The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation gave a $1 million gift to the Nasher Museum of Art, which is set to open Oct 2. The museum will name one of its gallery pavilions after the late Nicholas Benjamin Duke Biddle in honor of the benefactor’s family.
The $23 million museum will be Duke’s premier site for art exhibition, focusing primarily on sculpture and modern art.
Nicholas Biddle, who died in 2004, was the son of Mary Duke Biddle. He was a a great lover of the arts founding trustee of the Durham-based foundation that bears his mother’s name. The Nicholas Benjamin Duke Biddle Pavilion will be one of five pavilions surrounding the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Grand Hall, which was named for his sister.
“The Foundation made the gift to establish the Mary Duke Biddle Music Building, [so] it is fitting to have her two children represented significantly on another major arts institution at Duke University,” Mary Jones, granddaughter of Mary Duke Biddle and chair of the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, said in a statement. “My grandmother would be very pleased to have her children’s names brought together at the Nasher Museum of Art.”
The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation was created in 1956 to continue to support causes and organizations that she, her parents and her grandfather—the University’s namesake Washington Duke—advocated.
“Naming a pavilion for Nicholas Biddle is a wonderful way to continue the family’s history of making important things possible for Duke,” President Richard Brodhead said in a statement. “Mary Semans has long championed the arts at Duke, and it is especially fitting that her brother’s name will grace a pavilion next to the great hall that will bear her name.”
The gift will help bring funding for the construction project to within $4 million of its eventual $23 million cost. Duke trustee emeritus Raymond Nasher provided the single largest contribution to the museum with $7.5 million. Other major benefactors include the Nasher Foundation of Dallas and the Duke Endowment.
Kim Rorschach, the Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans director of the Nasher Museum, said the donation is beneficial and timely because it will assist in reaching the capital campaign goal before the museum opens this fall. “This gift is integral to the museum,” she said. “This whole thing is a very fitting tribute to [Nicholas Biddle]—we are delighted to honor his memory in this way.”
The Biddle Pavilion is a naturally lit 4,600-square-foot enclosure with white oak floors and floating art walls. It will feature one of the museum’s first exhibitions, “The Evolution of the Nasher Collection,” which will be composed of art from the personal collection of the Nasher family. The exhibition will be available to the public from opening night until May 13, 2006, and will map the collection’s growth, which originated with a 1954 work by Ben Sahn.
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