DURHAM, NC.-The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University will open its new building designed by architect Rafael Viñoly on October 2, 2005, creating a major new center for the arts on campus. The $24 million museum will foster multidisciplinary learning and serve the Raleigh-Durham community. The museum will inaugurate its two new special exhibition galleries with The Evolution of the Nasher Collection and The Forest: Politics, Poetics and Practice, reflecting the museum’s increased focus on modern and contemporary art.

The Nasher at Duke is named in honor of the family of Raymond D. Nasher, an internationally prominent art collector and philanthropist who graduated from Duke in 1943. Duke will alter its cultural landscape with the launch of the new museum, a defining expression of the university’s renewed commitment to the arts. The dramatic 65,000-square-foot facility will also become a cornerstone for cultural activities on campus, serving as a venue for performing arts events, lectures, film series and social gatherings. The new building supports the continuing growth of the museum’s collections, allows for leading-edge exhibitions in collaboration with museums around the world and provides an important cultural resource for the university and the public.

“Rafael Viñoly has designed an extraordinary building that will reinforce the Nasher Museum of Art’s role as a catalyst for the arts at Duke,” said Kimerly Rorschach, the Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher at Duke. “We are thrilled to inaugurate our building with two exceptional exhibitions and, in doing so, usher in a new era at the museum of increasing our focus on modern and contemporary art.”

The Nasher at Duke marks Viñoly’s first completed art museum project in North America. The new museum comprises five pavilions that will house three large gallery spaces, a 173-seat auditorium, museum shop, classrooms, administrative offices and a café. The building will provide 14,000 square feet of gallery space and another 13,000 square feet of display space in the Mary D.B.T. Semans Great Hall, which can accommodate large works and temporary installations. One of the three gallery spaces will display work from the museum’s permanent collection, organized in thematic exhibitions to complement coursework and reflect the scholarly interests of Duke faculty. The two other gallery pavilions will host a rotating schedule of traveling exhibitions.

Formerly the Duke University Museum of Art, the museum was founded in 1969 and housed in a former science building on the East Campus until May 2004. Highlights of the museum’s permanent collection of approximately 13,000 works of art include the Brummer Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Art, the George Harley Memorial Collection of African Art, a classical collection and more than 3,000 works of art of the ancient Americas.

About the New Building - The Nasher at Duke’s 65,000-square-foot building designed by architect Rafael Viñoly is the university’s first stand-alone museum in its 80-year history. The centerpiece of Viñoly’s design is the dramatic 13,000-square-foot glass-and-steel canopy rising to a height of 45 feet above the great hall. The faceted roof soars above this irregular pentagonal central courtyard, where five concrete pavilions fan out at different angles. The five pavilions house three large gallery spaces, a 173-seat auditorium and an education wing, which will contain a museum shop, university and community classrooms, administrative offices and a café. Full-height glass walls and a green slate floor connect the pavilions and blur the division between interior and exterior. The museum also extends beyond its walls into the surrounding nine-acre wooded site through the glass walls between pavilions and a 64-seat café with indoor and outdoor seating, overlooking sculpture gardens.

Raymond Nasher provided the largest gift, $7.5 million, toward the new building. The Nasher Foundation of Dallas subsequently donated another $2.5 million in honor of Nasher, its founder. The Duke Endowment, a charitable trust in Charlotte, N.C., has contributed $2.5 million in honor of its chairman emerita and former Duke University trustee Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans. The great hall will be named in her honor. The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation of Durham gave $1 million to name Pavilion I for the late Nicholas Benjamin Duke Biddle, the brother of Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans, the son of Mary Duke Biddle and a founding trustee of her charitable foundation. To date, the Nasher at Duke has raised $19 million toward its $24 million goal from a combination of public and private sources.

Located at Anderson Street and Duke University Road between Duke’s East and West campuses, the museum will serve as a gateway between the university and the community. It is adjacent to the 55-acre Sarah P. Duke Gardens, one of the most popular visitor destinations in North Carolina.

Inaugural Exhibitions - Drawn from the internationally renowned collection of the museum’s namesake, Raymond D. Nasher, and his late wife, Patsy, The Evolution of the Nasher Collection will explore the development of one of the world’s most significant collections of 20th-century sculpture. On view from October 2, 2005, to May 21, 2006, the exhibition will chronicle the collection’s growth, beginning with a 1954 acquisition of a work on paper by Ben Shahn and continuing through the creation of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas in 2003. In addition to sculpture, the show will examine the Nashers’ interest in emerging artists, tribal and ancient American art, textiles, early American modernism and contemporary architecture. Many works in this exhibition will be on public display for the first time.

The Forest: Politics, Poetics and Practice will focus on the forest as a subject in contemporary art, a fitting theme given the museum’s wooded surroundings and the university’s 7,000 acres of forest. On view from October 2, 2005, to January 29, 2006, the exhibition is organized around politics, poetics and practice, three prevalent themes for the artists. Viewers will thus contrast political commentary on forestry issues, fantastic or psychological exploration of the forest and active engagement with forest-based ecological threats. Co-sponsored by Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, The Forest will include work by 30 international artists and will premiere a new work by pioneering media artist Wolfgang Staehle.

Rafael Viñoly - Uruguayan-born architect Rafael Viñoly was commissioned by Duke University in 2000 to design the Nasher at Duke, the first stand-alone art museum he will have completed in North America. He recently completed the new home for Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. Viñoly’s designs have been chosen for expansion projects at the Cleveland Museum of Art; the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.; and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. He is also a new museum for the city of Colchester, England, and the Leicester Theatre Performing Arts Centre in England. Viñoly was the runner-up for the redesign of the World Trade Center site in New York City. His other cultural projects include the design of the Tokyo International Forum and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. Viñoly is a fellow of the American Institute of Architects and a recipient of numerous prizes, including the AIA/New York Chapter medal of honor.