Permanent Collection

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University was founded as the Duke University Museum of Art (DUMA) in 1969 with the purchase of the Brummer Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Art. The museum holds more than 13,000 works of art, including the Brummer Collection of medieval and renaissance art, the George Harley Memorial Collection of African art, a collection of classical Greek and Roman antiquities and more than 3,000 works of ancient American art.

The musuem's current collecting focus is on its growing collection of contemporary art.

The Past is Present: Classical Antiquities at the Nasher Museum Sixty works of art from the ancient Mediterranean world are on view, many of them for the first time, in the exhibition "The Past is Present: Classical Antiquities at the Nasher Museum." The works, ranging in date from about 2800 BCE to 300 CE, are part of a recent gift to the Nasher Museum from a private collection.

The exhibition includes examples of vase painting, marble and terracotta sculpture, bronze, carved amber and gold jewelry from the Cycladic era (third millennium BCE) through the late Hellenistic period.

The gift, given by an anonymous donor in 2006, contains pieces from a private collection assembled between the 1920s and the early 1970s. The show also includes ancient works from the Duke Classical Collection and the Nasher Museum's collection.

One of the recently acquired works in the exhibition is a vase from about 520-510 BCE, "Attic black-figure neck-amphora with Europa and the Bull," depicting an ancient Greek myth. The vase was found at Vulci in Etruria (Italy) more than 200 years ago and had been part of the collection of Lucien Bonaparte and the Duke of Buckingham.

Another work, "Gold Disc with Bees," was worn, possibly as a pendant, in the ancient Greek world almost 3,000 years ago. The detailed workmanship of the piece -- decorated with four honeybees clustered around a flower -- shows the influence of art of the ancient Near East (today's Middle East) that spread across much of the ancient eastern Mediterranean in the 7th century BCE.

The installation was organized by Carla Antonaccio, professor of archeology in Duke's Department of Classical Studies, and Sheila Dillon, the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke.

They present the exhibition through six themes: "The Bronze Age: before 'Greece'" (circa 3300 to 1100 BCE); "The Bronze Age without End" (circa 1100 to 700 BCE); "Women, Beauty and Adornment"; "Death and the Funeral"; "The Gods and Sacrifice"; and "The Greek Mixer: Symposia and Drinking Games."

An important aspect of the exhibition is researching, documenting and publishing the collection. Professors Antonaccio and Dillon team-teach a Duke class at the Nasher Museum; their students will take part in cataloging the new antiquities gift. Anne Schroder, the museum's curator of academic programs, is the coordinating curator for the exhibition.

Chapel Hill-based artist Patrick Dougherty enlisted help from volunteers to gather branches and saplings from Duke Forest and wove them into a large-scale sculpture outside the museum's main entrance. Dougherty is internationally known for his huge environmental sculptures with whimsical references to cocoons, nests, vessels and architecture. Last spring, he created a sculpture in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. For more information on Dougherty and his work, visit www.stickwork.net.

Duke University Photography