The Art of Judith Lowry

In her large-scale and colorful paintings, Judith Lowry (Mountain Maidu/Pit River/Washoe) chronicles the stories of her family and the legends, traditions, and complexities of her Indigenous ancestry. Born to a Euro-Australian mother, and a father who traced his roots to Native Northern California and Scots-Irish cultures, Lowry’s works reflect the Indigenous creation stories her father shared. She considers her paintings a modern extension of storytelling and a way of recording the oral histories of her family and community.

This retrospective exhibition features Lowry’s paintings alongside a concurrent exhibition featuring highlights from Lowry’s personal art collection that she recently donated to the Nevada Museum of Art. The conversations that unfold in Lowry’s paintings and the work of her friends and colleagues represent a lifetime of dialogue about ideas and issues that have shaped her life.

Lowry earned her B.A. in fine art from Humboldt State University, followed by an M.A. in painting and drawing from Chico State University. A resident of both Nevada City and Susanville, CA, and is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Pit River Tribe.

Lowry’s work has been exhibited widely and her paintings are included in the permanent collections of major museums including the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; the Peabody Essex Museum; the Crocker Art Museum; the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, the Denver Art Museum, and the Nevada Museum of Art.

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

Anthony McCall: Swell

Swell transports visitors to a different time and place. Inside a darkened gallery, beams of light intersect with a hazy mist to create a mesmerizing interplay of light and shadow. For some visitors, Swell evokes the experience of slowly floating across an ocean current or soaring through an expansive galaxy beyond our universe.

Anthony McCall (born 1940) is a British-born artist known for his ‘solid-light’ installations that he began in 1973. In 2024, McCall has solo museum exhibitions on view at the Tate Modern in London, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Design in Lisbon, Portugal. Swell was commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art for its permanent collection in 2017.

This presentation of Swell is presented in conjunction with the exhibition: Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada.

Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada

Long before humans walked the Earth, Nevada was submerged beneath the waters of an ancient sea. Explore this underwater realm and meet the giant sea creatures—also known as ichthyosaurs—that called it home. These marine reptiles lived 250 million years ago and this exhibition, Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada, debuts many of Nevada’s spectacular, but never-before-seen fossils.

Dive into Nevada’s prehistoric past through the display of original fossils, including a 33-foot specimen. Hear stories of Nevada’s early and present-day paleontologists and fossil hunters, including John C. Merriam, Annie Alexander, Charles Camp, and Martin Sander. And learn how Nevada’s extinct underwater animals connect us to a larger global community of scientific discovery.

Through a unique blend of paleontology, art, history, and design, this groundbreaking exhibition explores the rise and fall of these ancient sea creatures, revealing how an understanding of the prehistoric past and evolutionary change over time may in fact help us to anticipate our own future.

Highlights of the exhibition include: recently discovered fossils from the newest ichthyosaur species, Cymbospondylus youngorum, excavated in the Augusta Mountains of Nevada; fossils, photographs and field journal pages from the 1905 Saurian expedition to Nevada’s Humboldt Range; fossils excavated from the quarry known today as Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Historic Park; the story of fossil hunter Mary Anning, the first woman to discover an ichthyosaur fossil in Great Britain in 1811; striking examples of paleoart, revealing how artists and scientists have long worked together to imagine the world’s prehistoric marine creatures; and one of the nation’s largest collections of vintage prehistoric animal toys amassed by Jack Arata after visiting the ichthyosaur fossils in Berlin, Nevada as a young boy in the 1950s.

Accompanying the exhibition is a new children’s book celebrating women in science by honoring the achievements of Annie Alexander. Annie Alexander’s Amazing Adventure: An American Fossil Expedition in Nevada is written by Ann M. Wolfe with illustrations by Nevada-based artist Kate O’Hara. Through brilliant and colorful illustrations, readers learn about the plants and animals of the desert environment, ichthyosaur fossil discoveries and excavation, and extinction and climate science.

This exhibition is co-curated by Ann M. Wolfe, the Museum’s Andrea and John C. Deane Family Chief Curator and Associate Director, and lead paleontologist Martin Sander, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Bonn, Germany. The exhibition is designed by Nik Hafermaas of Berlin, Germany.

Lead Sponsors
Anonymous
Margaret and Charles Burback
Barbara and Tad Danz
Nevada Division of Museums and History
Reno Orthopedic Center
Elizabeth and Henry Thumann
Wayne L. Prim Foundation

Major Sponsors
The Bretzlaff Foundation
Kathryn A. Hall and Laurel Trust Company
Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller
Linda and Alvaro Pascotto
Friends of Nevada Museum of Art

Sponsors
Carole Kilgore Anderson
Betsy Burgess and Tim Bailey
The Deborah and T.J. Day Foundation
Estelle J. Kelsey Foundation
Jackie and Steve Kane
Debra Marko and Bill Franklin
Yvonne L. Murphy, PhD
Nevada Arts Council | National Endowment for the Arts
Sandy Raffealli | Porsche Reno
Reno-Sparks Convention & Visitors Authority
Robert Z. Hawkins Foundation
Whittier Trust
Tom and Bonda Young

Supporting Sponsors
Gail and Robert Aldrich
Kathie Bartlett
Chica Charitable Gift Fund
John Cunha
Tammy and Michael Dermody
Dickson Realty | Nancy and Harvey Fennell
Nancy and Alan Maiss
Nevada Mining Association
Viki Matica and Doug Brewer
Charlotte and Dick McConnell
The Thelma and Thomas Hart Foundation
Victoria Zoellner

Promotional Support
Dragon Lights Reno

Education Partners
Bureau of Land Management
PBS Reno
Terry Lee Wells Nevada Discovery Museum

We Were Lost in Our Country

This exhibition takes its inspiration from the video, We Were Lost in Our Country (2019) by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, now in the Nevada Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Nguyen’s powerful, moving-image work tells the remarkable story of the Ngurrara Canvas II (1997), which was made by a group of forty men and four women from the Walmajarri, Wangkatjunga, Mangala and Juwaliny communities and language groups. They all convened at the Pirnini outstation in the Great Sandy Desert in the Kimberley region of Australia to discuss making a Native Title Claim to the Australian government. In order to do this, the community members and Elders made a consequential decision: they would create a painting together that proved that they were the actual owners and original inhabitants of the land. To the Ngurrara people the monumental painting is a map, made from memory, of a place where their ancestors lived for over 65,000 years. It represents the direct connection to their land and the knowledge passed down for countless generations about what they refer to as Country. Fortunately, their claim was successful and thus, their achievement and legacy provides a remarkable model for the understanding of land rights, culture, and identity. In the words of Nguyen, “We Were Lost in Our Country explores questions of personal agency, inherited trauma, and intergenerational transmission, through a conversation among ancestors and descendants.” Importantly, Nguyen conveys the story through his interviews with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, so that they chronicle their own history and relationship with the land.

In the exhibition, the video is paired with a selection of paintings by artists from the Great Sandy Desert (also known as the Western Desert), some of whom were involved in painting the Ngurarra Canvas II, such as Jimmy Pike, Ngirlpirr Spider Snell, Mawukura Jimmy Nerrimah, and Tommy May Ngarralja. Most of the works are recent gifts from Margaret Levi and Robert Kaplan, and Dennis and Debra Scholl, and now are part 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.

Sponsor
Roswitha Kima Smale, PhD

Additional Support
Martha Hesse Dolan and Robert E. Dolan
Linda Frye

Nick Larsen: Old Haunts, Lower Reaches

Old Haunts, Lower Reaches is an exhibition of new work by Nick Larsen (b. 1982) that excavates history, possibility, identity, and place. Comprised of layered collage pieces, textile-based architectural models, and image projection, Larsen explores what is present and visible in the desert landscape and, perhaps more importantly, what isn’t.

Influenced heavily by the artist’s experience working for an archaeological firm focused on the Great Basin region, research for Old Haunts, Lower Reaches began when Larsen discovered a fading layer in the history of the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada. Rhyolite (located thirty miles from Death Valley National Park) served, at one point, as the proposed site for a planned queer community, Stonewall Park, envisioned by two men from Reno in the 1980s. Contextualized by the history of Rhyolite, Stonewall Park, and his own life, Larsen speculates pasts, presents, and futures for this desert locale.

In the words of the artist, “The desert is an environment defined by what it lacks, its bleakness an invitation to project possibilities for both what could have been and what might be on what is often perceived as empty.” Repurposing materials to create his layered collages and sculptures, Larsen’s speculative practice also serves as a kind of “making do,” using what is at hand to give form to an invisible history or an unattainable future.

Nick Larsen was raised in Northern Nevada and currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada

Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada is the first comprehensive exhibition and book to document the early wanderings and extended visits of the accomplished painter Maynard Dixon to the state of Nevada, Lake Tahoe, and the Eastern Sierra. From 1901 to 1939, Dixon made several trips from his San Francisco home to paint and sketch the striking landscapes of the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada. He also wrote numerous poems during his time in the American West. From Dixon’s first Nevada sketching trip on horseback with fellow artist Edward Borein in 1901, to his month-long commission documenting the construction of the Boulder Dam (now known as the Hoover Dam) in Las Vegas in 1934, Dixon captured the beauty of Nevada’s open spaces as well as its developing landscape. Among Dixon’s favorite painting subjects were old homesteads, wild horses, and stands of cottonwood trees, all of which figure prominently into over 100 paintings that will be included in this historic exhibition.

This exhibition is curated by Ann M. Wolfe, Andrea and John C. Deane Family Chief Curator and Associate Director, with scholarly contributions from Donald J. Hagerty, an independent scholar and author of six books on Dixon, including Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon. John Ott, professor of art history at James Madison University will contribute an essay on representations of labor and race in Dixon’s Boulder Dam paintings. Ann Keniston, professor of English with a specialty in American Poetry at the University of Nevada, Reno, will write on Dixon’s poems within the context of Modern poetry.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 288-page book published by Rizzoli Electa in New York and is designed by award-winning creative director, Brad Bartlett.

Major Sponsors

Victor and Victoria Atkins
The Bretzlaff Foundation
Carol Franc Buck Foundation
Gabelli Foundation | Mario Gabelli
Sandy Raffealli | Bill Pearce Motors
Phil and Jennifer Satre
Larry and Cathy Spector

Additional Support

Answerwest Inc.
Christie’s
David Dee Fine Arts
D.D. and Paul Felton
Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation
Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities
Charles Redd Center for Western Studies at BYU

Media Sponsor

PBS Reno

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless

Cannupa Hanska Luger: Speechless is on view in Durham, North Carolina at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, from February 13 – July 6, 2025.

This exhibition features the multi-disciplinary work of Cannupa Hanska Luger (b. 1979), an artist who is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold and is of Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European descent. Working with a wide array of media—video, performance, ceramic, textiles, found materials, and most recently paper—Luger activates cultural and social awareness relating to contemporary experience through his combinatory large-scale installations. He creates vivid aesthetic environments where Indigenous voices are amplified and rediscovered through the formulation of his inventive artistic vocabulary that counters a colonialist or anthropological gaze.

As part of a recent residency at Dieu Donné in New York, Luger produced dozens of hand-crafted feathers made from paper, which will be displayed throughout the Newton and Louise Tarble Gallery, along with Native American bustles made with the feathers. A large-scale radio tower made of pine trees, feathers, and found objects will anchor the installation, with a surrounding array of speakers made from ceramic components. The concept of cargo cults underpins the installation—a phenomenon that developed as a result of military campaigns sending cargo to foreign lands inhabited by Indigenous people. This happened in the South Pacific, for instance, when the US military was based there during World War II. Cults formed around the supplies that arrived from the sky, when in fact it was colonizing forces occupying Indigenous lands. In Speechless, Luger provocatively interprets and creatively amplifies the problematic colonial history and the contested concept of cargo cults from an Indigenous perspective. The title further underscores the fact that, in the words of Luger, “communication is at the root of all ritual and technological development.” The exhibition asks important questions relating to human agency, language, and implements of control. Who gets to speak? Who has to bite their tongue? Whose messages are muted? What meanings remain to be discovered? Luger asserts that the concept of the exhibition “flips the Western gaze back on itself to reflect that in present day North American culture, we are all in a cargo cult.”

The exhibition is part of Luger’s ongoing project, Future Ancestral Technologies (FAT) that explores Indigenous futures presented through a lens of speculative fiction. In the project, he probes how to share technology with his ancestors as we move into a time where the environment becomes an increasingly important, even desperate concern. Luger describes FAT as “a methodology, a practice, and a way of future dreaming that harnesses the power of science fiction to shape collective thinking and reimagine the future on a global scale.” The natural world is a critical element of this work as realized through the direct relationship he and his ancestors had with the land, the nomadic technologies Indigenous people developed, and the sacred places to which they formed connections. Cumulatively, Luger’s work encourages us to think about the earth, not as a possession that humans dominate, but rather as something omnipresent with which humans must restore their bonds. “Sustaining ourselves means belonging to the environment,” he has stated.

For the duration of the exhibition, tribal communities will be offered free admission.

Sponsors

Anonymous
Roswitha Kima Smale, PhD

Supporting Sponsors

Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller

Additional Support

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Elisheva Biernoff: Reservoirs of Time

This exhibition features the small-format paintings by the San Francisco-based artist Elisheva Biernoff, which are inspired by enigmatic photographs she encounters and collects that impact her in one way or another. The photographs she gravitates towards are taken by strangers and evoke an element of ambiguity and reverie. As a result, Biernoff is also painting and collecting other peoples’ memories, friends, relatives, and landscapes. Because she does not know the story of each photograph, other than what she intuits by looking at it, she imagines and reflects on the anonymous traces of lives and places that are for the most part unknown to her.

Painting, for her, is a way to see and understand the subject of a photograph, given she spends so much more time looking at the image than the person who took the original picture. In effect, her work manifests a great sense of care for other people’s lost or discarded memories. About her work, Biernoff reflects, “I’m getting to spend time with someone who is absent. Absent because they’re unknown to me, because they’re far away, because wherever they are, they’re either an older version of the person in the photograph or no longer living.” She imbues her work with consideration and a belief that every tiny detail of the image is momentous and meaningful. In the process she creates a re-enchantment with the object, and constructs new memories that we can imagine and share, even if their origins remain unknown.

Biernoff’s process is slow and methodical; she typically takes about three months to complete one work that is the same diminutive size of the photograph she paints. Cumulatively, she builds the image over time, adding small characteristics as she goes until eventually the work adopts a photographic quality. She makes her paintings on thin sheets of plywood and paints both sides of the wood to also represent the backside of the photograph, setting the finished works on small hand-made shelves, or above bases so that multiple perspectives are possible. Biernoff captures the reverse side of the image with equal attention to detail as the front.

The exhibition will consist of approximately ten paintings, several of which will be new, along with a group of postcards depicting photos Biernoff has taken, which will be made available to the public. Notably, this will be the artist’s first solo museum exhibition. Biernoff was born in 1980, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and lives and works in San Francisco. She received an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA from Yale University. She is represented by the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

Sponsors

Joachim and Nancy Hellman Bechtle

April Bey: 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.

In the exhibition, Bey positions herself as an alien from the planet “Atlantica,” where her mission on Earth is to observe and report as an undercover agent. This imagined world and her general interest in storytelling come from her father, who would relate childhood tales using alien narratives to illustrate how Black people were othered in the United States and The Bahamas. In contrast to the racial oppression and exploitation rampant on Earth, Atlantica offers a beautiful diasporic world in which Black people thrive and flourish.

A visual artist and art educator, Bey was raised in The Bahamas (New Providence) and now lives and works in Los Angeles, where she teaches at Glendale Community College.

April Bey: Atlantica, The Gilda Region is organized by the California African American Museum (CAAM) in Los Angeles. The exhibition was curated by Mar Hollingsworth, former visual arts curator, CAAM.

Sponsors

Nevada Arts Council
The National Endowment for the Arts

Adaline Kent: The Click of Authenticity

The first retrospective exhibition of one of midcentury America’s most innovative artists to occur in nearly sixty years, Adaline Kent: The Click of Authenticity features approximately 120 works that span Adaline Kent’s (1900-1957) entire career and chart major thematic developments in the artist’s work as it progressed from figuration to abstraction. Encompassing a diverse range of media, the exhibition includes drawings, original pictures incised on Hydrocal (a type of plaster), sculptures both large and small, and a collection of terracottas—many of which have not been seen by the public in over half a century.

The exhibition title comes from the artist herself; Kent often wrote down many of her ideas on art, filling notebooks with her thoughts. In one poetic note entitled Classic Romantic Mystic, dated April 17, 1956, Kent mused, “I want to hear the click of authenticity.” The exhibition title underscores the drive that propelled her forward in her work and life: to create art that expressed a unique approach to timeless subjects.

Kent grew up in the shadow of Mt. Tampalais, and therefore with a love of the natural world that she shared with her husband Robert B. Howard. They often spent their summers exploring the High Sierra. Kent and Howard also spent winters skiing in the Tahoe region, often staying with close friend and fellow artist Jeanne Reynal, who had a house at nearby Soda Springs. They were among the first investors of Sugar Bowl Ski Resort, and Kent’s brother-in-law, Henry Temple Howard, would design the first chairlift in California. Kent was a self-admitted “addict of the High Sierra,” and the landscape infused her work as she translated her experience of time and space in the mountains into aesthetic form.

Although Kent’s work is not widely known today, she was featured in key 1940s and 1950s exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Bienal de São Paulo, and she exhibited with the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. She was a peer of artists such as Ruth Asawa, Isamu Noguchi, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. Kent was also a member of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most productive mid-century artistic clan, which included Charles H. Howard, Madge Knight, John Langley Howard, Robert Boardman Howard, Henry Temple Howard, and Jane Berlandina.

Major Sponsors

Jenny and Garrett Zook Sutton | Corporate Direct

Sponsors

Charles and Margaret Burback Foundation
Barbara and Tad Danz
Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller
Linda and Alvaro Pascotto
Six Talents Foundation
Roswitha Kima Smale, PhD
Kaya and Kevin Stanley

Supporting Sponsors

Carole Anderson
Kathie Bartlett
Betsy Burgess and Tim Bailey
Chica Charitable Trust
Evercore Wealth Management
Galen Howard Hilgard

Additional Support

KQED
Pamela Joyner and Fred Giuffrida
PBS Reno