Rose B. Simpson is a mixed-media artist, whose work addresses the emotional and existential impacts of living in the 21st century, an apocalyptic time for many analogue cultures. Her figures are often powerful matriarchs or androgynous beings who channel the spirits of high art, hip hop, lowrider culture, and long-lost ancestors. Simpson comes from a tribe famous for the ceramics its women have produced since the 6th century AD. An apprentice to her mother, an acclaimed Native artist, Simpson grew up expressing herself in three-dimensions.

For the Nevada Museum of Art, Simpson has created a new body of work including four abstracted monumental earthen figures of varying sizes that appear to ascend from the gallery floor. Simpson’s work resonates with the awareness that natural resources extracted to create object-based artworks can become powerful tools for social reflection and evolution.

Simpson (b. 1983, Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) has a BFA from the University of New Mexico, an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and an MA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, NM; Pomona College Museum of Art; and Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Portland Art Museum; Princeton University Art Museum; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Simpson lives and works at The Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico.

Major Sponsors

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Six Talents Foundation

Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, Animal Crossings includes works that reveal various facets of the human-animal interface. The artists included in the exhibition reflect on ways that humans love, admire, study, hunt, and kill animals for a multitude of different reasons. 

As the world grapples with a pandemic resulting from a novel animal-human virus transmission, some people have chosen to cope with coronavirus-induced isolation by escaping virtually—for example, through video games. This exhibition’s title is inspired by a popular new video game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released by Nintendo in March 2020, that invites players to interact with cute animal characters in a completely imaginary world. The artworks on view remind us that artists have always sought a deeper understanding of human interactions with animals.

The Nevada Museum of Art has been selected to participate in a five-year exhibition partnership with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) made possible by Art Bridges and the Terra Foundation for American Art. The local kickoff to this multi-year, multi-institutional partnership started with “Vote Nevada Art,” a month-long community-wide campaign (July 11 – August 11, 2019) where the public voted to determine which artworks would hang on the walls of the Museum.

SAAM made eight paintings available as contenders for this race, including works by Childe Hassam, David Hockney, Edward Hopper, George Inness, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Angel Rodríguez-Díaz, and Severin Roesen.

The top three winners were Hassam’s The South Ledges, Appledore, 1913; Ryder’s House, 1933, by Hopper; and O’Keeffe’s Hibiscus with Plumeria, 1939.

These three treasures from the nation’s preeminent collection of American Art will be on view in America’s Art, Nevada’s Choice: Community Selections from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, opening during First Thursday on November 7, 2019, with a press conference and Unveiling Celebration.

To learn more about this five-year collaboration with SAAM and four partner museums across the American West read the press release.

This exhibition complements Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, a new look at this iconic artist through her art, fashion, and style. On view July 20 – October 20, 2019.

“Maybe it seems mad…that I go out like this and live out under the stars and the sky for a few days—but I am like that.”

Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, 1940

The beauty and elegance of Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings were prompted by the intimacy of her experience with the Southwest’s natural forms, especially in relationship to her paintings of the landscape surrounding her home at Ghost Ranch. Further from home, she made repeated camping trips to draw and paint at three extraordinary sites in the Southwest: Glen Canyon, Utah, and places in New Mexico that she referred to as “The White Place” and “The Black Place.” This exhibition presents a selection of fifty objects of camping gear belonging to O’Keeffe—everything from her flashlight to her Stanley thermos. The long drive from the artist’s home at Ghost Ranch made it an impossible day trip; painting and drawing the barren hills required camping. Between 1936 and 1949, the artist returned to these sites many times to create more than a dozen major works inspired by the astonishing landscape, isolated far off the road and away from all civilization.

We may not always realize it, but art helps us change the way we see ourselves. That is why when artist Trevor Paglen imagined launching a reflective, nonfunctional satellite into low Earth orbit, the Nevada Museum of Art understood that his artistic gesture could help to change the way humanity sees our place in the world.

Orbital Reflector is a sculpture constructed of a lightweight polyethylene material that looks like thin plastic. It is housed in a small box-like infrastructure known as a CubeSat that will be launched into space on board a rocket. Once in orbit, about 350 miles from Earth, the CubeSat will open and release the sculpture that will self-inflate like a balloon. Reflective titanium dioxide powder coats the inside of the sculpture, so that sunlight reflects off of it, making it visible from Earth with the naked eye — like a slowly moving artificial star as bright as a star in the Big Dipper.

The Nevada Museum of Art and Trevor Paglen worked with the aerospace engineering firm Global Western to design and manufacture Orbital Reflector. Spaceflight Industries arranged for the launch of Orbital Reflector on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.  As the twenty-first century unfolds and gives rise to unsettled global tensions, Orbital Reflector encourages all of us to look up at the night sky with a renewed sense of wonder, to consider our place in the universe, and to reimagine how we live together on this planet.

To learn more about the project, visit orbitalreflector.com.

#OrbitalReflector

Trevor Paglen: Orbital Reflector, co-produced and presented by the Nevada Museum of Art. The archive materials generated from the Orbital Reflector project will become part of the archive collections of the Museum’s Center for Art + Environment. Trevor Paglen: Orbital Reflector, co-produced and presented by the Nevada Museum of Art, will cost $1.3 million over the project’s three-year span.

Title Sponsor

Blockchains, LLC

Premier Sponsors

I. Heidi Loeb Hegerich

Switch

Louise A. Tarble Foundation

Lead Sponsors

Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation

The Jacquie Foundation

Piper Stremmel and Chris Reilly

Major Sponsors

Barrick Gold

Charles and Margaret Burback Foundation

The Fisher Brothers

Nion McEvoy

RBC Wealth Management and City National Bank

Sponsors

Sandy and Steven Hardie

Supporting Sponsors

Karyn and Lance Tendler

Additional Support

Henry Moore Foundation (UK)

Exclusive sponsorship for the Orbital Reflector installation and lead sponsorship for the Museum’s STEAM education programs is provided by Switch.

Additional support provided by the 557 backers of this project’s Kickstarter campaign.

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson investigate relationships between nature and culture, human and non-human animals, and domesticity and what is often referred to as “wild nature.” Working from both Reykjavik and London, they create installations that combine sculpture, text, photography, and video. Their most well-known exhibition, Nanoq: Flat Out and Bluesome (2001 – 2006), was a survey of all the taxidermied polar bears in the United Kingdom.

While researching the history of each bear, they identified the date, place and people associated with the animal’s death. They also created a photographic archive of each specimen and its taxidermic context—whether in storage, on display, or undergoing restoration.

Although Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson have worked with a number of other species, including birds and fishes, polar bears remain a subject of great interest to them. Since 2015 they have been artists-in-residence at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska in its Polar Labs program. Their work is on the denning habits and structures of the Alaskan bears, and how we must minimize disturbance of their dens by oil companies on the North Slope.

The materials for this exhibition are drawn from the Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections.

Painter and Guggenheim Fellow Judith Belzer visited the recently expanded Panama Canal Zone in 2015. Spending time both in Panama City and aboard a tugboat in the canal, her paintings deal with what she calls a “landscape of the Anthropocene” at both the small scale of intimate details and the grand scale of construction and the world’s largest ships.

Randolph Sims helped American Land Artist Michael Heizer use land moving equipment for the first time on Nevada’s Coyote Dry Lake in 1968.  Sims became an early Earthworks artist in his own right when Heizer encouraged him to use a backhoe on the playa “on the spur of the moment.” This archive exhibition includes drawings of Sims’ earthworks that were both proposed and fully-realized between 1968-1991.

Kristin Posehn is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer who works with fragments of architecture. Her 2008 public artwork, Reclamation, was based on the facade of a school in the ghost town of Metropolis in remote northeastern Nevada. Metropolis was founded in 1910 as the state’s first master planned community, but by 1925 it was abandoned due to insufficient water rights. The only structure still standing is the brick-and- stone arch that was the school’s entrance. Posehn reconstructed the arch in wood at a 1:1 scale in Almere, the Netherlands, which she then clad in high-resolution color photographs of the original facade. The result was to dis-locate/re-locate the structure into a living context on the last undeveloped plot in the center of Almere. The elaborate but ephemeral work was dismantled and the surviving materials are now housed in the Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections.

Posehn’s 2015 project A House Made of Air and Distance and Echoes was an architectural sculpture built by the artist and assistants on an abandoned airfield outside Vacaville, California. The work references the “Wedding Cake House,” a well-known example of “carpenter gothic” located in Kennebunkport, Maine. From this point of reference, Posehn “wiped away the house and manipulated its architectural frosting via digital process and hours of construction.” After completion of the piece in 2015, she photographed it, often in dense fog.

Posehn–who is a sculptor, writer, and photographer–repositions architecture in the physical world so we can consider the relationships between built and natural environments, between art and architecture, between the real and the fictional. Posehn’s archive materials are part of the Center for Art + Environment’s investigation into the relationships among built and natural and virtual environments.

For the first time ever, explore the remarkable story of how the legendary Nevada gathering known as Burning Man evolved through collaborative ritual from humble countercultural roots on San Francisco’s Baker Beach into the world-famous desert convergence it is today. Never-before-seen photographs, artifacts, journals, sketches, and notebooks reveal how this temporary experimental desert city came to be—and how it continues to evolve.

This exhibition is organized by the Nevada Museum of Art.

Many of the items included are drawn from the archive collections of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

#CityofDustArchive

Download the Press Release.

Lead Gift

Bently Foundation

Major Gift

Reno-Sparks Convention & Visitors Authority

Supporting Gifts

Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller; Eleanor and Robert Preger; The Private Bank by Nevada State Bank; Volunteers in Art of the Nevada Museum of Art

Additional Gifts

City of Reno; Jan and David Hardie

Media Gifts

KUNR Reno Public Radio; Reno News & Review

City of Dust will travel to the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum March 30, 2018 – September 16, 2018 as part of their exhibition No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man.