In April 2013, a patron and staff group from the Nevada Museum of Art visited A27 Atelier Haus in Berlin, Germany. After spending a week visiting the city’s cutting-edge contemporary galleries, museums, and alternative spaces, entering Leiko Ikemura’s lofty, light-filled, minimalist space was an entirely different experience—like stepping into a temple dedicated to art. In her spacious studio, large scale-paintings punctuated the walls, and ceramic and bronze sculptures were elevated on low pedestals.

Swiss architect Philipp von Matt designed this combination studio and residence for his wife, Japanese-born artist Ikemura. This exhibition presents a selection of paintings and sculptures by this accomplished and well-established artist, with a special focus on work that addresses aspects of the natural world: landscape and the female figures and animal creatures that inhabit it. Ikemura’s works describe conditions of loneliness, longing, and existential searching. Solitary doll-like female figures recline, dreaming with closed eyes, while a sculptural figure covers her face with her hands, a gesture of both grief and transcendence of earthly reality. Other figures sit pensively, seeming to morph into features of the landscape they inhabit, becoming indivisible from the natural world. Oval ceramics in the form of human faces, displayed low on the ground, feature holes for their mouths, alluding to breathing and thereby existence. These works are informed by the artist’s experiences as an expatriate, her personal relationships, and the historically significant things that have occurred in her lifetime, such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011.

Born in Tsu, Japan, Ikemura left her native land at age twenty-one to escape “the strictness of Japanese tradition.” Beginning in the late 1970s, she pursued language studies in Spain, and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Seville. She moved to Switzerland in the 1980s, living in Lucerne and Zurich, where she began to exhibit her work in group exhibitions. Ikemura’s first major solo exhibition was held in Bonn in 1983, launching her career in Germany. Before long she moved to Germany permanently, settling in Cologne in 1984. By 1992, she was offered a teaching post at the Berlin University of Fine Arts, where she taught painting from 1992 to 2015.

Her work is documented in numerous catalogues and books, and is included in internationally prominent public collections, such as the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France; The Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland; the Kunstmuseum Linz, Lentos, Museum of Modern Art Linz, Austria; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Osaka, Japan, among others. Ikemura’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe and Asia, however this is her first solo exhibition in the United States.

Exhibition sponsors

Kathie Bartlett; Barbara and Tad Danz; John C. Deane; Linda Frye; Marcia and Charles Growdon; Mae and Walter Minato; Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller; Suzanne Silverman

This exhibition presents eleven extraordinary paintings by Southern California artist Daniel Douke dating from 2007-15. (more…)

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

Tahoe’s hydrological impact extends far beyond its shores. The 400-square-mile greater Lake Tahoe watershed contains 63 tributaries, or streams, that flow into it from adjacent Sierra peaks. Lake Tahoe’s waters flow out and down the Truckee River 122 miles to the north and east before feeding Pyramid Lake, a terminus desert lake whose surface area rivals that of Tahoe and whose resources sustain the indigenous Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe.

Nineteenth-century artists depicted the region’s water in abundance—as a plentiful resource that could seemingly never be depleted. Recreation and agriculture, however, began to impact the larger watershed system’s water levels, clarity, and ecological makeup. The politics of how the lake’s water is distributed outside the Tahoe basin continues to be a complicated matter.

Today scientists race to study human impacts on Lake Tahoe so that conservation measures can be implemented to help manage the diverse interests that depend on the lake’s output. Federal officials declared parts of the Tahoe Basin a natural disaster area in 2014 due to severe drought and lack of water from diminishing snowmelt. Many living artists have created works that reflect on how issues related to water quality, distribution, and conservation affect the lake’s future.

The Nevada Museum of Art presents artist Betsabeé Romero’s first solo museum exhibition in the western United States. One of the most revered Mexican artists of her generation, Romero is known for combining indigenous and folkloric designs with non-traditional art-making materials, and for creating inventive installations inspired by literature and diverse cultures. The artist will create a series of four new installations for the exhibition, with an overriding thematic focus on transportation—both literal and metaphorical.

Sponsor

Nevada Museum of Art Volunteers in Art (VIA)

This powerful and haunting series of fifty photographs documents and examines the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities in the United States.

For the past five years, photographer Richard Ross has interviewed and photographed both pre-adjudicated and committed youth in the juvenile justice system. To date, he has visited more than 250 facilities in 30 states—including Nevada. Ross has photographed in group homes, police departments, youth correctional facilities, juvenile courtrooms, high schools, shelters, classrooms, interview rooms, and maximum security lock-down and non-lock-down shelters, to name just a few. By photographing the children from behind or by obscuring their faces, the children’s identities are always kept anonymous.

Ross received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Florida, Gainesville and teaches art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was principal photographer for the Getty Museum and their Villa Project and does editorial work for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, Vogue, La Repubblica, and Architectural Digest.

Exclusive Sponsor

Wilhelm Hoppe Family Trust

The Oxford English Dictionary defines our contemporary understanding of the word “draw” as “to form a line by drawing a tracing instrument from point to point of a surface.” A drawing is “an arrangement of lines which determine form.” But the root of the word in Old English, dragan, meant to pull or drag; in other Teutonic tongues it indicated to carry or bear something.

Hook, Line & Sinker is an exhibition of drawings construed in the widest sense, an anthology of practices deployed by artists to configure the world, examples of the singular discipline that underlies every other way of making a mark in the world. All of visual art sits atop a line, even if one is not visible within the work itself; a line is present if for no other reason than all art has a boundary, a frame, an ending where it abuts the rest of the world. That’s because lines are the fundamental fact of vision, which at all times seeks to define what is seen.

Based in Miami, Debra and Dennis Scholl have been fearless and strategic collectors of contemporary art for 35 years. This exhibition, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, offers viewers an opportunity to expand their understanding of how drawing is defined in the 21st century. From Alice Channer’s Untitled (hair clips), to Jason Hedges’ Caymus and caymus special select cabernet sauvignon, experimental art-making materials abound in this selection of 40 works by 18 artists.

Lead sponsor

Enid A. Oliver, ChFC/Ameriprise Financial

Supporting sponsor

Sotheby’s

Additional support

Stremmel Gallery

This exhibition samples the Nevada Museum of Art’s diverse and growing contemporary art collection alongside a selection of artworks on loan from private collectors. The Museum recognizes Contemporary Art as a crucial area of investment, and curators seek out works for the permanent collection that reflect the institution’s ongoing commitment to artists’ creative interactions with natural, built, and virtual environments.

Recent additions to the collection include Anne Lindberg’s ethereal graphite and colored pencil piece Motion Drawing 25, Helen and Newton Harrison’s monumental mixed media drawing, 8 Yuba Mappings: A Disagreement in All Cases, as well as a studio-made photographic book by San Francisco-based artist and pilot Michael Light, who also photographed Roden Crater/Meteor Crater 07.07.11 and James Turrell’s Roden Crater Earth Work.

These artworks from the Museum’s collection are complemented by a concise selection of paintings by artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell, Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, and Takashi Murakami, on loan from leading West Coast art collectors.

Santa Cruz-based artist Andrea Borsuk will create a new site-specific mural installation portraying the journey from the California coast to the Nevada desert. By layering paintings, drawings, and objects on top of a wall mural to imply a narrative trajectory, Borsuk explores the precarious notion of time and destiny.

“I am fascinated by our cultural obsessions with the various rituals and talismans that we subscribe to for protection, good luck and safety in our daily lives,” explains the artist. “Horseshoes, rabbit’s feet, and safety devices–all are mementi mori—signs and reminders of the precarious nature of life and our need for all kinds of faith. Referencing the three sisters of fate from Greek mythology, my narrative toys with the notions of divine powers and the hopes we may cast upon these eclectic ‘goddesses’ for bestowing upon us fortune and survival.”

Featured as jewels on an elaborate ‘thread of life,’ Borsuk’s cast of characters are reveling in and ultimately submitting to the journey of life—an unpredictable and ever-changing ride.

Watch a video of Borsuk’s journey from Santa Cruz to Reno, NV here. (Link)

timepaths is a process-based, multi-media installation by Reno-born artist Franklin Evans that investigates the complex paths he’s taken as a contemporary artist. Now living in New York and showing in galleries internationally, Evans first started painting at Stanford University as an undergraduate in 1987. At that time university art programs tended to maintain distinct boundaries between various media. Evans, however, sought a more complex visual language and began to explore the dissolution of distinct media through collaborations with choreographers, writers, and curators. His resulting installations take on the appearance of labyrinthine studio spaces where materials from diverse times and places in his life provide context and are given equal attention.

The installation at the Nevada Museum of Art will consist of multiple intersecting systems of work that Evans has been developing over the past five years. Among them will be photoappropriation, a visual exploration of the artist’s own personal family photographs; curationappropriation, a system that explores the artist’s relationship to the contemporary art gallery system; wallmemoryskin, which specifically refers to past wall installations, and wallnotes and readingnotes that combines the artist’s diaristic excerpts from his journals and audio notes. All of these will be experienced in relation to Evans’ signature tape screens made from painted canvas strips that he refers to as painthallstage.

Sponsors

Ms. Chris Mattsson, Carole Server and Oliver Frankel, Mr. and Mrs. Michael C. Stanley, Wynn Resorts, City of Reno Arts and Culture Commission, and the Nevada Arts Council , a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency

Lita Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis installation is the first large-scale artwork created in Antarctica. This milestone of contemporary land art, widely acknowledged to be both a stunning and ecologically sensitive intervention on the continent, has received international acclaim. Originally funded by the National Science Foundation, Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis was installed on the Ross Ice Shelf on December 22, 2006—concurrent with the summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. This exhibition features original objects and archive materials from the 2006 project. In conjunction with the exhibition, SKIRA Rizzoli, New York will publish the first major publication on Lita Albuquerque.