The Arts The arts are taking center stage at Duke. Through a campus-wide initiative, we aim to build our reputation as a hub of artistic expression and make the arts a signature part of the Duke experience. A vibrant arts scene has blossomed at Duke. From major exhibitions at the Nasher Museum of Art to newly commissioned works by Duke Performances, the university offers more opportunities than ever to encounter the arts in every form. Yet our talented students still demand more. Admission applications accompanied by arts-related portfolios from visual works to recital recordings have doubled in the past seven years. The ever-growing number of student dance groups has challenged us to find more rehearsal space. Painting and media studios are booked solid throughout the year. And Duke s symphony orchestra regularly attracts more than a hundred student members most of whom aren t even music majors. During the Duke Forward campaign, we will seek investments in arts-related programs and people. In addition to upcoming renovations of Duke s most prominent performance spaces, donor support will allow us to add mentors, invest in programming, and grow a vital arts ecosystem that encourages creative expression among our students and enriches the entire Durham community. Partnering for the future
Out of the Gallery, Into the Classroom When the exhibit Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art: Form, Balance, Joy, came to the Nasher in the 2012 spring semester featuring 34 Calders and pieces by seven contemporary artists two of the featured artists came with it. Noted contemporary artists Kristi Lippire and Jason Middlebrook spent a week on campus as visiting artists-in-residence. In addition to giving a public lecture about Calder s influence on their work, they visited several Duke classes, including Gary Ybarra s Fundamentals of Electrical and Computer Engineering course. Good engineering can also be aesthetically pleasing, says Ybarra, adding that he hoped the experience helped his students see the connection between their field and the arts. Duke s Visiting Artist-in-Residence Program gives the university the opportunity to showcase new works of cultural importance and offers Duke students a number of exciting chances like these to connect and collaborate with prominent working artists. Innovative jazz trio The Bad Plus recorded new music written by Duke student composers while on campus. Celebrated Haitian-American artist Edouard Duval-Carrié teamed with visual art students in Duke s innovative Humanities Labs to create a new commission Haiti: History Embedded in Amber, a piece on permanent display in Duke s Smith Warehouse. Visiting artists have also brought insight and inspiration to departments beyond the fine and performing arts from the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, which hosted performance artist Amy Caron and her installation piece on mirror neurons, to the Sanford School of Public Policy, which sponsored a residency by political cartoonist Kevin KAL Kallaugher to enrich conversations about the presidential election. In 2004, students represented less than 14 percent of Duke Performance attendees. In 2011, students made up a third and sometimes more than half of the audience.
Creating a Cultural Hub The arts bring people together. From shared moments in a quiet gallery to the collective thrill of great theater, Duke creates opportunities for students and the surrounding community to experience the arts in all forms. With the university s help, downtown Durham has been revitalized and is home to a nationally recognized performing arts center, the internationally acclaimed Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and numerous venues for music and art. Since 2005, the Nasher Museum of Art has logged more than 80,000 visits from Duke students who are not only enjoying exhibits, but also attending classes and studying artwork not on public display. Duke Performances sells over 9,000 discounted tickets to students each year, giving them the chance to see celebrated artists like the Branford Marsalis Quartet and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Duke s robust Visiting Artist-in-Residence Program brings prominent practicing artists to campus for up to a semester, providing students and community members with a chance to connect and work with them. And planned renovations to Page and Baldwin Auditoriums, from acoustic improvements to updated seating and amenities, will make Duke s most visible performance spaces more appealing to artists and audience members alike. Sustaining our momentum will take both expendable and endowed support for arts programming. Duke Performances has one of the smallest staffs among peer institutions, for example, and there are few dedicated sources of funding for arts programming at Duke even as we have expanded our offerings. Philanthropic support of arts events during the Duke Forward campaign will allow us to continue to attract the kinds of incredible performers and exhibitions that put Durham on the arts map and will ensure that we can keep those experiences affordable and accessible to our students. Your expendable gift of $100,000 can sustain the Arts Angel Fund for one year, enabling students to purchase greatly discounted tickets to Duke Performances. Your endowment gift of $100,000 or more can create a named Acquisitions Fund or Exhibitions and Programming Fund at the Nasher Museum of Art. Your gift of $1 million or more can endow a visiting artist residency, bringing exciting and innovative artists to inspire our students and drive Duke s reputation in the arts world.
Education and the Arts Today s students don t see the arts as a bonus. They see it as an essential part of the student experience, and they actively seek out an educational environment where the arts are highly valued and widely supported. Duke offers many opportunities to deliver that kind of experience. We now provide a professional-level education for students who will pursue careers in the arts, as well as a chance for every student to have a hands-on arts experience. A new dance major was approved in 2006 to serve students who want to receive excellent dance training as part of a broader liberal arts education instead of attending a conservatory. More than 200 students are majoring or minoring in art, art history, and visual studies. And in 2011, Duke ventured into exciting new territory with the launch of its first master of fine arts degree, the MFA in Experimental & Documentary Arts. This interdisciplinary program leverages the strengths of not only Duke s renowned Center for Documentary Studies, but also our expertise in film, video, and computational arts. Beyond the classroom, Duke offers many pathways for students to build the arts into their time at the university. Our arts-related DukeEngage experiences, for example, give students regardless of major or level of artistic expertise ways to explore the arts in the context of larger societal issues. More than 70 student organizations, from musical ensembles to a comedy troupe, provide outlets for students to share their creativity on stage or in a gallery. Although we have dramatically expanded our offerings in recent years including the addition of a Student Arts Warehouse that added rehearsal and studio space Duke is still catching up to other universities with more established arts programs and reputations. By investing in Duke s arts educational programming during the campaign, donors help ensure that we can provide committed young artists with the tools to pursue their passions and all students with the foundation to fuel a lifelong interest in the arts. Your gift of $100,000 or more can endow an Arts Education Fund to support arts programs and to stage student productions and exhibits. Your gift of $250,000 or more can endow a scholarship for undergraduates pursuing a course of study in the arts, or a fellowship for graduate students.
Dancing Their Way to China How do twelve Duke dancers with wildly different styles from ballet to Bollywood end up performing in front of 60,000 spectators in a Chinese stadium? The story begins with DukeEngage, our signature service-learning program, and ends at the 2011 opening ceremonies for a major college athletics event. In 2010, Hsiao-Mei Ku, a professor of the practice of music and the Ciompi Quartet s violinist, created an arts-focused DukeEngage program to bring the vitality of Duke s creative community to Chinese students. DukeEngage in Zhuhai participants introduced arts into the curriculum at a local middle school by teaching classes in dance, photography, and public speaking. At the end of the program, Duke students put on a show for the school that combined traditional Chinese dance, break dancing, and modern dance. The mixture of styles was so unusual that their performance was covered by the Chinese media, and this exposure led to an invitation to perform at the 2011 Summer Universiade, an event comparable to the Olympic Games for college athletes. Duke is very supportive of the arts and of finding ways to cultivate arts experiences and resources for students, says team member Kartik Pawar, a biomedical engineering major from South Brunswick, New Jersey. I never thought that break dancing would take me to China, and I m grateful to Duke for giving me both a great engineering education and this amazing experience as a dancer. Connecting Students and Alumni Through the Arts The annual Duke Arts Festival gives all students the opportunity to showcase their talent from arts majors to biology students who have never taken an arts course. During this two-week event, more than 200 student artists display paintings, sculptures, and drawings in the Bryan Center, and more than 30 student groups perform in public spaces, including the plaza, the library, and even on a campus bus. The festival culminates with the opportunity for students to connect with alumni working in arts careers during the Duke Entertainment, Media, and Arts Network Weekend. In recent years, small group workshops and panel discussions have featured songwriter and Warner Brothers executive Kara DioGuardi 93, Entertainment Weekly writer David Karger 95, and producer/ director Jennifer Grausman 96, to name a few. These experiences allow alumni to share how they have translated their passion for the arts into a rewarding career. It s a really great opportunity to network and build connections with alumni you might not normally meet, says Betsy Klein, a cultural anthropology major and visual studies minor. It also really reinforces Duke s commitment to the arts. Admission applications accompanied by arts-related portfolios from visual works to recital recordings have doubled in the past seven years.
Distinguished Arts Faculty Great artists need great mentors. Duke s faculty includes internationally exhibited painters; a Grammy-winning composer; musicians with degrees from Julliard, Yale School of Music, and the Royal Conservatory of Music; professional dancers and choreographers who have performed with the Joffrey Ballet and Bill T. Jones; and an award-winning playwright. These core arts faculty not only teach in the classroom; they also work with students in rehearsals, performances, and workshops, and raise Duke s profile and reputation through the pursuit of their own creative endeavors. But student demand to work with these inspiring professors exceeds the available opportunities to do so. Because of our limited number of arts faculty, popular courses such as drawing and acting often over-enroll, making it difficult for majors to meet their requirements and for non-majors to incorporate an arts experience into their Duke education. At the same time, we also seek to add research faculty who can help build bridges between departments and disciplines, How will you move duke forward? pushing the limits of traditional genres and forms, and exploring the fascinating territory where the lines blur. Through a program called WIRED!, for example, art historians, architects, engineers, computer scientists, and visual artists work together recreating historic buildings and archaeological sites using hand drawings, computer animations, and virtual reality renderings. And through connections nurtured by the Divinity School, scholars and artists are exploring the rich question of what the arts can bring to the experience of faith and vice versa. Endowed support for arts faculty is a campaign priority and will provide role models to guide our students to pursue their creative passions, regardless of their major. Your gift of $2.5 million can endow a named professorship in the arts, enhancing our ability to recruit and retain the most talented faculty to teach our students. Creating the Future of Art at Duke Instead of finding a dance partner, a student in Tommy DeFrantz s workshop Performance and Technology is creating one. She s using video technology to capture her shadow and create a performance by dancing with different versions of it. The course, which challenges students to integrate technology into performance projects, has attracted a broad array of students, including engineering, computer science, and dance majors. Duke s efforts to create a hotbed of innovative activity in the arts is drawing faculty like DeFrantz, a choreographer, performer, and author who joined Duke in 2011. Internationally known for his scholarly work in performance studies, he is now exploring connections between performance and technology. The chance to collaborate with students and faculty from different fields attracted him to Duke. The opportunity here is delicious, says DeFrantz. Another recent hire who is helping put Duke at the forefront of exploring new forms of art is Bill Seaman, a professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies whose work focuses on artificial intelligence. The Visual Studies Initiative at Duke brings artists, theorists, scientists, and people from the humanities together, says Seaman, who came to Duke in 2008 from the Rhode Island School of Design. Because of that, Duke is probably one of the most interesting places I could be. He is currently working with music professor John Supko on a new work that explores sound and poetry in a novel way, and with computer programmer and architect Todd Berreth on a piece that employs virtual reality elements using the Duke Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE). Explore dukeforward.duke.edu