Virtual / Past Exhibits A-Z
This page contains on-line content from past exhibits held in various library galleries at Duke University. Not all past exhibits have an on-line presence, so not all exhibits will be present here, but this page will attempt to list all temporary exhibits in the libraries beginning in Fall of 2008.
In order to allow ease of use this page has been designed to allow the user to list the exhibits by date of exhibition, title of exhibition, place of exhibition, or artist (where appropriate). Click a column heading and it will sort alphabetically or by date. If there is a more elaborate web page for a specific exhibit, you will be able to click the title of the exhibit to explore any available on-line content.
| Exhibit | Artist | Display Dates | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
Above the Rim
|
Various |
online |
online |
Alex Harris: Photographs, 1998-2000. Images from the Duke University Special Collections Library
|
Harris, Alex |
September 2003 |
|
America Votes: Presidential Campaign Memorabilia from the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
|
Various |
August 2000 |
online |
Bassett Affair
|
Bassett, John Spencer |
online |
online |
Blue Devil Gallery
|
Various |
online |
online |
Cameron at sixty
|
Various |
online |
online |
Campus Protest
|
Various |
online |
online |
The Chronicle
|
Various |
online |
online |
Carl Mydans: Photographs, 1935-1958
|
Mydans, Carl |
3 April 2006 |
|
Close To Home: Photographs by Margaret Sartor
|
Sartor, Margaret |
7 August 2006 |
|
Comic Book Cultures
|
Various |
3 March 2005 |
|
Danny Wilcox Frazier - Driftless: Photographs from Iowa
|
Frazier, Danny Wilcox |
5 November 2007 |
|
Day of the Dead at Duke University Libraries
|
Students |
30 October 2007 |
|
Durham Rose Bowl, 1942
|
Various |
online |
online |
Early Comic Strips 1898-1916
|
Various |
14 January 2005 |
|
Faculty Houses
|
Various |
online |
online |
Guido Mazzoni Pamphlet Collection Exhibit: A Renaissance at Duke
|
Various |
December 1996 |
online |
Highlights of Duke presidencies
|
Various |
online |
online |
James Karales: Photographs 1956-1969
|
Karales, James |
11 April 2005 |
|
Joe McCarthy & Hornell Hart
|
Various |
online |
online |
Larry Schwarm: On Fire
|
Schwarm, Larry |
October 2003 |
|
Maxwell Did It!: Photographing the Atlantic City Boardwalk, 1920s-1950s
|
R.C. Maxwell Company |
11 January 2006 |
|
Mel Rosenthal: Photographs from In the South Bronx of America
|
Rosenthal, Mel |
2 August 2004 |
|
Near the Cross: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta
|
Rankin, Tom |
14 January 2008 |
|
Neither Model Nor Muse: Women and Artistic Expression
|
Various |
22 October 2007 |
|
Night Vision: Photographs of William Gedney and Lynn Saville
|
Gedney, William |
8 August 2005 |
|
Olive Pierce: Forty Years of Photographs (1963-2003)
|
Pierce, Olive |
4 August 2008 |
|
Pivotal Books/Personal Reflections
|
Various |
11 August 2008 |
|
Portraits in the Gothic Reading of Perkins Library
|
Various |
1985 |
Gothic Reading Room |
7 Elections that Changed U.S. History
|
Various |
11 October 2008 |
|
Skirts, Bloomers, and Shorts
|
Various |
online |
online |
Steven Smith: Photographs of the Suburban West
|
Smith, Steven |
7 November 2005 |
|
Still Going On: An Exhibit Celebrating the life and times of William Grant Still
|
Still, William Grant |
September 1995 |
online |
Then & Now - Eight South African Photographers
|
Various |
31 March 2008 |
|
Third Person, First Person: Slave Voices from the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library
|
Various |
October 1995 |
online |
Women at Duke
|
Various |
online |
online |
Duke basketball history
Alex Harris juxtaposes two groups of color images - a series of Havana views seen through the windshields of aging American automobiles and a series of American landscapes seen in the context of a boy's electronic game - to explore the potential of the photographer's eye and the camera's frame both to limit and to expand our view of the world.
Winners share the limelight with the defeated in this exhibit of U.S. presidential campaign memorabilia drawn primarily from the holdings of the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library. The exhibit illustrates the nation's presidential elections in letters, sheet music, leaflets, buttons, bumper stickers, and even t-shirts.
In the autumn of 1903, a controversy that became known as the "Bassett Affair" erupted on the Trinity College campus. The resolution of the dispute, which lasted for six weeks, was a milestone for academic freedom in U.S. higher education.
A Pictorial History of Duke's Mascot
Celebrating Duke's Indoor Stadium
The 1969 takeover of the Allen Building, Duke University's administrative center, came at a time of high tension on college campuses across the nation.
100 years of a student newspaper
A retrospective of Carl Mydans' early black and white photography for the Farm Security Administration and for Life magazine.
Margaret Sartor has been documenting her family and her hometown in northern Louisiana for close to a quarter century. This exhibit of evocative black and white prints includes selected portraits and landscapes made between 1986 and 2004.
Comic books have been an integral part of American culture since the 1930s. They have both influenced our collective imagination and echoed the concerns of the eras in which they were published. This exhibit explores the resonance of comic books in 20th century American culture from the 1930s to the present. The comic books in this exhibit are from Duke University's Edwin and Terry Murray Collection of Pulp Culture and, where indicated, the Daniel Breen Collection of American Comic Books, Rare Book Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Danny Wilcox Frazier’s dramatic black-and-white photographs portray a changing Midwest of vanishing towns and transformed landscapes. As rural economies fail, people and resources are migrating to the coasts and cities, as though the heart of America were being emptied. Frazier’s arresting photographs take us into Iowa’s abandoned places and illuminate the lives of those people who stay behind and continue to live there: young people at leisure, fishermen on the Mississippi, veterans on Memorial Day, Amish women playing cards, as well as more recent arrivals, Lubavitcher Hasidic Jews at prayer and Latinos at work in the fields. Frazier's camera finds these newcomers while it also captures activities that seemingly have gone on forever: harvesting and hunting, celebrating and socializing, praying and surviving.
In the Fall Semester 2007 the Archive for Human Rights sponsored a celebration of Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead. The Latin American tradition of Dia de Los Muertos is an exercise in memory and memorilization. Not only family photos but also favorite foods, toys, personal and family objects, and other items closely associated with the deceased are juxtaposed on an ofrenda or altar, offering a number of different avenues of memory (documentary, sensual, communal) through which the living and the dead, the past and the present, can reunite.
The only Rose Bowl not played in Pasadena
This exhibit of early "funnies" is drawn from the volumes of the recently acquired American Newspaper Repository (ANR) which contains over 152 titles dating from 1852 through 2004. Long runs of The World and The Chicago Tribune provided material for the exhibit. At the turn of the nineteenth century, two newspaper titans, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, were engaged in a bitter rivalry for supremacy in the New York market. The introduction of the color printing press and the modern "comic strip" was instrumental in their competition to circulate the most newspapers.
Photos of faculty houses
Originally a private library belonging to a Florentine professor of literature and Senator of Italy, the Guido Mazzoni Pamphlet Collection is a rich ensemble of more than 49,000 pamphlets, small volumes, librettos, newspapers, periodicals, and clippings spanning four centuries of Italian and European history. This on-line exhibit features selected items relating to literature, music, popular culture, the two World Wars, early Fascism, and more.
A history of Duke by administrations
The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library acquired the James Karales Collection in 2004. The prints in this show were culled from five distinct bodies of work: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March; the Vietnam War; the Lower East Side of New York City; Rendville, Ohio; and logging in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to the exhibition quality prints, the collection contains negatives, slides, contact sheets and 5x7 and 8x10 proof prints.
Academic freedom in the 1950s
This exhibition presents work by Larry Schwarm, winner of the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in Photography for his series of color images capturing the dramatic prairie fires that sweep across the Flint Hills of Kansas each spring. A professor of art at Emporia State University, Schwarm has spent the past twelve years photographing the burning of the tallgrass prairie in his native state.
Black and white photographs in this exhibit were selected from thousands of images in the R.C. Maxwell Company Collection, part of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History. The R. C. Maxwell Company produced electric "spectacular" signs and billboards and used the photographs to document construction and placement of those advertising signs on the boardwalk.
Against backdrops of rubble, abandoned buildings, and destroyed city blocks, these portrait photographs depict the everyday lives of residents as they struggle to survive "planned shrinkage," an urban planning strategy utilized from the 1960s-1980s to raze residential buildings in older urban areas and replace them with industrial parks.
An exhibition of photographs by Tom Rankin from his long-standing work on the sacred traditions and landscapes of the Mississippi Delta.
Two exhibits were mounted as part of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture’s third biennial symposium: Stretching the Canvas: Women Exploring the Arts and The Feminist Art Movement, 1970s-1980s.
This singular show offers 48 photographs made between sunset and sunrise by nocturnal photographers Bill Gedney and Lynn Saville. These beautiful, edgy black and white prints reveal the evocative power of moonlight, reflected light, and deep shadow to alter familiar landscapes and inspire the imagination.
A Maine resident and lifelong political activist, Olive Pierce's photographs reflect the spirit of community. This retrospective of black and white gelatin silver prints includes images that document life in Cambridge, Massachusetts as well as Maine fishing communities. Images of Iraqi citizens under US economic sanctions in 1999 and photographs of Maine citizens demonstrating for and against the war in 2003, make the connection between the local and global community.
Pivotal Books/Personal Reflections is an exhibit that explores the personal nature of books and the relationships that exist between reader and written word. There is a chemistry that can only exist in the private moment of reading; the images are fully formed within the readers mind and the exchange between the writer and reader is intimate and isolated and at times, personal. It doesn't matter whether the book is scholarly or children's literature; whether the reader is a professor or a mechanic; this potential relationship can exist for any person, regardless of race, social class, economic class, religion, mental ability or sexual preference; the only thing that matters is the desire for this relationship, and the ability to read (or be read to).
The Gothic Reading Room of Perkins Library serves as a gallery of prominent figures in Duke University’s history. Portraits of Washington Duke, James Buchanan Duke, and Benjamin Newton Duke are surrounded by those of trustees of The Duke Endowment, Duke’s previous presidents, and other notable figures in the history of the university.
Vote to change history! "7 Elections that Changed U.S. History" is an exhibit that explores elections of the past and is on display until December in the Perkins Gallery of Duke University Libraries. You can also revert back in time, look at the issues, and vote on the elections of the past--and find out who we would elect today--if we had it to do all over again!
An Anniversary Celebration of Women's Athletics at Duke
In these black-and-white, landscape photographs, Steven Smith depicts the continuous expansion of suburban development into the deserts and up the mountain sides of California, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Smith won the Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book in Photography award for this stellar body of work.
A multimedia celebration of the centenary of the birth of William Grant Still, known as the dean of African-American composers. This exhibit contains a timeline of the cultural context in which Still lived and worked as well as a narrative of his life that includes photos, letters, music scores, and sound clips of his compositions.
An exhibition of 160 photographs mounted in 5 venues at Duke University. South African photographer Paul Weinberg conceived and curated Then & Now which is comprised of black and white and color photographs from 8 South African documentary photographers. Twenty photographs were selected from each photographer, 10 made under apartheid and 10 photographs made after the historic democratic elections of 1994.
This exhibit probes the life experiences of American slaves from the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century, and examines the enterprise of recovering and preserving African American history of the period. The exhibit showcases the kinds of rare materials that under scrutiny reveal the ambitions, motivations, and struggles of people often presumed mute.
A brief narrative and a guide to resources in the Duke University Archives.
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