Step into the captivating world of groundbreaking artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson as she takes you on a journey through her visionary career. For this conversation Hershman Leeson will by joined by B. Ruby Rich—a scholar and critic of independent, Latin American, documentary, feminist, and queer films; and a professor emerita of Film & Digital Media and Social Documentation at UC Santa Cruz. Their conversation will explore the themes and innovations that define Hershman Leeson’s work, diving into the intersection of humanity, technology, and artificial intelligence. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear their insights in relation to the thought-provoking exhibition, Lynn Hershman Leeson: Of Humans, Cyborgs, and AI.

Join four local choreographers as they screen dance films created in response to both new and reimagined spaces throughout the Museum and its forthcoming expansion. After the screenings, each choreographer will participate in a panel discussion exploring the role of dance in museum spaces, the creative process behind making a dance film, and the intersection of dance and visual art.

Featured local choreographers include: Caitlin Bell, Cari Cunningham, Maggie Stack, and Rosie Trump.

Join Colin Robertson, Charles N. Mathewson Senior Vice President of Education and Research at the Nevada Museum of Art, for an introduction to a new programmatic partnership between the Museum and the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). He will survey some about what’s to come programmatically, and how the partnership aims to increase lifelong learning opportunities in the community.

How do creative minds bring to life the fantasy and sci-fi worlds of Avatar, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars, and video games like Monster Hunter, Elden Ring, and Pokémon? What would these worlds and the creatures in them be like if not for our knowledge of the vast fossil record and geologic history? Our modern world is rich with inspiration, but it is grounded and preceded by the past. 99% of all life is extinct and our modern world represents a fraction of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history. Join Dr. Kiersten Formoso and discover the rich way that paleontology and geology have influenced creative minds. 

Wendy Calvin, a planetary scientist specializing in optical and infrared spectroscopy of minerals and ices, discusses many different planets, why scientists believe these planets have interior oceans and upcoming missions that will expand our understanding in new ways. 

Before moving to Reno, Langston Hughes became deeply involved in the arts and politics of San Francisco and Carmel-by-the-Sea. He supported the Scottsboro Boys trial by organizing a celebrity auction in San Francisco and participated in the 1933 California strikes. His activism led to an unproduced play and threats that forced him to leave Carmel. Seeking safety, he went to Reno in September 1934, as described in his unpublished essay “The Vigilantes Knocked at My Door.”

In Reno, Hughes developed a new artistic perspective shaped by his experiences in the American West, contrasting the region’s promise with the severe poverty he encountered. Traveling through the South and California, and experiencing homelessness firsthand, he created two of his most powerful stories, “Slice ‘Em Down” and “On the Road.” Join Alex Albright as he retraces Hughes’s steps through the Biggest Little City and beyond. 

Dorothy M. Davis unveils Langston Hughes and Griffith J. Davis’s 20-year friendship. Through personal letters and photographs, Davis will provide rare insights into how their bond inspired new horizons for Langston Hughes in Africa and Griff Davis as an internationally recognized pioneer photographer, journalist, and U.S. Senior Foreign Service Officer. 

Dorothy M. Davis, President of Griffith J. Davis Photographs and Archives, has unearthed, researched, managed, preserved and promoted her father’s legacy as an internationally renowned pioneer photographer, journalist and Senior U.S. Foreign Service Officer since he died in July 1993.  Starting as the Executor of his Estate, Ms. Davis is the primary source and contextual authority on his kaleidoscopic life.

Growing up in an African American U.S. Foreign Service family, Dorothy M. Davis has followed her father’s footsteps as a pioneer in the area of international development communications. Born in Liberia and raised in Tunisia, Nigeria, Switzerland, and the U.S.A., Ms. Davis has a unique career path that thrives at the nexus of private, public and non-profit sectors. The range of clients of her parallel company, Dorothy M. Davis Strategic Global Consulting, include: the United Nations system, Congressional Black Caucus Institute-Global African Diaspora Initiative (CBCI-GADI), Prosper Africa, The Andrew J. Young Foundation, and the Africa America Institute. 

Griff Davis’ photographs are permanently installed at the Museum of Broadway in Times Square, New York City; the U.S. Supreme Court Archives at the request of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer; the U.S. Embassy/Monrovia at the request of then-U.S. Ambassador to Liberia Linda Thomas-Greenfield; and Spike Lee’s collection of historical photos.

Exhibitions and documentaries include: The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, New York; the National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, California; PBS-WEDU-TV Arts Plus segment “Griffith Davis” in Florida (August 2023); PBS American Experience “The American Diplomat” (February 2022); “Les Rencontres d’Arles International Photography Festival” in France (Summer 2021); The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada.

Ms. Davis’ article, Through His Lens: The Legacy of Pioneering U.S. Foreign Service Officer Griff Davis, appears in the October 2024 issue of the Foreign Service Journal. For more information: www.griffdavis.com.

Join Dr. Cheryl Finley for an insightful talk exploring the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes’ profound influence on shaping the movement’s artistic and cultural legacy. Discover how Hughes’ poetry, vision and voice helped define an era of artistic expression and Black identity. 

Cheryl Finley, Ph.D., is the Walton Endowed Professor and Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College. Committed to engaging strategic partners to transform the arts and culture industry, she leads an innovative undergraduate program at the world’s largest historically Black college and university consortium in preparing the next generation of African American museum and visual arts leaders.

A curator and contemporary art critic, Dr. Finley is retired from Cornell University, where she was a tenured professor of Art History for more than 20 years. She is an award-winning author noted for Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton University Press, 2018), the first in-depth study of the most famous image associated with the memory of slavery—a schematic engraving of a packed slave ship hold—and the art, architecture, poetry, and film it has inspired since its creation in Britain in 1788. Her co-authored publications of note include My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South (Yale University Press, 2018), Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2011), and Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos- Pons, Pamela Z (Prestel, 2008). A frequent essayist, Dr. Finley’s writing has appeared in numerous academic and popular publications, including Art Forum, Aperture, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, American Quarterly, and Small Axe. She serves on the Boards of Creative Capital, the Menil Foundation, Circuit Arts and Island Grown Initiative. She has written extensively on the Harlem Renaissance including artists Lois Mailou Jones and James VanDerZee.

Dr. Finley’s current book project, Black Art Futures, is a social art history of the global Black arts ecosystem, focusing on the relationships among artists, patrons, curators, museums, galleries, art and activism. Her current exhibition, ‘Free as they want to be:’ Artists Committed to Memory, is co-curated with Dr. Deborah Willis. It will be on view at the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center until June 30, 2025, and travel to Cornell University’s Johnson Museum in fall 2025.

Photo by Gediyon Kifle

Radley Davis (Iss Awi/Pit River) introduces the traditional cultures of the Pit River People of present-day Shasta, Siskiyou, Modoc, and Lassen Counties in Northern California. Davis will share stories of the connection to ancestral lands and ongoing efforts to preserve language and customs. 

Nevada has been the source of some of the best fossils and fossil hunting in the United States, particularly for those in search of ichthyosaurs, giant aquatic reptiles from the Triassic.  One of the earliest collectors to explore these riches was Annie Montague Alexander, a petit, soft-spoken woman with a passion for paleontology specifically and for field work in general. Barbara Stein, author of On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West, explores Annie Alexander and her contributions to paleontology and vertebrate zoology.  

About Barbara Stein: 

Barbara Stein was a staff curator and researcher in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology from 1985-2000, the first museum of two natural history museums founded by Annie Montague Alexander on the UC Berkeley campus.  A symposium in 1994 on women who had made important contributions to the University became the impetus for writing, On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West.