This exhibition—primarily drawn from the Nevada Museum of Art’s permanent collection—presents work that taps into and explores various kinds of ancestral frequencies. Ranging from Indigenous artists of the Great Basin to Australia, as well as artists examining their African and Latin American roots, the artists in the exhibition explore different modes of artistic expression that inspire connections to diverse cultural histories. The double entendre of the title further underscores how considerations of cultural belonging, in particular with respect to the human relationship to its natural environs, have become irregular and displaced with the advent of modernization and the industrial revolution. Together the works in the exhibition inspire us to listen to and tune in to the frequencies and ancestral wisdoms of the past.

Additional Support

Nevada Arts Council

Shifting Horizons is an exhibition featuring artworks and archival objects that have been gifted to or purchased by the Nevada Museum of Art in the past three years, demonstrating our ongoing commitment to integrating a range of artistic voices. It includes a diverse range of objects—from painting and sculpture to photography and video—that capture our focus on creative interactions with natural, built, and virtual environments. Artists in the exhibition include both familiar friends and those that are newly associated with the Museum, from Laura Aguilar and Nicholas Galanin to Allison Janae Hamilton and Tony Feher.

This exhibition is generously sponsored by the Nevada Museum of Art Collections Committee: Kathie Bartlett, Barbara Danz, Linda Frye, Marcia Growdon, Martha Hesse, Maureen Mullarkey, Kristi Overgaard, and Peter Stremmel.

This exhibition presents work by a group of artists who use a variety of media–from oil on canvas to computer code—to manifest the concept of flow in different ways. Whether channeling the rhythms of the natural world such as waves or wind into their work, or engaging in meticulous repeated gestures, these artists produce work that manifests finely honed skills and great effort—but that effort is invisible. Featured artists include Rowena Meeks Abdy; Lita Albuquerque; Karl Benjamin; Emilie Clark; Fawn Douglas; Joseph Feddersen; Rachel Hayes; Michael Heizer; Lordy Rodriguez; Hiroshi Sugimoto; Camille Utterback; and Takako Yamaguchi.

One of the most noteworthy responses to the monumental Land Art interventions came at the same time as their production. Beginning in 1968, the artist Judy Chicago embarked on a series of ephemeral Atmospheres performances using colored smokes and fireworks in the deserts of the American West that were intended to “soften that macho Land Art scene,” as she puts it. Long overlooked by art historians and scholars, Chicago’s Atmospheres series provides a critical counterpoint and essential context to the predominantly male Land Artists working in the desert during the 1960s and 70s. It is for this very reason that the Nevada Museum of Art began working with Chicago in 2018 to secure the acquisition of her entire fireworks archive for the Center for Art + Environment archive collection. This exhibition debuts the archive publicly for the first time, and features never-before-seen vintage photographs and 16 mm films, ephemera such as correspondence and permits, press coverage, related clothing, as well as large-scale photographs documenting the history of Chicago’s Atmospheres performances from 1968 to the present.

Sponsors

Barbara and Tad Danz

Additional Support

Elaine Cardinale

Drawn from the permanent collections of the Nevada Museum of Art with several key loans from contemporary artists, Where Art and Tech Collide highlights the various ways that artists use technology to inspire wonder and curiosity. Featuring artworks by Andy Diaz-Hope, Trevor Paglen, Kal Spelletich, Leo Villareal, and Gail Wight, among others, the exhibition ignites an exploration of the human relationship to the increasingly digital and artificial world of the future. Camille Utterback’s interactive digital work, Precarious, provides the centerpiece, where the motion of visitors results in colorful, constantly changing forms projected onto the gallery wall. 

Every year, the Museum, in partnership with the Desert Research Institute’s Science Alive program, hosts a statewide conference to explore best practices in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) Education. The 2020 NV STEAM Conference focuses on the T in STEAM, highlighting and celebrating the ways artists and interdisciplinary practitioners leverage new and emerging technologies to change the way we see the world. Art about technology, art made with technology, and art made by technology serve as springboards for thought, learning, and discussion.

Organized in conjunction with the 2020 NV STEAM Conference, a statewide education initiative.

Lead Sponsor

Tesla

Major Sponsor

Odyssey Foundation

Sponsor

City National Bank | An RBC Company

“Sincere,” first recorded in English in the 1530s, is from the Latin word sincerus, meaning “clean, pure, sound, etc.,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Born 1959 in Reno, artist Galen Brown creates work in drawing, printmaking, mixed media sculpture, and photography that embodies the adjective and resonates with intelligence and formal beauty. This exhibition takes a retrospective view of the Carson City-based artist’s work from the 1990s to the present, highlighting process-based bodies of work—including his massive drawings on scrap museum board, like Sine Cere—which he assembles over the course of many years. Educated at the San Francisco Art Institute, Brown’s painstaking and often obsessive practice results in works that demonstrate his commitment to erasing the boundaries between art and everyday life.

Sponsors

Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller

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.

James Turrell is an artist whose media are light and space, and for the last forty years he has been carefully sculpting the cinder cone of an extinct volcano near Flagstaff into one of the world’s largest and most important land based sculptures.

Turrell first studied psychology and mathematics before earning a Masters of Fine Arts degree in 1966, the year that he first began experimenting with light projections as sculpture. In the 1970s he started building “skyspaces,” which feature openings cut into or constructed as part of roofs. These apertures, which make apparent the way color changes in the sky over time, are also designed to evoke a feeling in the viewer that the sky is close enough to touch. Turrell has been commissioned since then to install dozens of these architectural sculptures in museums across the United States and Europe, and as far away as Australia. He has also created skyspaces for many private clients, including the Louis Vuitton store in Las Vegas.

Turrell has received major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Bund Long Museum of Shanghai, among others. A museum devoted solely to his work opened in Argentina in 2009. He received a MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1984, and the National Medal of Arts in 2013.

The photographs and archival materials on view in this exhibition are on loan from the Lannan Foundation. 

Sponsor

Louise A. Tarble Foundation

In 1931, a group of civic-minded citizens led by humanities professor and climate scientist Dr. James Church and local art collector Charles Cutts, established what is today known as the Nevada Museum of Art. Sixty years later, in 1993, a major endowment gift from the Carol Franc Buck Foundation established the Altered Landscape Photography Collection that is now one of the institution’s largest focused collecting areas with approximately 2,000 photographs. In these images, artists reveal the ways that individuals and industries have marked, mined, toured, tested, developed, occupied, and exploited landscapes over the last fifty years. While the image makers take various approaches, together they offer a panoramic sweep of the contentious social and political debates that have shaped contemporary discourse on the changing environment. Held in trust for future generations, an art museum’s permanent collection reflects the values and identity of the community it serves.

The photographs in this exhibition are hung on the walls in a manner known as “salon style.” The term refers to the centuries-old French tradition of displaying art in large, grand gallery spaces as a backdrop for conversation and dialogue. In private French homes, invited guests would gather in salons (or grand living rooms) to discuss art, history, politics, and other important matters of the day. Beginning in 1737, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris re-invented the idea of the salon when they opened their student exhibitions to the general public for the first time. Not only were all community members invited to attend salons, visitors were encouraged to debate and share opinions about the works on view—much like what happens in many art museums today.