Nasher Museum Blogs

By Kristen Greenaway

I was surprisingly shocked when I learned last night that Michael Jackson had died. He was just a couple of years older than I, and like most people I had really enjoyed him in my teen years as the kid brother yet lead singer for the Jackson 5, before the “wierdness.” When Thriller was released in 1983, I was one of a million people in the first week of its release who bought the album—on vinyl. I didn’t own a CD player in 1983, but in my fourth year at ‘varsity doing my Masters, had been given my parents’ old record player and speakers. Good thing I lived by myself in an old bedsit, because I played the heck out of that album. Continue Reading »

By Wendy Hower Livingston

For me, Independence Day is a low-key affair.
A few sparklers, a hot dog and I’m good. Flag waving makes me slightly queasy.
Recently, however, I saw three exhibitions that nudged me toward thinking about my country’s birthday with a more open mind.

Shepard Fairey’s famous portrait of Barack Obama, part of his retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, had me feeling pretty good about red, white and blue. The Nasher Museum’s upcoming exhibition of photographs, “Beyond Beauty: Photographs from the Duke University Special Collections Library,” opening July 2, includes wonderful images that show the quirky, the funky and, sometimes, the dark side of America. But it was “The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art” that really got me thinking.

I continue to sift through images in my mind from that exhibition at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, outside Boston. The show brings up stories from America’s past–some new to me, others reimagined by the artists and still others held up under a magnefying glass to reveal new parts. Continue Reading »

It’s not always easy to talk about video art on school tours. Logistics can pose a challenge. Julie Thomson, the associate curator of education at the Nasher Museum, has ideas about how to share works like “Video Quartet,” now on view  at the Nasher Museum,  with students. Read her post on the Art21 Blog.

IMAGE: Christian Marclay, “Video Quartet,” 2002. Four-channel DVD projection with sound, 14 minutes. Each screen is 8 x 10 feet; overall installation is 8 x 40 feet. Edition 1 of 5.

By Dez Webb

The exhibition “Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City” closed recently, and the gallery is dark. Here at the Nasher Museum, the public is not allowed to watch the installation of the next exhibition, “Beyond Beauty: Photographs from the Duke University Special Collections Library,” which opens Thursday, July 2. But I can.

As a student intern, I was able to hang out for a while with Brad Johnson, the chief preparator, who oversees this challenging process along with preparators Alan Dippy, Harvey Craig and Patrick Krivacka. The job of a preparator is very interesting. They are art handlers and in charge of setting the galleries up and making them look nice. They take works of art down, put them into customized crates, set the new exhibitions up–and this is only the beginning. Johnson’s job is the design and layout of each exhibition as well as unpacking, installing, repacking, putting labels up, keeping the works secure and much more. Continue Reading »

By Brittany Titus

A photograph in the Nasher Museum’s permanent collection gallery instantly caught my eye.
Artist Zwelethu Mthethwa captured a woman sitting in her house, but the crazy part about it is that her house looks like it is made out of cardboard, her table of newspapers. Pictures hung up appear to be drawn, or ripped apart, and I just don’t understand why. I guess this is a real life situation.

This work of art made me never want to take life for granted because you never know what someone else’s treasure is or when someone can just take everything away from you. When I looked directly at the photo it was almost like I felt her hurt, her pain, her crying just from being in that environment. We sit here and complain about everything but never stop for a second to think about what people in other countries are going through, whether it’s by choice or from a dictatorship. I guess I now understand the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” because after examining a photo like this, nothing but thoughts of pain come to my head. The last impression I got of the photo was of her speaking to me with her eyes saying, “Look at me, this is a real situation. Why Me?”

CREDIT: Zwelethu Mthethwa, “Untitled from Interior Series Number 9,” 2002-2006. Color print mounted on aluminum. Promised Gift of Blake Byme, Los Angeles, in memory of Raymond Nasher.

Brittany Titus is a Nasher marketing intern and a rising junior at North Carolina Central University.