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by Bridget Booher
Kimerly Rorschach had been director of the University of Chicago’s David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art for a decade when she learned in 2003 that Duke University was searching for a director for its first freestanding art museum. She knew Duke as a leading research and liberal-arts university and had a passing familiarity with its art history program, “but their art museum was not on the radar screen,” she says.
At the time, Duke’s art holdings were housed in a former science building on East Campus. DUMA—the Duke University Museum of Art—had been formally established in 1969 under president Douglas Knight, yet despite the best efforts of a core group of supporters through the years, it never garnered the attention or support that other university museums enjoyed. The allotted space was so cramped that only a fraction of the museum’s holdings could be displayed at a time; faculty members and students who wanted to see additional works had to make an appointment to view them in storage. When Rorschach came to campus for interviews, a visit to DUMA wasn’t even included on her official itinerary.
Yet Rorschach was intrigued by what was taking shape at Duke. Raymond Nasher ’43, one of the country’s prominent collectors of modern and contemporary sculpture, had pledged $7.5 million—a gift that would eventually grow to $10 million—toward the construction of a new museum. Eminent architect Rafael Viñoly had been commissioned to design the 65,000-square-foot facility. And leading arts marketing firm Resnicow Schroeder Associates had been hired to oversee the museum’s launch.
“I really didn’t have an impression of Duke being distinguished in the arts, but people were urging me to take a more serious look at it,” recalls Rorschach. “So I did. And even though there wasn’t a track record, I saw a huge opportunity. There was a willingness to make resources available, and a commitment to do something serious. And that was very exciting, because I like building things and making a huge difference. And clearly, a huge difference could be made.”
Convinced Duke was serious about its commitment to build and sustain a major museum, Rorschach accepted the offer to become the Mary D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director of the Nasher Museum in 2004. The next year, the Nasher opened to the public, and almost immediately it became a literal and figurative example of how the arts can transform a campus—and a campus culture. Since 2005, more than 80,000 Duke students have visited the museum, and faculty members from a range of disciplines—including German, medieval history, Italian, women’s studies, classical civilization, art history, and English—have built museum visits into their curricula.
While perhaps the most visible representation of Duke’s commitment to the arts, the Nasher is only one piece of an ambitious institutional imperative to make the arts an essential part of the Duke experience. The same year that Rorschach and her colleagues put the finishing touches on the Nasher’s debut, Duke’s senior leadership released a strategic plan listing six key goals. Among them was an aspiration that many observers felt was long overdue: raising the level of the arts on campus through enhanced programming, expanded curricular opportunities, increased cross-disciplinary research, and improved facilities.
“I think it would be fair to say that Duke’s delivery into the arts area, as compared to what you might call the promise of a liberalarts education and the commitment we saw at most of our peer schools going into this decade, was not as good as it should have been,” says provost Peter Lange. “We had arts programs that were well designed and adequate—I wouldn’t use more than that word—for students who were really committed. But we didn’t set out to attract students who were interested in the arts, and we didn’t do anything to motivate students to be committed or to reach out to those who had no arts background.”
Lange, a political scientist who came to Duke in 1981, says that an institutional commitment to the arts has grown in fits and starts. “It’s been a trajectory,” he says. “I was part of many committees and conversations through the years where we’d say, ‘And then we need to do this or that in the arts.’ But when it came time to allocate money, those [projects] would always fall just below the line” of what would get funding. But with the opening of the Nasher, “we had a breakthrough event. It became our platform for really taking off in the arts. It has changed the way the arts are perceived on campus.”
Following the release of the strategic plan, Lange appointed a Council for the Arts to coordinate and expand arts activities on campus. Chaired by Rorschach, the group tracks and promotes collaborations among professional, academic, and student arts organizations, awards a number of collaborative and visiting-artist grants, and assesses the university’s progress toward goals. Lange also appointed music professor and composer Scott Lindroth as Duke’s first vice provost for the arts.
In the five years since, dance became an undergraduate major and its department added courses in theory and practice, and the department of art and art history added visual studies to its name, in part to reflect expanding scholarship and increased student interest in technology and new media. Duke Performances has become one of the region’s leading presenters of traditional, contemporary, and avant-garde music, dance, and theater, drawing more than 33,000 people to its events during the past academic year. (Those numbers include nearly 10,000 Duke students, who have the benefit of heavily discounted tickets through a subsidy provided by the provost’s office.)
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