The Morehead Hill Neighborhood Association is hosting a Night at the Nasher Museum at Duke University Thursday, May 14. We'll meet across the street from the Nasher in the Rubenstein Arts Center's Ruby Lounge for snacks and social hour at 5pm, then move over to the Nasher Museum for a 6pm guided tour of two exhibits: Silvia Heyden's Weaving Notes and Nature and Dyani White Hawk's Listen.

Space is limited for this event, so please rsvp to: moreheadhill@gmail.com with your name, e-mail and phone number, and the number of people in your party. You will receive a confirmation e-mail. See you on May 14th!

A bit more about the artists/exhibits:

Silvia Heyden: Weaving Notes & Nature brings Heyden's work back to Duke, 54 years after her first solo exhibition at the Duke University Museum of Art.  Silvia Heyden (1927–2015) saw weaving as a form of music. Trained first as a violinist, she brought a deep sense of rhythm, movement, and improvisation to the loom, creating more than 800 tapestries over her lifetime. For Heyden, thread and color were not static materials. They were alive, capable of expressing emotion, sound, and the natural world.

Born in Switzerland, Heyden studied in the Bauhaus tradition, a Modernist movement that emphasized bold color, strong design, and the unity of art and craft. While grounded in this training, she quickly developed her own distinctive style. Rather than following strict patterns, she embraced experimentation and spontaneity, allowing her weavings to respond intuitively to her surroundings.

After moving to Durham, North Carolina in 1966, Heyden found new inspiration in the landscapes of the American Southeast. Rivers, forests, and beaches—especially the nearby Eno River—became central to her work. She wove tapestries that swell, open, and shift, intentionally revealing the underlying structure of the loom. These moments expose the "warp," the grid beneath the surface, and give her textiles a sense of movement and breath.

LISTEN, an eight-channel video installation, aims to chip away at one of the biggest challenges facing Native people, the tremendous lack of knowledge among the American public regarding Native people, history, and our contem­porary tribal nations. Because the full history of the colonization of this land is not taught in our public education systems, most Americans are largely unaware of the way this history has and continues to impact contemporary realities of Native people.

In each monitor, footage of land and life is layered with footage of a woman speaking her Indigenous language, filmed on tribal homelands. Some speak about their experiences in boarding school when they were forced to abandon speaking their languages. Others speak of their rela­tionship to the land, share prayers, songs, tribal and personal stories, and practice the language with one another. The aim is not to provide translation but to offer an opportunity for Native people to be honored and represented in their homelands, and for non-Native audiences to be in­troduced to, and familiarized with, the cadence and sounds of a small sampling of the Indigenous languages of this land.

LISTEN provides a window into the immense division between the greater American public and our Native Nations, as well as the tremendous omissions of truth in how our national history is taught.

Dyani White Hawk
November 2023; updated 2025