The art museum has become a prestige commission for contemporary architects, and for several decades reference has been made to a “museum building boom.” Among these new museums, those of Louis Kahn are especially admired. This significant American architect, who ranks in this century with Frank Lloyd Wright both as a creator and as an influence, has made a special contribution to the architecture of museums and has helped create a subtle but telling change in the concept of what a late twentieth-century museum building should be. After a brief look at the development of a tradition in museum architecture, this study examines Kahn’s three art museums: the Yale University Art Gallery, the Kimbell Art Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art. It traces the development of each museum through museum through its various stages: the background of the institutions and the commissions, the programs for the buildings, their designs and evolutions, their constructions, and the evaluations of the completed buildings. Material on Kahn’s plans for a museum for the De Menil collection, begun shortly before his death, is also included. Accompanying the text are illustrations of the buildings, including Kahn’s personal sketches, architectural plans and sections, and presentation perspective drawings. Photographs of the finished buildings present the transformed vision of the architect in tangible form, showing that the museums, while related, are individualized accomplishments. This is the first comprehensive study of Kahn’s museums.

The Art Museums of Louis I. Kahn

Arts & Photography

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

The Brummer Collection of Medieval Art in the Duke University Museum of Art is one of the finest to be found in any American university museum. It is remarkable for its breadth and the variety of objects represented, with works varying in scale from monumental stone pieces to small-scale objects in wood, ivory, or metal, and ranging from the seventh to eighth centuries through the sixteenth century. This fine catalog makes available for the first time this rich but little-known collection. Five studies by leading art scholars focus on key works in the collection and contribute to a new understanding of the origins of many of the pieces. Two introductory essays comment on the character of the collection as a whole, its acquisition by Duke University, and its conservation. Finally, the catalog section discusses the more important pieces in the collection and is followed by a checklist of entries and smaller photographs of all other objects.
Contributors. Ilene H. Forsyth, Jean M. French, Dorothy F. Glass, Dieter Kimpel, Jill Meredith, Linda S. Roundhill

The Brummer Collection of Medieval Art: Duke University Museum of Art

Bruzelius, Caroline

Meredith, Jill

History & Criticism

Lavishly illustrated with nearly 400 color images, Painting the Maya Universe is the most thorough study and brilliant display of Classic Maya ceramic painting yet published. Building on twenty years of research and debate, Dorie Reents-Budet and her collaborators Joseph W. Ball, Ronald L. Bishop, Virginia M. Fields, and Barbara MacLeod bring together many perspectives, including the art historical, archaeological, epigraphical, and ethnohistorical, to examine one of the world’s great but overlooked painting traditions. With an emphasis on sixth- to eighth-century pottery featuring both pictorial and hieroglyphic imagery, Painting the Maya Universe presents an extraordinary exploration of the cultural roles and meanings of these Guatemalan, Belizean, and Mexican elite painted ceramics. Maya pottery is discussed both in aesthetic terms and for the important information it reveals about Maya society, artistry, politics, history, religion, and ritual. The range of ceramic painting styles developed during this period is also presented and defined in detail. Painting the Maya Universe is the first publication to present a definitive translation of the hieroglyphic texts painted on these objects. With many glyphs deciphered here for the first time, this analysis reveals much about how these vessels were perceived and used by the Maya, their owners’ names, and, in several cases, the names of the artists who created them. This information is combined with archaeological and other data, including nuclear chemical analyses, to correlate painting styles with specific Maya sites. Published in conjunction with Duke University Museum of Art and an exhibition touring the United States, Painting the Maya Universe presents an astonishing visual record as well as a monumental scholarly achievement. With photographs by Justin Kerr, the foremost photographer of pre-Columbian art, it includes over 90 unique full-color rollout photographs, each showing the entire surface of an object in a single frame. The book also addresses the questions and controversy regarding the loss of information that occurs when objects are removed from their archaeological context to become part of public and private collections. Painting the Maya Universe will energize discussion of Maya pottery, hieroglyphic texts, and iconography. Its photographs, a lasting resource on this great painting tradition, will stimulate and delight the eye. It is a breakthrough in art history and Latin American scholarship that will enrich general readers and scholars alike.

Painting the Maya Universe: Royal Ceramics of the Classic Period

Reents-Budet, Dorie

Painting the Maya Universe: Royal Ceramics of the Classic Period (Duke University Museum of Art)

Baltimore Portraits is a unique presentation of photographs by Amos Badertscher. These portraits—many accompanied by poignantly revealing, hand-written narratives about their subjects—represent a sector of Baltimore that has gone largely unnoticed and rarely has been documented. In this volume, the assemblage of images of bar and street people—transvestites, strippers, drug addicts, drag queens, and hustlers—spans a twenty-year period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s. Badertscher’s arresting and melancholy photographs document a culture that has virtually disappeared due to substance abuse, AIDS, and, often, societal or family neglect. The photographer’s focus on content rather than on elaborate technique reveals the intensely personal—and, indeed, autobiographical—nature of his portraits. Their simplicity along with the text’s intimacy affects the viewer in ways not easily forgotten. An introduction by Tyler Curtain contextualizes the photographs both within the history of Baltimore and its queer subculture and in relationship to contemporaneous work by photographers Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, Duane Michaels, and others. Curtain also positions the underlying concerns of Bardertscher’s art in relation to gay and lesbian cultural politics. This striking collection of portraits, along with the photographer’s moving text, will impact not only a general audience of photographers and enthusiasts of the art but also those engaged with gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, and cultural studies in general. It is published in association with the Duke University Museum of Art.

Baltimore Portraits

Badertscher, Amos

Photography & Video

Individual Artists

The Forest: Politics, Poetics, and Practice focuses on the forest as a theme in contemporary art. The full-color catalog accompanies one of the inaugural exhibitions at the new Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, on view from October 2, 2005, through January 29, 2006. The show features contemporary works of art by more than thirty artists from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. It includes drawings, prints, sculpture, photography, film, video, digital imagery, and sound art.Starting with “politics”—the first of its three organizing themes—the exhibition examines works that take a political approach to the forest and nature. Germany’s Joseph Beuys’s lithograph Save the Woods (1972) anchors a contemporary collection of works—by An-My Le (Vietnam), Rosemary Laing (Australia) and Collier Schorr (U.S.), and Zwelethu Mthethwa (South Africa), among others—that look at issues of war, nuclear threat, colonialism, industrialization, and deforestation.“Poetics” investigates the psychological, mythical, spiritual, and literary aspects of the forest, inspired by the Grimms’ fairy tales, Celtic mythology, and European ghost stories. Among the artists showcased are Kiki Smith (U.S.), Wim Wenders (Germany), Yang FuDong (China), Petah Coyne (U.S.), and Paloma Varga Weisz (Germany). “Practice” focuses on artists who are actively engaged with issues of ecology. The exhibition marks the premiere of a webcam project by pioneering media artist Wolfgang Staehle. Other artists include Simon Starling (U.K.), Alan Sonfist (U.S.), and Carsten Holler (Germany).The Forest is cosponsored by the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University.

The Forest: Politics, Poetics, and Practice

Conjuring Bearden, a richly illustrated exhibition catalog, explores the theme of the “conjur woman” in the work of artist Romare Bearden (1911–1988). Throughout his career, Bearden represented the female figure of the conjurer, or her Caribbean equivalent, the Obeah woman, in his art. Enthralled by her spirituality and power to transform, Bearden depicted the Obeah in his collage, photomontage, and watercolors. Although much has been written about Bearden, this is the first book to critically address his obsessive and creative relationship with this figure of the black vernacular.One of Bearden’s most striking methods for introducing the figure of the conjur woman in his art was by distilling Cubist and Dadaist fracture through the deconstructive aesthetics of jazz compositions and African American folk collage and assemblage. With arresting color, Bearden’s conjurers were neither eroticized nor made passive. Essays look at Bearden’s thematic presentation of African American spirituality in relation to his experiments with form and technique. They trace his visual musings on African, Caribbean, and African American expressive mysticism and examine his magical reinvention of pictorial space and time.
This catalog accompanies an exhibition of the same title at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, which will be on display from March 4, 2006 through July 16, 2006. Together, they build on the findings of The Art of Romare Beaden, a major retrospective organized by the National Gallery of Art that toured nationwide.

Conjuring Bearden

Powell, Richard J.

Di Giulio, Margaret Ellen

García, Alicia

Trout, Victoria

Wang, Christine

Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova &amp; Robin Rhode, curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, examines the work of three early-career artists for whom the streets of their respective cities act as fluid, living sources of inspiration. The full-color catalog accompanies the three-person exhibition on view from March 29, 2007 through July 29, 2007 at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art. For these artists, found objects and performative gestures help build the foundation for their art, which includes painting, works on paper, sculpture, photography, video, installation, and other mixed media. Together they reinterpret the urban vernacular to engage critical issues of class, geography, and race in contemporary society. Mark Bradford is best known for abstract collages made largely from accumulated signage taken from the streets of South Central Los Angeles that he tears, bleaches, sands, and embellishes to reconfigure the urban landscape. These visible remains and the residual human energy in urban spaces become the foundation of Bradford's work. William Cordova works primarily with found paper and everyday objects to create drawings and mixed-media installations; some materials and iconography--such as books, speakers, tires, and albums--are recurring images that allude both to Cordova's Peruvian heritage and modern urban subcultures. Inspired by graffiti, film, sports, and hip-hop, as well as his personal experiences in the rough neighborhoods of Johannesburg, South Africa, Robin Rhode's performances involve the build-up and erasure of chalk drawings on the walls of public spaces and galleries that playfully transform his renderings into illusory three-dimensional objects through the artist's physical engagement. This richly illustrated catalog includes a curatorial essay and an individual text about each artist.

Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova & Robin Rhode

Schoonmaker, Trevor

The renowned artist Irwin Kremen’s collages, paintings, and sculptures are composed from such diverse materials as scraps of weathered paper, wasp nests, saw blades, and steel. Irwin Kremen: Beyond Black Mountain (1966 to 2006) is the exhibition catalog accompanying a retrospective covering forty years of the artist’s career. The work will be on display at Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art from March 22, 2007 through June 17, 2007. A longtime North Carolina resident and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Duke University, Kremen studied literature and writing with M. C. Richards at the legendary Black Mountain College in the mid-1940s. There he met John Cage, David Tutor, and Merce Cunningham, all of whom became close friends, artistic inspirations, and ardent supporters.
Kremen did not show his work publicly until a 1978 exhibition at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art featuring mostly small non-representational collages. In 1979 his works were exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection of Fine Arts, where they were received enthusiastically; the Washington Star heralded him as “an American master of collage” on the level of “Robert Motherwell, Anne Ryan, and Romare Bearden.” Since then, Kremen’s work has been shown in nearly thirty shows in the United States and abroad; favorably reviewed in the New York Times, Washington Post, Artforum International, the Chicago Tribune, and Art News; and acquired by museums and private collectors across the country.
The catalog includes full color illustrations of more than 100 of Kremen’s collages as well as twelve sculptures and three monumental pieces made over the past decade in collaboration with the Duke art professor William Noland.

Beyond Black Mountain: Irwin Kremen (1966 to 2006)

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Books by Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Art Museums of Louis I. Kahn

The Brummer Collection of Medieval Art: Duke University Museum of Art

Painting the Maya Universe: Royal Ceramics of the Classic Period

Painting the Maya Universe: Royal Ceramics of the Classic Period (Duke University Museum of Art)

Baltimore Portraits

Baltimore Portraits

The Forest: Politics, Poetics, and Practice

Conjuring Bearden

Street Level: Mark Bradford, William Cordova & Robin Rhode

Beyond Black Mountain: Irwin Kremen (1966 to 2006)