CANCELED: Dixon in Depth

CANCELED: Due to worsening weather conditions, we’ve made the difficult decision to cancel today’s program, Dixon in Depth. The Museum and galleries remain open today. Ann Wolfe and John Ott will be in the galleries from 10am to 11am for informal conversation. Timely refunds will be issued to all registrants. Thank you for your understanding.

Maynard Dixon’s trips through Northern and Southern Nevada between 1901 and 1939 resulted in hundreds of sketches, paintings, and poems.

Join exhibition curator Ann M. Wolfe, along with renowned Dixon scholar Donald Hagerty and award-winning art historian Dr. John Ott of James Madison University, for a series of in depth talks about Dixon in Nevada.

Hagerty will speak to Dixon’s many visits to Nevada in the first half of the twentieth century, while Ott will focus on Dixon’s representation of laborers during the construction of the Boulder Dam in the early 1930s. 

 

  •  Doors Open with Coffee at 9:30am 
  • Opening Remarks by Ann Wolfe 
  • Donald J.  Hagerty | A Scattering of Obsidian Chips: Maynard Dixon’s Nevada
  • John Ott | Labor, Race, and Maynard Dixon’s Boulder Dam Suite
  • Book Signing

About the Speakers

ANN M. WOLFE
Ann M. Wolfe holds the endowed position of Andrea and John C. Deane Family Chief Curator and Associate Director at the Nevada Museum of Art, where she has worked since 2006. She is an art historian, scholar, and writer on topics specializing in Nevada art history, photography, Indigenous art of the Great Basin, and placing Nevada art, history, and culture into a broader global context. 

 

DONALD J. HAGERTY
Donald J. Hagerty is the author of Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon, The Life of Maynard Dixon, and The Art of Maynard Dixon. Additional publications include Beyond the Visible Terrain: The Art of Ed Mell, Holding Ground: The Art of Gary Ernest Smith, Canyon de Chelly: 100 Years of Painting and Photography, and Leading the West: One Hundred Contemporary Painters and Sculptors. In addition, he has written numerous articles for Western Art Collector, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, California State Library Bulletin, and American Art Collector, among others. 

 

JOHN OTT
John Ott, Ph.D., is Professor of Art History at James Madison University and researches artwork by and portrayals of African Americans, particularly during the second quarter of the twentieth century, as well as art markets and collecting in the United States. He is author of Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority (Ashgate, 2014) and, with Tim Cresswell, Muybridge and Mobility (University of California Press, 2022). 

Image Credit:

Wild Horse Country [Humboldt County, NV], 1927, Oil on canvas, 26 x 30 inches. Collection of the Society of California Pioneers

Nick Larsen on “Old Haunts, Lower Reaches”

Drawing on the structure of Belongings, his 2019 artist’s book, join Nick Larsen as he weaves image, text, and short storytelling as entry points into his exhibition Old Haunts, Lower Reaches. In the no man’s land between fictional archaeological inventory and autobiography, Larsen maps and mines both what’s present and visible in the desert landscape and, maybe more importantly, what isn’t.

This speculative groundwork supports other preoccupations to be explored here: camouflage, punk merch, the infinite uses for a bandana/hanky, map legend poetics, excavation and survey patterns, color naming, place naming, ghost town reoccupation, vestiges and artifacts, and the meaningful human activity that transforms a place into a site. 

 

*Admission includes access to First Thursday

Museum Confidential Live in Reno with Cannupa Hanska Luger

Join us for a live recording of Museum Confidential, a popular podcast syndicated on National Public Radio and Spotify, that lifts the curtain on museum practices, art world issues, and culture-makers. Inspired by the Nevada Museum of Art’s Indigenous Art Futures Initiative and the current exhibition Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless, podcast founder Jeff Martin will host a lively conversation with Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota) and Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Apsara DiQuinzio, about Luger’s practice, the inspiration for the exhibition, and more. The program will also celebrate the launch of the exhibition catalog produced in conjunction with the exhibition, and the artist will be available to sign copies. 

About Museum Confidential: 

Think of a museum. Any museum. Which artworks get displayed, and which don’t, and why? Where do they keep all the unshown (or unshowable) pieces? And why do they keep them at all? Museum Confidential was originally an unprecedented exhibition at Philbrook Museum of Art exploring such questions; it’s now a popular podcast that is posted twice monthly, from September through May — a creative partnership between Jeff Martin of Philbrook and Scott Gregory of Public Radio Tulsa. MC covers the same fertile ground that the exhibit itself had covered, of course — plus lots of other topics relating to art, artists, museums, curators, museum-going, art history, the art market, and so on. 

*Doors Open at 5pm with Cash Bar

Afrofuturism and Black Feminisms with Prisca Gayles, Ph.D.

Join Prisca Gayles, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender, Race and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno, for a conversation on Afrofuturism and Black Feminisms, and how these concepts are woven into April Bey’s Atlantica: The Gilda Region. 
 
In Atlantica, The Gilda Region, interdisciplinary artist April Bey creates an immersive installation that taps into Black Americans’ historical embrace of space travel and extraterrestrial visioning—a cultural movement dating back to the late 1960s and later termed Afrofuturism. Through this Afrofuturist lens, Bey reflects on subjects such as queerness, feminism, and internet culture in vibrant tableaux that combine plants, video, music, photography, and oversized mixed-media paintings and textiles.
 
About Prisca Gayles, P.h.D.:
 
Prisca Gayles is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender, Race and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Gayles investigates the role of emotions in transnational Black social movements with a broader research goal of understanding the diverse ways that blackness is politicized across the African diaspora and used as a tool to demand racial justice in spaces of black invisibility. Her current book project, Pain into Purpose: Mobilizing Emotions in Argentina’s Black Resistance Movement draws from a twenty-two-month ethnography to analyze how emotions permeate the macro- and micro- politics of Argentina’s Black social movement. This research has been funded by the Tinker Foundation, The U.S. Fulbright Program, a Gaius Charles Bolin Dissertation Fellowship at Williams College, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Dr. Gayles’s research interests include Black Feminist Theory, Afro-Latin American feminisms, the sociology of race and ethnicity, Social movements, Migration and citizenship, and the African diaspora in Argentina. Currently, her work can be found in The Black Social Economy in the Americas: Exploring Diverse Community-based Markets (Palgrave MacMillan 2018), Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability (University of Pittsburgh 2022) and the journals of Ethnic and Racial Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, and Gender, Place, and Culture. 

Skinner In-Depth with Kolin Perry

Join Kolin Perry for an in-depth tour of End of the Range: Charlotte Skinner in the Eastern Sierra.

Charlotte B. Skinner (1879-1963) was an artist and educator living in the Eastern Sierra of California from 1905 to 1933. She spent her early life in San Francisco, immersing herself within a community of professional artists working and exhibiting there. After moving to the remote, rural community of Lone Pine, California, her home on Brewery Street became an escape from the hustle and bustle of the Bay Area for artists and friends seeking community among the company of other artists.

This exhibition features original paintings and drawings of the Eastern Sierra by Charlotte B. Skinner. It also includes works by artist-friends including Dorothea Lange, Maynard Dixon, Roi Partridge, Sonya Noskowiak, Ralph Stackpole, and William Wendt, along with Panamint Shoshone baskets from her own personal collection.

It is accompanied by a small publication with an essay written by Kolin Perry.

Generously supported by John A. White, Jr., in memory of Charlotte Skinner’s grandson, James Skinner.

Skinner In-Depth with Kolin Perry

Join Kolin Perry for an in-depth tour of End of the Range: Charlotte Skinner in the Eastern Sierra.

Charlotte B. Skinner (1879-1963) was an artist and educator living in the Eastern Sierra of California from 1905 to 1933. She spent her early life in San Francisco, immersing herself within a community of professional artists working and exhibiting there. After moving to the remote, rural community of Lone Pine, California, her home on Brewery Street became an escape from the hustle and bustle of the Bay Area for artists and friends seeking community among the company of other artists.

This exhibition features original paintings and drawings of the Eastern Sierra by Charlotte B. Skinner. It also includes works by artist-friends including Dorothea Lange, Maynard Dixon, Roi Partridge, Sonya Noskowiak, Ralph Stackpole, and William Wendt, along with Panamint Shoshone baskets from her own personal collection.

It is accompanied by a small publication with an essay written by Kolin Perry.

Generously supported by John A. White, Jr., in memory of Charlotte Skinner’s grandson, James Skinner.

Skinner In-Depth with Kolin Perry

Join Kolin Perry for an in-depth tour of End of the Range: Charlotte Skinner in the Eastern Sierra.

Charlotte B. Skinner (1879-1963) was an artist and educator living in the Eastern Sierra of California from 1905 to 1933. She spent her early life in San Francisco, immersing herself within a community of professional artists working and exhibiting there. After moving to the remote, rural community of Lone Pine, California, her home on Brewery Street became an escape from the hustle and bustle of the Bay Area for artists and friends seeking community among the company of other artists.

This exhibition features original paintings and drawings of the Eastern Sierra by Charlotte B. Skinner. It also includes works by artist-friends including Dorothea Lange, Maynard Dixon, Roi Partridge, Sonya Noskowiak, Ralph Stackpole, and William Wendt, along with Panamint Shoshone baskets from her own personal collection.

It is accompanied by a small publication with an essay written by Kolin Perry.

Generously supported by John A. White, Jr., in memory of Charlotte Skinner’s grandson, James Skinner.

BRDI Presents: Architect Finn Kappe

Architect Finn Kappe discusses the style and aesthetic of his own architectural practice, and that of his modernist father Ray Kappe, in this edition of the Black Rock Design Institute (BRDI) lecture series.  

*Doors open at 5 pm with hosted beer. Program begins at 6 pm.

 

Tracing the Life and Work of Charlotte Skinner with Kolin Perry

Join Perry as he traces the life of Charlotte Skinner shining light on the places, people and events that informed her work.  

Stay after the talk and join the curator in a walkthrough of the exhibition starting at 5pm. 

This exhibition features original paintings and drawings of the Eastern Sierra by Charlotte B. Skinner. It also includes works by artist-friends including Dorothea Lange, Maynard Dixon, Roi Partridge, Sonya Noskowiak, Ralph Stackpole, and William Wendt, along with Panamint Shoshone baskets from her own personal collection.

Admission includes access to First Thursday and the walkthrough following the talk.

Sheila Swan and Peter Laufer on Neon Nevada

Join Sheila Swan and Peter Laufer, authors of Neon Nevada, for a discussion surrounding the influence of neon signage on the development of Nevada’s unique culture. 

About Neon Nevada:

Published in 1994, Sheila Swan and Peter Laufer take readers on a journey across the state of Nevada on a quest to discover and illuminate Nevada’s neon. Full-color photographs and historical commentary bring the state’s hues of neon to life.

Praise for Neon Nevada:

“This is not merely a coffee table book; it’s an immersive journey through time, a celebration of art, culture, and nostalgia.” —Nick Vedros, president, the LUMI Neon Museum

“The book is a testament to the largely unknown sign designers and tube benders who have made and continue to make Nevada’s magnificent commercial landscape all aglitter!” — Alan Goldman, Blue Plate Productions, producer of the documentary film “Glowing in the Dark”