Long before humans walked the Earth, Nevada was submerged beneath the waters of an ancient sea. Explore this underwater realm and meet the giant sea creatures—also known as ichthyosaurs—that called it home. These marine reptiles lived 250 million years ago and this exhibition, Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada, debuts many of Nevada’s spectacular, but never-before-seen fossils.

Dive into Nevada’s prehistoric past through the display of original fossils, including a 33-foot specimen. Hear stories of Nevada’s early and present-day paleontologists and fossil hunters, including John C. Merriam, Annie Alexander, Charles Camp, and Martin Sander. And learn how Nevada’s extinct underwater animals connect us to a larger global community of scientific discovery.

Through a unique blend of paleontology, art, history, and design, this groundbreaking exhibition explores the rise and fall of these ancient sea creatures, revealing how an understanding of the prehistoric past and evolutionary change over time may in fact help us to anticipate our own future.

Highlights of the exhibition include: recently discovered fossils from the newest ichthyosaur species, Cymbospondylus youngorum, excavated in the Augusta Mountains of Nevada; fossils, photographs and field journal pages from the 1905 Saurian expedition to Nevada’s Humboldt Range; fossils excavated from the quarry known today as Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Historic Park; the story of fossil hunter Mary Anning, the first woman to discover an ichthyosaur fossil in Great Britain in 1811; striking examples of paleoart, revealing how artists and scientists have long worked together to imagine the world’s prehistoric marine creatures; and one of the nation’s largest collections of vintage prehistoric animal toys amassed by Jack Arata after visiting the ichthyosaur fossils in Berlin, Nevada as a young boy in the 1950s.

Accompanying the exhibition is a new children’s book celebrating women in science by honoring the achievements of Annie Alexander. Annie Alexander’s Amazing Adventure: An American Fossil Expedition in Nevada is written by Ann M. Wolfe with illustrations by Nevada-based artist Kate O’Hara. Through brilliant and colorful illustrations, readers learn about the plants and animals of the desert environment, ichthyosaur fossil discoveries and excavation, and extinction and climate science.

Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada is a 9,000-square-foot exhibition co-curated by Ann M. Wolfe, the Museum’s Andrea and John C. Deane Family Chief Curator, along with lead paleontologist Dr. Martin Sander, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at University of Bonn, Germany. The exhibition is designed by Nik Hafermaas based in Berlin, Germany.

Lead Sponsors
Anonymous
Margaret and Charles Burback
Barbara and Tad Danz
Reno Orthopedic Center
Elizabeth and Henry Thumann

Major Sponsors
Linda and Alvaro Pascotto

Sponsors
Carole Anderson
Betsy Burgess and Tim Bailey
John Cunha
Estelle J. Kelsey Foundation
Debra Marko and Bill Franklin
Nevada Arts Council | National Endowment for The Arts

Supporting Sponsor
Gail and Robert Aldrich
Chica Charitable Trust

Additional Support
Brian Kendig

Old Haunts, Lower Reaches is an exhibition of new work by Nick Larsen (b. 1982) that excavates history, possibility, identity, and place. Comprised of layered collage pieces, textile-based architectural models, and image projection, Larsen explores what is present and visible in the desert landscape and, perhaps more importantly, what isn’t.

Influenced heavily by the artist’s experience working for an archaeological firm focused on the Great Basin region, research for Old Haunts, Lower Reaches began when Larsen discovered a fading layer in the history of the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada. Rhyolite (located thirty miles from Death Valley National Park) served, at one point, as the proposed site for a planned queer community, Stonewall Park, envisioned by two men from Reno in the 1980s. Contextualized by the history of Rhyolite, Stonewall Park, and his own life, Larsen speculates pasts, presents, and futures for this desert locale.

In the words of the artist, “The desert is an environment defined by what it lacks, its bleakness an invitation to project possibilities for both what could have been and what might be on what is often perceived as empty.” Repurposing materials to create his layered collages and sculptures, Larsen’s speculative practice also serves as a kind of “making do,” using what is at hand to give form to an invisible history or an unattainable future.

Nick Larsen was raised in Northern Nevada and currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Water plays a key role in the global economy, informing agricultural, commercial, residential, and industrial development. It also sparks conflict, protest, political debate, activism, and conservation. Our collective dependence on water—and acknowledgment of its dwindling supply—demands innovation, new technologies, and creative solutions. Water by Design, drawn primarily from the permanent collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, explores the ultimate design challenge: sustaining humanity while preserving a limited natural resource.

This exhibition examines water through the lens of artists who have documented the use, exploitation, and preservation of this precious commodity. Artists include Edward Burtynsky, Pilar Cereceda, Robert Dawson, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Ann Johnston, Maya Lin, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Richard Misrach, Mary Miss, Mark O’Connell, Cara Romero, Juane Quick-To-See-Smith, Oscar Tuazon, Takako Yamaguchi, and many others. Their diverse perspectives offer insight into how artists, designers, Indigenous knowledge keepers, engineers and scientists have worked across disciplines to power innovation, question existing systems, and seek visionary solutions to help navigate the future.

This exhibition is organized in conjunction with the 2023 NV STEAM Conference, a statewide education conference focused on exploring ideas and strategies that incorporate Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math education into innovative classroom practices that foster student creativity and innovation. The NV STEAM Conference is presented in partnership with the Desert Research Institute. Learn more or register at nvsteam.org

Lead Sponsor

Tesla

Major Sponsor

Waste Management

Additional Support

Truckee Meadows Water Authority

Featuring more than thirty works, this exhibition honors the career of artist Ben Aleck, a lifelong educator and enrolled member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe (Kooyooe Tukadu/cui-ui fish eaters.) Aleck was born in Reno in 1949 and raised on the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony (RSIC). A graduate of Wooster High School, he attended the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland, California, where he witnessed the politics and protest of the Vietnam War era and the countercultural movement of the late 1960s. His past involvement with the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz have also shaped his artistic practice. Aleck’s paintings, illustrations, and prints give visual form to Indigenous stories about the stars, coyote, plants, the formation of Great Basin lands, and the origins of its people.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a book with an essay by Melissa Melero-Moose.

For the duration of the exhibition, all members of tribal communities will be offered free admission.

Sponsors

Sandy Raffealli | Bill Pearce Motors
The Phil and Jennifer Satre Family Fund at the Community Foundation of Northern Nevada
Six Talents Foundation

Supporting Sponsors

Carole Anderson

Additional Support

Kathie Bartlett
Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities
Sylvia and Jim Thacker

Founded by Andrea Zittel in 2002, High Desert Test Sites (HDTS) is a nonprofit arts organization based in Joshua Tree, California. Located on 100 acres owned by Zittel, HDTS is dedicated to “learning from what we are not” and the belief that learning from the high desert community can offer new insight and perspectives, often challenging art to take on new areas of relevancy. HDTS is known for its roving biennial events featuring artworks installed in diverse desert locations, and its programs that include performances, workshops, film screenings, publications, residencies, excursions, as well as two well-known community-based programs known as Kip’s Desert Book Club and High Desert Test Kitchen. This exhibition features highlights from the HDTS archives, recently acquired by the Nevada Museum of Art. A significant portion of this collection was originally exhibited and curated by Sohrab Mohebbi and Aram Moshayedi in An Ephemeral History of High Desert Test Sites: 2002-2015. This exhibition is guest curated by Brooke Hodge.

Additional Support

Heidi Allyn Loeb

Extreme environments—from the Arctic Circle to outer space—have long provoked curiosity and wonder. In more recent times, these seemingly uninhabitable places have attracted attention as potential sites for development, future migration and colonization. 

Armed with this awareness, artists, designers, and engineers have worked across disciplines to power innovation, question existing systems, and seek visionary solutions to help navigate the future of extremes. These practitioners help us to understand our connection to this world and other worlds. They tackle difficult concepts to make the inaccessible accessible, and the invisible visible.  

This exhibition is organized in conjunction with the 2021 NV STEAM Conference, a statewide education conference focused on exploring ideas and strategies that incorporate Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math education into classroom practices that foster student creativity and innovation. The NV STEAM Conference is presented in partnership with the Desert Research Institute’s Science Alive program and supported by the Nevada Department of Education and the Governor’s STEM Advisory Council. 

Prototype for New Understanding, a title inspired by an artwork by Brian Jungen, debuts recent artwork acquisitions alongside longtime favorites from the Nevada Museum of Art permanent collection. Over the past decade, the Museum has worked diligently to grow its permanent collection and to establish itself as a leader in the field of art and environment, examining ways people interact with natural, built, and virtual environments. This field of inquiry stems from the Museum’s geographic location in a region known for diverse indigenous cultures; an extreme desert environment; rich natural resources; military, industrial, and nuclear history; complex land and water issues; and legacies of colonialism. The Museum’s integrated art, archive, and library collections are at the heart of this field of inquiry and reflect this unique thematic orientation.

The artworks on view in the exhibition were chosen to promote curiosity and connect ideas across time, space, geographies, disciplines, and cultures, and to catalyze interdisciplinary conversations about our changing world.

From the first voyages to the “new world” in the 1500s to 21st-century late modernity, globalization has impacted quality of life and contributed to a stratified society. This exhibition assembles a multigenerational group of artists working in sculpture, painting, photography, and video art, who uncover markers of class through their work. These markers identify a complex hierarchy in social structures that define and shape us. Without You I Am Nothing explores society’s relationship to labor, consumption, and materiality by examining and encouraging viewers to consider these topics.

This exhibition is curated by Alberto Garcia, UNR Art History graduate.

The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Australian Memorial Poles from the Debra and Dennis Scholl Collection presents 94 works by contemporary Aboriginal artists from Arnhem Land. Traditionally, these poles—named lorrkkon in the west and larrakitj in the east —marked the final point in Aboriginal mortuary rites. They signified the moment when the spirit of the deceased had finally returned home—when they had left all vestiges of the mundane “outside” world, and become one with the “inside” world of the ancestral realm. Today, these poles are made as works of art.

The artists included in the exhibition are some of the most respected contemporary artists working in Australia today. These include John Mawurndjul, who was recently honored with a retrospective at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, and Djambawa Marawili, whose work has been included in the Moscow, Istanbul and Sydney Biennales. Yet, it is not art world acclaim that these artists seek. The power of their work comes from its desire to communicate the persistence and beauty of Aboriginal culture to the world, to scratch beneath the surface and show what hides there.

The Inside World is drawn from the collections of Miami-based collectors and philanthropists Debra and Dennis Scholl. The exhibition is the third touring exhibition of their Aboriginal art collections, following the successful exhibitions Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artist from Aboriginal Australia, and No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting, which toured to 12 museums in North America. All three exhibitions are organized by the Nevada Museum of Art.

Book
Edited by Henry F. Skerritt with contributions by Murray Garde, Louise Hamby, Howard Morphy, Kimberley Moulton, Diana Nawi, Wukun Wanambi, and David Wickens, this book explores the complex histories of memorial poles in Australia.

Enrique Chagoya’s provocative works incorporate diverse symbolic elements from pre-Columbian mythology, Western religious iconography, and American popular culture. Chagoya often appropriates the visual tropes of Western modernism in his works, just as the masters of Modern art cannibalized so-called primitive forms without properly contextualizing them. This exhibition highlights some of Chagoya’s most fascinating pieces: artist’s books that take their form from pre-Columbian codices. His contemporary codices illustrate an imagined world in which the European conquest of the New World failed and the normative culture of the Americas is based in indigenous ideology.

The artworks in this exhibition are drawn from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.