In celebration of Older Americans Month, the Museum offers FREE admission to seniors every Wednesday during the month of May.

In celebration of Older Americans Month, the Museum offers FREE admission to seniors every Wednesday during the month of May.

Mary Anning was a pioneering paleontologist and fossil collector, yet little is known about her life. Anning’s history is incomplete and contradictory, her lifetime was a constellation of firsts. Join us for a discussion with Megan Bellister, Nell J. Redfield Curator of Learning and Engagement, as she places Mary Anning in historical and cultural context through the fashions of the time.

Denise Dutton, Statue of Mary Anning, 2022

Using camera lenses made of glacier ice, artist Tristan Duke explores our current moment of climate crisis. As Peter E. Pool Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment, the artist used his ice-lens camera to document the rapidly melting glaciers of the Sierra Nevada. Join us for a talk concluding his fellowship, and a preview of his book “Glacial Optics” forthcoming from Radius Books. 

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. 

Join Museum volunteer docents for a discussion of Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray making connections to the exhibition When Langston Hughes Came to Town. Participants should have completed the book prior to meeting. Register online for guiding questions that will be discussed at the book club. Arrive early to place a lunch order with the Café! Space is limited, advanced reservations are recommended.

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 Seeking safety, he went to Reno in September 1934, as described in his unpublished essay “The Vigilantes Knocked at My Door.”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.

When Langston Hughes visited Reno in 1934, the city had just a few hundred Black residents. The Black community had been growing steadily for six decades, as they established homes and businesses and built enduring social and religious institutions in the face of mounting racial prejudice and discrimination. Historian Alicia Barber will share new research about the Black community of 1930s Reno, made possible by a National Park Service Underrepresented Communities Grant received by the City of Reno in 2024.

Dr. Alicia Barber is a professional historian, author, and recognized authority on the cultural history and built environment of Reno and the state of Nevada. She researched the Northern Nevadan designs of African American architect Paul Revere Williams for the Nevada Museum of Art’s 2022 exhibit, Janna Ireland on the Architectural Legacy of Paul Revere Williams in Nevada. In collaboration with the nonprofit organization Our Story, Inc., she has intensively researched the history of Black Springs, a traditionally African American neighborhood north of Reno founded in the late 1940s. She is the co-founder and editor of the website and smart phone app Reno Historical and the author of Reno’s Big Gamble: Image and Reputation in the Biggest Little City and The Barber Brief, a weekly e-newsletter about urban development in Reno.

Photo courtesy of the Nevada Historical Society

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