Exhibits: Now Showing

The Bathers: Photographs by Jennette Williams

Jennette Williams, a fine arts photography instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, has been selected to receive the fourth Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for her stunning platinum prints and color photographs of women at European and Turkish bath houses.  Duke’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library (RBMSCL) acquired a selection of the exhibit photographs through the generosity of the Honickman Foundation established by Lynne Honickman. 

Start: 8 September 2009  |  End: 13 December 2009 |  Special Collections Gallery

Student Exhibits

There are a variety of spaces available for students to have exhibitions in the library. 

The DUU Visual Arts Committee has more information on the Old Perk Gallery and the Technology Alcove, or click here to learn about the student wall in Perkins and see the calendar of upcoming exhibits.

What is Jazz?: Selections from the Jazz Archive at Duke University

The Jazz Archive at Duke has set out to collect and explore jazz's material resonances in order to grapple with the history and impact this cultural phenomenon has had over the past century.  In this exhibit, photographs, posters, analytic prose, music manuscripts, and recorded audio, join with playing cards, album covers, and literary fiction to demonstrate a part of the process of documenting jazz's social and cultural history.  By exploring some of the traces of jazz's past, and implicitly challenging viewers to consider the possibilities of jazz's future, this exhibit provides one response to the ever-present question, "What is jazz?"

Start: October 2009 | End: January 2010 | Rare Book Room Cases

Insects of the Duke Campus

These photographs are part of a student project in the Fall 2008 Entomology course (Biology 222L). Using stereo microscopes equipped with digital cameras, the students produced extended focal image macrophotographs of insects by using software to combine a series of photos taken at different focal planes.

Start: 7 October 2009  |  End: 18 November 2009 |  Student Wall, Perkins Library

Beyond Beauty: Photographs from the Duke University Special Collections Library

 An exhibit at the Nasher Art Museum features more than 80 original photographs, films, personal artifacts and rare published portfolios, many of which will be on view for the first time. The exhibition includes photographic material from the 1860s to the present, selected from Duke's Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library. The exhibition was organized by Duke's Special Collections Library and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and will be on view at the Nasher Museum from July 2 through October 18, 2009.

Start: July 2009 | End: October 18 2009 | Nasher Art Museum