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
Chica Charitable Gift Fund
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

Hershman Leeson has been probing new technologies and making works about cyborgs since the 1960s, while also engaging with issues of surveillance, gender, and privacy. She proffers the cyborg as an inevitable outcome of human development in a technologically driven society. Defined as “a fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by mechanical elements built into the body,” cyborgs are antecedents of artificial intelligence. This exhibition presents three of Hershman Leeson’s most recent videos (made in the last five years) that explore the interrelationship between humans, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence. Similarly, in this exhibition Hershman Leeson presents three different techno-female personas, in three related videos—in the last one she introduces her newest alter-ego.

In the first work, Shadow Stalker (2019) Leeson alerts people to the fact that everyone has an online alter ego, created perhaps unwittingly, through the data driven footprints they generate. In Logic Paralyzes the Heart (2021)—the first video to be acquired as part of the Museum’s Altered Landscape Collection—we meet the very first cyborg, played by actress Joan Chen. While on a retreat, she reflects on the past and offers her visions of a troubled future, particularly in relation to climate change. The final, and most recent work, Cyborgian Rhapsody: Immortality (2023), is the follow-up to Logic Paralyzes the Heart. Like in the previous video, she introduces a new cyborg, created with the help of AI, who goes by Sarah and bears a striking resemblance to the artist. Born in the future (2029), Sarah meets two human friends online, after interrupting their social media feeds. In each of these works, Hershman Leeson tells a cautionary tale about the potential misuses and abuses of technology, which has already begun to radically reshape human relationships, societies, and the history of life on Earth.

Major Sponsor
Thomas Lee Bottom

Supporting Sponsors
Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation
Darby and David Walker

This collaborative wall project by Tadáskía (b. 1993) and Ana Cláudia Almeida (b. 1993) explores the spiritual dimensions of visual forms through hybrid approaches to painting and drawing. Tadáskía’s graphic tangles of colors and lines incite us to accompany the winding forms as if following a path of a traveler who mediates a familiar earthly world and a far-off mystical space. Through prints, paintings and drawings, Almeida creates movements on fabric and paper that record reflections on religion, nature and sexuality, and the constant mutability that underlies life and artistic making. Both artists emphasize change, in their material processes—through the transference of gestures across different supports—and in the transitive, ever-shifting images. Though abstract, their work sparks associations with otherworldly landscapes and trance-like visions. As a sort of ritual enactment of their processes coming together, Tadáskía and Almeida render a panoramic tableau sprawling along the wall in the Museum’s Theater Gallery.

Tadáskía and Ana Cláudia Almeida both live and work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Tadáskía’s first solo exhibition in a museum in the United States is currently on view at MoMA, New York until October 14, 2024. Her work was featured in the 35th São Paulo Biennial, choreographies of the impossible (2023), with a large-scale installation featuring her wall drawings and sculpture. Ana Cláudia Almeida is currently an MFA candidate in painting and printmaking at Yale University. She has had solo exhibitions at the galleries Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Quadra in Brazil. This is her first project in a US museum.

SPONSORS
Pamela Joyner and Fred Giuffrida

When Langston Hughes Came to Town explores the history and legacy of Langston Hughes through the lens of his largely unknown travels to Nevada and highlights the vital role Hughes played in the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. James Mercer Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes studied at Columbia University in 1921 for one year and would eventually become one of leading writers of the Harlem Renaissance. A writer with a distinctive style inspired by jazz rhythms, Hughes documented all facets of Black culture but became renowned for his incisive poetry.

The exhibition begins by examining the relationship of this literary giant to the state of Nevada through a unique presentation of archival photographs, ephemera, and short stories he wrote that were informed by his visit to the area. The writer’s first trip to the Silver State took place in 1932, when he investigated the working conditions at the Hoover Dam Project. He returned to the state in 1934, at the height of his career, making an unexpected trip to Reno, and found solace and a great night life in the city.

The presentation continues with work created by leading artists of the Harlem Renaissance who had close ties to Hughes, including sculptures by Augusta Savage and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, photographs by Griffith J. Davis, and paintings by Beauford Delaney, Romare Bearden, Aaron Douglas, Norman Lewis, Hugo Gellert, Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, and Archibald J. Motley, Jr. The range of work on display foregrounds the rich expressions of dance, music, and fashion prevalent during the influential movement.

The final section of the exhibition features contemporary artists who were inspired by Hughes and made work about his life. Excerpts from Hughes’s poems and short stories are juxtaposed with related works of art, demonstrating how his legacy endures in the twenty-first century. Isaac Julien, Kwame Brathwaite, Deborah Willis, PhD., Benny Andrews, Gordon Parks, Chase R. McCurdy, Arvie Smith, and David Shrobe are the artists whose works are included. Julien, for example, in his renowned series Looking for Langston reimagines scenarios of Hughes’s life in Harlem during the 1920s. His black-and-white images are paired with Hughes poem “Poem (To F.S.).” Similarly, Brathwaite’s impactful photographs highlight the continuation of the Harlem Renaissance through the Black pride movement of the 1960s and are coupled with the poem “My People.” Finally, Glenn Ligon’s prints from his America neon sculptures relates to Hughes’s poignant poem “Let America Be America Again,” which leave viewers to ponder the question of belonging in America.

This exhibition is organized by the Nevada Museum of Art and curated by Carmen L. Beals, Associate Curator and Outreach Director, Las Vegas.

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
Chica Charitable Gift Fund
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

This special exhibition features highlights from the personal collection of Judith Lowry (Mountain Maidu/Pit River/Washoe), an accomplished Native American artist and enrolled member of the Pit River Tribe, who recently donated over 125 artworks to the Nevada Museum of Art.

Assembled over many decades by Lowry and her husband Brad Croul, the Lowry & Croul Collection of Contemporary Native American Art includes paintings by prominent Native American contemporary artists with a West Coast and Great Basin focus.

The collection contains works by some of the West Coast’s most noted Native American artists, including paintings by Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu/Hawaiian/Portuguese), Frank LaPena (Nomptipon Wintu), and Frank Day (Konkow Maidu). Important and rare story paintings by Dalbert Castro (Maidu) are also included, along with works by Jean LaMarr (Northern Paiute/Pit River) and George Longfish (Seneca and Tuscarora). An exceptional selection of photography by Lowry’s cousin Dugan Aguilar (Northern Paiute/Maidu/Pit River) is included, as well as many traditional beaded and woven works by Lorena Gorbet (Mountain Maidu), Shiwaya Peck (Maidu), and Tiffany Adams (Chemehuevi/Koyoomk’awi/Nisenan).

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with The Art of Judith Lowry.

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. 

Free admission for Tribal Communities

Major Sponsors
Judy and David Collins
Friends of Nevada Museum of Art
Sandy Raffealli | Mini of Reno

Sponsors
San Manuel Gaming and Hospitality Authority
Phil and Jennifer Satre

Supporting Sponsors
Kathie Bartlett
Betsy Burgess and Tim Bailey
Yvonne Murphy, PhD and Murray Mackenzie
Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians