Gifts at Work

Nasher Museum Makes First Purchase of Art

(From the Duke News Service) The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University has made its first purchase of art -- a sculpture by New York-based artist Petah Coyne, director Kimerly Rorschach announced Jan. 20th.

The Nasher Museum of Art is a major new arts center on Duke’s campus that serves the university, Research Triangle area and surrounding region with exhibitions and educational programs.

Untitled #1111 (Little Ed's Daughter Margaret

The newly purchased work is “Untitled #1111 (Little Ed’s Daughter Margaret),” an 11-foot assemblage of tree branches, feathers, ribbon, thread, tassels -– and hundreds of silk flowers dipped in a specially formulated midnight blue wax. The underlying figure is a fiberglass cast statue with a hidden mechanism programmed to cause its eyes to well up with “tears” twice a day at unpredictable times.

The museum chose the sculpture after Petah Coyne lent another, similar work, “Untitled #1165 (Paris Blue),” for one of the museum’s inaugural exhibitions. That exhibition, “The Forest: Politics, Poetics, and Practice,” is on view through Jan. 29.

“I am pleased to bring this dramatic work of art to Durham,” Rorschach said. “We are delighted to have the opportunity to purchase a major piece by an artist whose work moves us, and whose contributions to the development of contemporary art are significant.”

“Untitled #1111 (Little Ed’s Daughter Margaret)” will be on view at the Nasher Museum this fall, Rorschach said. Through Aug. 27, the sculpture is part of the ARS ’06 exhibition of contemporary art at the KIASMA Museum in Helsinki, Finland.

Buried elements within the sculpture emerge, Coyne said, only after a visitor looks long and hard at the piece.

The sculpture includes remnants of a couture gown specially made for the figure by a dressmaker, two large stuffed fighting birds and empty bird skins. The artist also incorporated a braid of human hair given to her by an art collector. The braid, according to Coyne, belonged to the gentleman’s mother, a Victorian woman named Margaret who was a musician and early feminist and who died when the collector was a child.

“However much time you spend, that’s what you’ll see,” Coyne said. “So it can be just an elaborate, beautiful thing, which is all that many people see, but I prefer it to have this deeper, darker, sometimes even humorous dialogue with people.”

The former Duke University Museum of Art, which closed in May 2004, purchased works of art during the 35 years it operated on Duke’s East Campus, Rorschach said, but this is the museum’s first major purchase of internationally significant art. The Nasher Museum, which opened in October, is raising funds for a $10 million endowment for programs, exhibitions and acquisitions of art to build the museum’s permanent collection. The museum’s focus is on collecting modern and contemporary art.

For more information, contact: Wendy Hower Livingston | (919) 684-3314 | wendy.hower@duke.edu

January 20, 2006