An exhibition featuring materials drawn from the archive collections of Jessica Rath in the Center for Art + Environment.

The paintings of Cedra Wood can be interpreted as fables: she uses a realistic approach to portray herself and others in exotic and fictionalized places that leave viewers seeking greater meaning. Dreamlike and mythical, her paintings are peaceful yet threatening puzzles to be deciphered. As complicated as they may be, however, the artistic practice that she employs to produce them is even more involved.

For many months of the year, Wood traverses places ranging from the Outback of Australia to the glaciers of Svalbard. She drives desolate roads, sometimes camping or staying at science stations along the way. She weaves and sews costumes during her travels—often from native materials collected on site. She then constructs mysterious narratives for her photographs. At the same time she sketches and writes elaborate journals, miniature letters in bottles, and on other objects found along the way.

Wood’s paintings are influenced by folk music, science fiction, and Celtic mysticism, as well as surrealism and contemporary performance art. They are compelling because she never reveals their meaning. Rather, she offers viewers glimpses of a world where one’s imagination is free to discover meaning based on personal experience and free association.

From 2012 to 2014, Wood was a Center for Art +Environment Research Fellow. Many of the materials shown here are drawn from her archives at the Center.

David Taylor began photographing along the U.S. Mexico border between El Paso/Juarez and San Diego/Tijuana in 2007. The border is demarcated by 276 stone obelisks, most of which were installed from 1891-95. In 2014, Taylor finished documenting all of the monuments that mark the international boundary west of the Rio Grande. This undertaking led to encounters with migrants, U.S. Customs and Border Protections agents, human smugglers, members of the civilian border-watch group known as the Minutemen, and residents living along the border.

Taylor traveled both alone and in the company of agents, and his photographs were published in the book and portfolio Monuments, which contains views of all the border obelisks. While Taylor worked on this project, the Border Patrol doubled in size and the federal government constructed more than 600 miles of pedestrian and vehicular fencing, and added seismic sensors to detect the government has attained “operational control” in many border areas—but people continue to cross. Much of that traffic occurs in the most remote, rugged areas of the southwest deserts.

In 2014 Taylor and internationally-renowned Tijuana artist Marcos Ramírez ERRE undertook a second border project, tracing the original 1821 northern boundary of what was then the newly independent Mexico. The line stretched from present-day northern California to the Gulf of Mexico, west of New Orleans. That boundary was never surveyed or physically marked and exists only as a reference on historic maps. For DeLIMITations, ERRE and Taylor marked the 1821 border between Mexico and the western territories of the United States by installing 47 sheet metal markers to mimic the existing monuments. The artists asked the question: “What would Mexico and the United States look like had that boundary been fully realized?”

Monuments and DeLIMITations presents the selections from the border monuments portfolio, one of the markers designed for the mapping project done by ERRE and Taylor, and extensive historical and contemporary materials drawn from the project archives of the Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

As Lake Tahoe became a popular destination for vacationers and tourists in the early twentieth century, demand for souvenirs and other mass-produced items grew rapidly. Travel photographers and enterprising commercial firms began to cater to an ever-increasing demand for souvenir images. The rise of offset printing and lithography led to the proliferation of printed postcards.

Visitors came to Lake Tahoe and the surrounding Sierra to enjoy a variety of recreational activities—including hiking, fishing, horseback riding, swimming, and boating. Increased access via railroad and automobile gave rise to tourism and a vibrant resort culture during the first half of the twentieth century. Just like today, visitors to Lake Tahoe in the early twentieth century, might have purchased postcards to send friends or to keep as personal mementos of their travels.

All postcards from the collection of Erik Flippo.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

While the Civil War raged in the eastern United States and Tahoe’s lumber industry rose to prominence to service Nevada’s booming Comstock mines, the Lake Tahoe region began its transformation into a landscape of tourism, leisure, and recreation. Easy railroad and automobile access to the region accelerated the growth of resorts around the lake in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Lake Tahoe became a place of rest and repose for the social and economic elite.

During this time resorts began to flourish, including Tahoe Tavern and the Grand Central Hotel near Tahoe City, the Glenbrook Inn on the east shore, and the Tallac Hotel on the south shore. As the region became more settled and accessible, artists could easily fold a visit to Lake Tahoe into their Pacific Coast travels, which might have also included a stay at Yosemite.

Many artists produced nostalgic or romantic images of the region, which were readily purchased as souvenirs by visitors and tourists. At the same time, many ofthe San Francisco Bay area’s most prominent architects were commissioned to design private residences in the Lake Tahoe basin, forever changing the nature of its built environment.

Jennifer Steinkamp is among today’s best-known contemporary artists working in the field of new media art. Fly to Mars is a computer-animated projection of a tree that comes to life with movement as it cycles through the four seasons of the year. From colorful flowering buds in spring to leafless branches in winter, viewers experience the natural cycle of a tree’s foliage. Simultaneously, the tree bows up and down, as though attempting to break free from the earth’s gravity and take flight into the cosmos.

This exhibition is presented as part of the Art + Environment series, an initiative of the Nevada Museum of Art that brings together community, artists and scholars to explore the interaction between people and their environments.

Michael Light’s landscape photographs document-and thereby provoke-human dialogue with nature. His images are at once scathing and celebratory, exploring the complex and ever-evolving relationship between contemporary American culture and the environment. Concerned both with the politics of that relationship and the seductive power of landscapes, Light’s work deals in paradoxes that traverse the nebulous terrain where beauty, horror, wonder, and fear converge. The resulting large-format aerial images address themes of mapping, vertigo, geology, and human impact on the land. Like all of Light’s work, these images provide a beautiful yet thought-provoking glimpse into American traditions of expansion and exploration-the insatiable human need to pursue the unknown.

The Nevada Museum of Art gratefully acknowledges the Carol Franc Buck Foundation for support of the publication and the accompanying exhibition. Additional support provided by the City of Reno Arts and Culture Commission.

This exhibition is presented as part of the Art + Environment series, an initiative of the Nevada Museum of Art that brings community, artists, and scholars together to explore the interaction between people and their environments.

Organized on the occasion of the Nevada Museum of Art’s 80^th anniversary in 2011, this special exhibition will celebrate the institution’s early founders, Dr. James Church, Charles Cutts, and volunteer members of the Latimer Art Club, revealing how their vision for a regional art gallery evolved into the robust and vigorous institution that the Museum is today.

The Nevada Museum of Art’s founding was championed eighty years ago by Dr. James Church, a University of Nevada, Reno humanities professor and early climate scientist who established the first snow laboratory in the world in the Sierra Nevada during the early 20th century. The interdisciplinary interests of Dr. James Church were widely felt during the earliest years of the institution’s founding. This philosophy continues to foster the dynamic and multidimensional public programs and open dialogue offered by the Museum today.

The exhibition traces eighty years of this unique focuson art and science up until the 2009 founding of the Center for Art + Environment (CA+E)—the only museum-based art research institute in the world devoted to the support and study of how people perceive and interact with their natural, built, and virtual environments. The CA+E encourages the creation of new artworks, convenes artists, scholars, and communities to document, research, and analyze artworks, and increases public knowledge of these creative and scholarly endeavors.

Each fall, about 250 million Monarch butterflies migrate from the United States and Canada to Mexico, where they spend their winter until conditions favor a return flight in the spring. Inspired by this spectacular biological event, New York-based, and Mexican-born artist and self-taught lepidopterist Erika Harrsch has created a video and sound installation titled Eros-Thanatos, recorded at the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary in Michoacan, Mexico. Thousands of printed paper butterflies will cover the floor of the gallery to provide visitors with an artificial experience of the natural phenomenon as well as a reminder of the fragility of life and the power of nature.

To complement the installation, Harrsch will have pop-up performances of United States of North America. In an interactive installation, visitors fill out faux paperwork and spin a “wheel of fortune” to see if they can win a passport for “North America”—an imaginary country that combines features of Canada, the USA, and México. The passport combines features of all three countries, and at the center is an emblematic representation of the Monarch Butterfly, which belongs to the three nations—crossing freely without borders.

In the early 1990s the California artist Daniel McCormick began to go beyond witnessing and documenting environmental damage in photographs to create artworks as ecological interventions, adding aesthetics to ecological restoration. Joined by artist Mary O’Brien, they founded Watershed Sculpture as a studio to address sites in need of environmental remediation. Their sculptures, most of which are located on public lands and in open spaces, work to restore the equilibrium of watersheds and other ecosystems adversely impacted by rural and urban communities. Using elements from the places where they work, such as cuttings from willows and other flora, McCormick and O’Brien weave natural materials into large basket forms that they then live stake onto the site. The sculptures, as they grow into silt traps, erosion control implements, fish habitat, and other ecological enhancements, eventually disappear, becoming part of the land and waters they serve to improve.

McCormick and O’Brien have been commissioned to create watershed sculptures as close as eastern Marin County, where they live, to as far away as the Louisiana coastline, where they worked to restore damage to natural storm surge barriers caused by hurricanes. Their works often become community projects involving land managers, water quality agencies, schools, and local nonprofits. In addition to creating sculptures, they are often engaged as consultants in community master planning.

In 2013, McCormick and O’Brien began working with The Nature Conservancy to create works along both the Carson and Truckee rivers. Part erosion control, part habitat development, the 360-foot-long woven structure built in spring 2014 at the River Fork Ranch Preserve in the Carson Valley is their longest structure to-date. Beginning in summer 2014 the pair drew up sketches for the work to be implemented along the Truckee River at the McCarran Ranch Site just east of Reno. This exhibition draws upon archives donated by the artists from their previous works, as well as these two local projects.

Daniel McCormick is an interdisciplinary artist with integrated skills in sculptural installation, environmental design and ecological restoration. He earned a degree in environmental design from UC Berkeley, and has studied with James Turrell. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his work has been featured in exhibitions at the Oakland Museum of California, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Bolinas Art Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA and the McColl Center for Visual Art. Mary O’Brien is an award winning sculptor and creative director who works in film, video and sculpture. She received a BA in Political Science from Marquette University, studied environmental communications at the University of Minnesota, and earned a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio Arts from UC Berkeley.

Support

The Nature Conservancy and the J. Robert Anderson Memorial Fund

Additional support

Patagonia, Inc.

Learn more about The Nature Conservancy artist collaboration here: nature.org/nevadaart.