasures.

  

The differences between the old and new museum facilities are readily apparent. DUMA has been housed in a converted classroom building, not discernably different from its neighboring freshman dorms and largely invisible to an unaware visitor on campus. Nasher, on the other hand, is a built-to-purpose museum and striking work by famed architect Rafael Viñoly. It is prominent even during its construction. But between the old museum's quiet closing and the fanfare surrounding the Fall 2005 launch of the new facility, there is nothing of a university museum at Duke--no temporary exhibit space, no interim educational programming through the museum and no community outreach.

   As the old East Campus museum gradually empties, the Durham community is enduring a sense of emptiness of its own. Although a year is short for a major transition in the museum world, the absence of a university museum at Duke still has implications for arts education programs in the greater Durham community. One such popular program at Hope Valley Elementary School, Art Club, must be indefinitely canceled until Duke once again has a center for art. Just off East Campus, I meet with co-founder of Hope Valley's Art Club, Tamela Davis, one afternoon to discuss the Club's tenuous situation.

"We're pretty much at a standstill until the Nasher opens and until the new director of the education department has a direction," she tells me frankly over an outdoor table at Whole Foods.

Davis is a woman who lets you know she's a teacher by the very tone of her voice. It is firm without being harsh; her slow, southern pronunciation is commanding, but with the underlying assurance of mutual respect between speaker and listener. Before she taught, Davis was an interior designer and a journalist. Today, the tall woman with perfect nails and perfect hair is the art teacher at Hope Valley, for all the school's 870 students, in Kindergarten through fifth grade.

Davis is also the force behind Art Club, a program she developed with Adera Causey, former DUMA university and community educator. "It occurred to me that it would be fabulous if kids could partner with the museum and learn the permanent collection," Davis says. Participants enter the semester-long program to learn about art--this club was for art appreciation, not art creation. The premise, then, was to help fourth- and fifth-grade students feel comfortable in a museum setting. "Their general feeling going in is one of intimidation," she says. "They think, 'I don't belong there, I shouldn't go, it costs a lot of money to go.' It's just to demystify the art museum and also to get the children talking about art."

Every Tuesday afternoon, the "art kids," as they came to be known by Duke undergraduate volunteers like junior Alexis Vaughun, came to visit DUMA . The kids began the semester by choosing a piece of art to criticize--not necessarily a piece that they liked; all that mattered was that it somehow caught their attention. The Tuesday sessions included lessons on the basic elements of art, exploring art compositions and visiting local arts organizations, and over the course of the semester, the students gradually grew more confident in criticizing art. On the last day, the students presented their chosen artwork and criticized it in front of their friends and parents.

The critiques generated by the Art Club kids are far from conventional. Last semester, one girl suggested that the artist of a large found-objects collage of a kissing couple was probably too lazy to paint, so he just stuck trash on there. Another boy criticized a painting that featured a detailed female nude, but because he was nervous, never mentioned the fact that the focal character was naked.

Davis says Art Club was the most popular after-school offering at Hope Valley. Since Art Club is one of the more unusual after-school programs offered at the elementary school, Causey explains that many of the students chose to participate in Art Club as a change from the other alternatives.

"It got so intense that when the kids brought their sign-up slips I'd have to sign them, date them, and write the time--that's how I chose the kids, first come, first serve," Davis adds.

Despite the school's proximity to Duke--Hope Valley is just 3.5 miles away from East Campus--Art Club represents the most significant experience with the University for many students. "A lot of them said that they don't come to Duke for anything else but [Art] Club," Vaughun says. "They asked me questions about Duke and being a student here--I think it might have opened their eyes to more of the options around them for their education."

With the close of DUMA, Art Club is on hold. Back at Whole Foods, Davis says she doesn't know what the future has in store for Art Club. "It's gone because the museum is gone. That was our major focus--the connection to the DUMA. That was the whole thing," she says.

The building that hosted nearly five years of Art Club has housed a variety of disciplines. Before its dedication as the Duke University Museum of Art in 1969, it was a science building--and is still labeled as such in a stone carving above the entryway. "An alumna was in our Old Master gallery upstairs and said, 'I dissected some project in this gallery back when I was an undergraduate!'" says Anne Schroder, the Nasher research curator in charge of reinstalling the permanent collection in the new museum.

Display cases replaced lab stations as the classrooms of the former science building were renovated into exhibit halls. But as the museum grew, administrators jockeyed for space with the very art they were employed to protect and display. Gesturing toward a large meeting table in the center of a busy staff common area, Assistant Registrar Myra Scott recalls juggling artwork and work space within the museum. "A lot of times we have to show students artwork on the table out here because we really don't have the space to do something like that," she says.

The building's metamorphosis into a museum was hindered by its physical similarities to the rest of East Campus. Outside, the old museum's façade has no distinctive features that identify it as different from the other buildings with Georgian architecture and brick exteriors that populate the quadrangle. "There's been no real identity, visually, on the quad here," Schroder says.

When the museum was still open, banners in front announced special exhibits, but the building remained just another brick structure to oblivious students. "I think it's one of those things, where if you're into art and you like it, you know the museum is there and you use it," Vaughun offers, standing in front of a huge, ancient funerary urn in one of the gray-ceilinged, gray-carpeted DUMA galleries.

Meanwhile, Nasher has become the object of attention for students and visitors curious about the large-scale construction project. Although Nasher is just down the street, the only thing that the old and new museums share is Duke's permanent art collection. "We're not going to just deconstruct this museum and put it all up in the new Nasher," says Wendy Livingston, interim communications coordinator for the Nasher.

Instead, three of the five large white pavilions at Nasher will be devoted to art. Of those three, two will house temporary exhibitions and the third will be the new home to Duke's permanent collection. Schroder has been charged with reinstalling the collection and has chosen a thematic approach. Artworks will be grouped and displayed according to broad themes such as "Constructions of Gender" or "Symposium versus Cemetery" rather than by civilization, as they were in DUMA.

"We're seizing this moment as an opportunity to integrate the museum with the multidisciplinary teaching of the University," Schroder says. "We want to make this more of a conscious program of coordinating thematic installations that speak to what the teaching personality [of Duke] is."

And the students seem excited. "A museum on campus is a working, living, breathing thing, and a lot of students overlook it right now because it's in this little building on East," senior Lauren Miller says. "But once it's a bigger presence in the middle of campus, people will really respect it more."

Add an auditorium, gift shop, study-storage areas, sculpture garden, café, proximity to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens and an element of curiosity, and museum officials are confident that students will be drawn to Nasher. "It's going to be the center of the arts on campus," Livingston says. "This is where it all happens."

When it opens, that is.

The interim period between museums is a time for utility rather than publicity. "Our focus, I have to say, has to be on getting the new museum open and not on arranging substitutions," Schroder says.

It's true. Durham, N.C. can't compare to the New Yorks, Chicagos and Philadelphias of the American art map. The city is better known for its baseball, diet centers and tobacco past than its arts--a reality that often leaves the community with limited opportunities to satisfy its artistically-inclined demands. It's not that the arts are neglected at Duke, but students believe the arts are simply sidelined by students occupied with other pursuits. "There's a feeling that arts are on East Campus, and then sort of ostracized to the edge of the campus," says Courtney Crosson, Trinity '04.

Stuck somewhere between the teaching mission of the University and its ambition to establish a nationally renowned museum lies the city of Durham. Within the past year, the Durham Arts Council developed and began to implement a community-wide Cultural Master Plan. The far-reaching effort, funded by a total of $700,000 from a 2001 North Carolina occupancy tax, seeks to identify and consolidate cultural endeavors for the Durham community. The project fact sheet describes a plan that seeks "to survey what currently exists, and what is being planned by major institutions, by the universities, by the city of Durham" and by other active community members in order to supplement the city's arts offerings.

Although the anonymity of DUMA may have made it more important to interested Durham residents and University visitors than to Duke students, it seems to me that Durham's ambitious plan is incomplete without the involvement of the University. Certain changes in priorities regarding art at Duke that coincide with the closing of DUMA, such as the termination of Art Club and the University's recent reservations about funding a cultural center in downtown Durham, may represent a shift in attention away from the greater community and toward Duke.

But I believe a university museum may be more than a venue for consumption; it can be an instrument for growth. Durham looks and will continue to look to Duke for a significant portion of its culture. The unavoidable programming and outreach gap during the large-scale move may prove a springboard for Duke students interested in art to become directly involved in the Durham arts community--and it is up to the museum staff members to meet the challenge of developing and maintaining an arts audience at Duke.

"This is an awkward time because we have to keep our members and our students excited about a museum that doesn't exist yet--for a whole year," Livingston says.