Established in 1931, the Nevada Museum of Art was co-founded by Dr. James Church—a pioneering climate scientist, humanist, and interdisciplinary scholar at the University of Nevada, Reno—and the Latimer Art Club, a group of dedicated landscape painters led by Lorenzo P. Latimer who sought to capture the natural beauty of the region. A decade later, the Museum gained new momentum through a generous gift from Charles Cutts, whose donation of rare books, a modest art collection, and his residence helped solidify the institution’s foundation.  Today, the Nevada Museum of Art along with its Institute for Art + Environment, continues to uphold these founding values.  By fostering meaningful engagement with art and culture and supporting interdisciplinary research and scholarship, the Museum remains a vital educational resource for all. This spotlight exhibition in the new Thomas and Pauline Tusher Library includes paintings by Lorenzo Latimer, historical photographs, and a major sculpture by Maya Lin that memorializes Mount Rose.

A new rooftop garden on the third floor of the Nevada Museum of Art showcases plants deeply connected to Native American basketry traditions of the Great Basin, honoring the enduring relationship between people, plants, and the broader environmental ecosystem of the region.

The rooftop features three distinct planting areas that are the foundation of the Thomas and Pauline Tusher Sculpture Garden, which will house an evolving collection of outdoor sculptures in the years to come.

The selected plants—which relate to the Museum’s permanent collection of Native American baskets—were chosen collaboratively by a team of Indigenous consultants. These plants are not only central to the creation of both functional and artistic baskets but also carry deep cultural meaning.

Indigenous knowledge, passed down through generations, offers invaluable wisdom about sustainable land stewardship and the responsible use of natural resources. By respecting and incorporating traditional practices, the garden exemplifies how these methods of cultivating and harvesting can play a vital role in addressing modern environmental challenges. The plantings serve as a reminder that respecting traditional ecological knowledge can provide sustainable solutions to contemporary environmental issues.

We are grateful to Melanie Smokey (Western Shoshone | Washoe), Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute), Jay Martin (Washoe | Western Shoshone), and Rhiana Jones (Akimel O’Odham | Washoe) for their collaboration.

Lead Sponsor: Henry Luce Foundation

Multi-media artist Edgar Arceneaux’s (b. 1972) artistic approach begins with three guiding principles that propel his work forward—a material investigation, a rigorous engagement with history, and his own personal connection to the given subject. A protean artist who engages many different styles and subjects, his practice encompasses drawing, painting, performance, video, sculpture, and installation.

This exhibition highlights Arceneaux’s series Skinning the Mirror, which he started in 2021. In this expansive body of work, he uses the mirror as a device to explore the formulation and fracturing of identity, specifically in relation to memory. Using found mirrors, Arceneaux separates the reflective substrate from the sheet of glass, which he then applies to a prepared canvas. The process of “skinning” a mirror becomes an exercise of control and chance, often leading to imperfections. Cracks, flaws, and small shards of glass remain on the fabric’s surface during the decoupling. The resulting works resemble traditional abstract paintings while maintaining an alluring, reflective quality. Once the separation is complete, Arceneaux places the paintings at sites tied to a historical narrative he is investigating. Over time, the atmosphere of the selected locale alters the surface of the canvas, imbuing it with the environment so that the work itself becomes a part of the history that Arceneaux is exploring.

Previously Arceneaux’s Skinning the Mirror series has reflected the changing of the seasons, riverways in the Midwest, and the often fraught and conflicting spectrum of racial, political, and cultural perspectives that transform a location into a place of interest. While in Reno, Arceneaux will investigate a new, historically significant site that inspires his work.

SPONSORS

Pamela Joyner and Fred Giuffrida

Cross disciplinary artist Thomas J Price (b. 1981) confronts preconceived attitudes towards representation and identity, foregrounding the intrinsic value of the individual and subverting structures of hierarchy. Celebrated for his large-scale figurative sculptures, Price draws our attention to the psychological embodiment of his fictional characters, highlighting nuanced understandings of social signifiers and predetermined value. Drawing from multiple sources, the works are developed through a hybrid approach of traditional sculpting and digital technologies. Price balances methods of presentation, material and scale to challenge our expectations and provide cues for deeper human connection.

The work Grounded in the Stars (2024) included in the exhibition, depicts a full-figured representation of a fictionalized Black woman dressed in leisure attire with braided locks of hair. The female subject stands on a plinth in a calm, everyday pose, which contrasts with ideals of how subjects are often glorified in monumental, sculptural form. The serene expression on her face invites guests to reexamine their own culturally coded perceptions, interrogating how we are seen, understood and valued. In extension of this exploration and Price’s wider conceptual practice, a new painting will also be included, made as part of Price’s residency at the Joyner/Giuffrida Collection. Together, the works explore themes of presence and connection.

Thomas J Price lives and works in London, UK. He studied at Chelsea College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. The artist will have his first solo exhibition in New York, entitled Resilience of Scale, at Hauser & Wirth in April through June this year. Concurrently, a large-scale, 12-foot bronze sculpture of Grounded in the Stars (2023) will appear in Times Square in New York City shown in tandem with the artist’s Man Series, six video animations that will be displayed on surrounding billboards as part of the Times Square Art Midnight Moment program.

Sponsors

Pamela Joyner and Fred Giuffrida

Desert Dialogues marks the inaugural exhibition in the Museum’s Art + Environment Education Lab, inviting visitors, educators, and learners of all ages to embark on a visual exploration of the diverse motivations that draw people to the desert. Featuring works from the Museum’s Carol Franc Buck Altered Landscape photography collection, this exhibition reveals how the desert and other arid lands have been sites of exploration, discovery, development, solitude, and survival, both historically and today.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a Wagon Station, a pod-like living shelter designed by artist Andrea Zittel and customized by Aaron Noble. Originally installed at A-Z West, Zittel’s 80-acre desert compound in Joshua Tree, California, the sculpture evokes both covered wagons of 19th-century American settlers and modern suburban station wagons or recreational trailers. The Wagon Station embodies a spirit of adaptability and innovation, reflecting the ways in which people engage with harsh yet inspiring desert environments.

Often misperceived as barren and desolate, deserts are vibrant ecosystems, rich in life-sustaining resources. While many artists are drawn to the quiet expanse of these places, where vast skies and rugged terrains provide a reprieve from urban spaces, other artists reveal how the resources of the desert have been harnessed and exploited to provide water, energy, housing, and military protection to sustain modern life as we know it.

About the Art + Environment Education Lab

A new educational space in the Charles and Stacie Mathewson Education and Research Center, the Art + Environment Education Lab is a place for everyone, but especially students and teachers to interact closely with the Museum’s art and archive collections. Host to numerous courses in collaboration with the University of Nevada, Reno, the goal of the space is to build understanding and generate new knowledge about the Museum’s collections and the important role that art and artists serve in helping the public understand environmental issues.

Considered among the world’s oldest, continuous living cultures, Australian Aboriginal people come from ancestral lines estimated to be greater than 60,000 years old. The origins of the cultures and belief systems, often referred to as Dreamings, Songlines, or Creation Time, continue to inform knowledge systems that exist today, which are intricately tied to their Country (homeland) and are represented in their art. Thus their contemporary works of art evidence what has been referred to as an “eternal present.” For artists from remote areas of the continent, their lives continue to be linked to ancient knowledge and diverse customs, which permeate their art forms and become eternal sign systems that evolve in the present.

This exhibition highlights the momentous gift of contemporary Indigenous artists from many rural areas throughout the continent of Australia—from the northern region of Arnhem Land (Yirrkala and Maningrida) to the Central desert sites of Utopia and Papunya, and to southern areas of Anangu Pitjanjatjar Lands (APY). Robert Kaplan and Margaret Levi, who live in Seattle, Washington, have been acquiring work since the early 1990s, building one of the most esteemed collections of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists in the United States. In 2023, Kaplan and Levi gave the Nevada Museum of Art more than seventy works, most of which are presented here for the first time.

This consequential gift includes over fifty contemporary artists working from twenty different geographic areas. Artists represented in this significant gift and exhibition include legends such as Ginger Riley Munduwalawala, Polly Napangardi, Gloria Petyarre, George Ward Tjungurrayi, and Paddy Fordham Wainburranga, among many others. Artists of a younger generation who have already been recognized on an international stage, such as Gunybi Ganambarr and Djambawa Marawlli, are similarly present. Thirty-six artists from about fifteen diverse communities and language groups comprise the exhibition.

Celebrated for its diverse holdings of Australian Aboriginal Art from a range of media, the Kaplan & Levi Collection now forms a significant core of the Museum’s Robert S. and Dorothy J. Keyser Art of the Greater West Collection. In 2012, the Museum defined the Greater West as a “super region,” which broadens conventional definitions of the West by expanding the scope of the collection’s geographic emphasis to encompass a region generally bounded from Alaska to Patagonia and from Australia to the United States intermountain West. This is a geography of frontiers characterized by large expanses of open land, enormous natural resources, diverse Indigenous peoples, colonization, and the conflicts that inevitably arise when all four of those factors exist in the same place at the same time.

This inaugural exhibition celebrates the opening of a new gallery and showcases remarkable gifts of Native American baskets and Pueblo pottery to the Nevada Museum of Art. The baskets are a gift from Larry Dalrymple and Steve Moreno, who dedicated the past 45 years to acquiring baskets, personal histories, and photographs from  modern and contemporary weavers of the Great Basin, Northern California, and the American Southwest. The pottery comes from Brenda and the late John Blom, who began their collection in the early 1990s, sourcing pieces directly from potters, galleries, and Pueblo villages in the Southwest.

To commemorate this special occasion, the exhibition also features 15 newly commissioned Native American baskets from weavers in the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada, including Leah Brady (Western Shoshone), Loretta Burden (Northern Paiute), Sue Coleman (Washoe), Norma Darrough (Western Shoshone), Gracie Dick (Northern Paiute), Julia Parker (Coast Miwok | Kashaya Pomo), Lucy Parker (Kashaya Pomo | Yosemite Miwok | Mono Lake Paiute | Coast Miwok), Melanie Smokey (Western Shoshone | Washoe), Sandra Eagle (Northern Paiute), Rebecca Eagle (Northern Paiute), Nila Northsun (Shoshone | Chippewa), and Jacqueline Rickard (Walker Lake Paiute).

Another highlight of the gallery is a major mural by Jack Malotte (Western Shoshone | Washoe) in collaboration with Lena Tseabbe Wright (Northern Paiute | Yurok). Contemporary artworks inspired by basketry and pottery traditions are interspersed throughout the gallery.

To accompany the exhibition, the Museum, in collaboration with the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California and publishing partner Rizzoli Electa, will publish The Art of Native American Washoe Basketry, a reissue of chapters on Washoe basketry and culture, first published in Tahoe: A Visual History in 2015.

This exhibition is co-curated by Melissa Melero-Moose (Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe) and Ann M. Wolfe, the Museum’s Andrea and John C. Deane Family Chief Curator and Associate Director.

Lead Sponsor
Henry Luce Foundation

Carmen Herrera painted for over seven decades, receiving recognition for her elegant, hard-edge style late in life. Having developed her signature style in the late 1940s, her work connects to artists such as Piet Mondrian, Ellsworth Kelly, as well as the Neo-concrete work of artists like Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, who flourished in Brazil after World War II. She made large-scale paintings, drawings, sculpture, and much later in life, began making murals modeled after her paintings, many of which have never been executed. Based on her painting La Fonteyn (2015), Untitled (2021) is realized here for the first time.

Born in Cuba, Carmen Herrera moved to New York City in 1954, where she lived until her death at the age of 106. From 1948 to 1954, Herrera lived in Paris and exhibited at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, alongside artists such as Sonia Delaunay and Jean Arp, all of whom focused on abstraction. In New York, her work was displayed at the Alternative Museum in the East Village and El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. The twenty-first century brought her increased recognition, and in 2016 (at the age of 101), the Whitney Museum of American Art opened her career retrospective solidifying her groundbreaking contribution to geometric abstraction.

Using fruit as a method of exploring the familiar, the artist duo Fallen Fruit investigates interstitial urban spaces, bodies of knowledge, and forms of civic participation and collaboration. They began by creating maps for what the artists called “public fruit,” or fruit trees growing on public property in Los Angeles. They have expanded their project into an ongoing exploration of the boundaries of public and private spaces while using fruit as both a material object and conceptual framework. Their projects take on many fruit-inspired forms, ranging from the public adoption of trees, the creation of public edible gardens, zines, performances, as well as large-scale immersive installations that examine the history of a given site or collection.

The collective unveils a new commission for the Museum’s Grand Hall, with an immersive installation that spans wallpaper and curtains. Using the flora and fauna specific to Reno, The Power of Pollinators (And Other Living Things) (2024) assumes larger than life proportions inside the Museum walls. The interior motifs are a continuation of the garden outside—fruit, berries, trees, flowers, and pollinators—that appear in Monument to Sharing, in the Linda and Alvaro Pascotto Sculpture Garden. Both works offer a unique public ‘welcome,’ and invite visitors to explore ideas of generosity, agricultural production, and the importance of cultivating community.

Fallen Fruit was originally conceived in 2004 by Matias Viegener, Burns and Young. Since 2013, Burns and Young have continued the collaborative work.

During her long, prolific, and groundbreaking career, the American photographer Dorothea Lange made some of the most iconic portraits of the 20th century. Dorothea Lange: Seeing People reframes Lange’s work through the lens of portraiture, highlighting her unique ability to discover and reveal the character and resilience of those she photographed.

Featuring 100 photographs, the exhibition addresses her innovative approaches to picturing people, emphasizing her work on social issues including economic disparity, migration, poverty, and racism.

This exhibition debuted at the National Gallery of Art in 2023 and is curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art. The Nevada Museum of Art’s presentation of Dorothea Lange: Seeing People will be the only West Coast venue for this exhibition.

This exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, and is part of its Across the Nation program to share the nation’s collection with museums around the country.

Major Sponsors
Thomas Lee Bottom
The Bretzlaff Foundation
Carol Franc Buck Foundation

Sponsors
Victoria and Victor Atkins
CEJohnson Foundation
The Deborah and T.J. Day Foundation
Nancy and Harvey Fennell | Dickson Realty
Hazel Foundation Fund
Jackie and Steve Kane
Dale Leonudakis
Sandy Raffealli
Phil and Jennifer Satre
Gayle and Cliff Scheffel
Elizabeth and Henry Thumann
Christine and Scott Tusher

Supporting Sponsors
Kathie Bartlett
Betsy Burgess and Tim Bailey
Mary Connolly
Tammy and Michael Dermody
Molly and Mark D. Gamble
Viki Matica and Doug Brewer
Charlotte and Dick McConnell
Keith McWilliams | Evercore Wealth & Trust
Peter E. Pool