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

Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II

Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II relates the unique story of more than 1,100 men who deceived, sketched, and painted across Europe to manipulate Hitler’s armies during World War II.

Activated on January 20, 1944, the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, known as the “Ghost Army,” was the first mobile, multimedia, tactical deception unit in US Army history. Consisting of an authorized strength of 82 officers and 1,023 men under the command of Army veteran Colonel Harry L. Reeder, this unique and top-secret unit was capable of simulating two whole divisions—approximately 30,000 men—and used visual, sonic, and radio deception to fool German forces during World War II’s final year.

The unit consisted of a carefully selected group of artists, engineers, professional soldiers, and draftees, including famed artists such as fashion designer Bill Blass, painter Ellsworth Kelly, and photographer Art Kane. The unit waged war with inflatable tanks and vehicles, fake radio traffic, sound effects, and even phony generals, using imagination and illusion to trick the enemy while saving thousands of lives along the way. Armed with nothing heavier than .50 caliber machine guns, the 23^rd took part in 22 large-scale deceptions in Europe from Normandy to the Rhine River, the bulk of the unit arriving in England in May 1944, shortly before D-Day. The 23rd, along with the 3133rd Signal Service Company in Italy, helped liberate Europe from the grip of Nazi tyranny.

Produced by the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, this exhibition brings together archival photography, historical artifacts, uniforms, sketches, and life-sized recreations of inflatable military equipment used during combat.

Ghost Army: The Combat Con Artists of World War II is exclusively sponsored by the E. L. Wiegand Foundation.

While the exhibition is on view the Museum will proudly offer free admission to active military members, their families, and veterans thanks to generous support from the E. L. Wiegand Foundation.

Ghost Army education and programming sponsors:

Carole Anderson
The Bretzlaff Foundation
The Thelma B. and Thomas P. Hart Foundation
The Jackie and Steve Kane Family Trust
McDonald Carano
The Private Bank by Nevada State Bank
Whittier Trust Investment & Wealth Management

Ernesto Neto: Children of the Earth

This room-sized installation, Children of the Earth (2019) by Ernesto Neto (b. 1964), pays homage to the Amazon rainforest and emphasizes the fecundity of the natural world at large. Neto’s immersive, cocoon-like presentation invites visitors to revel in the senses as he metaphorically transforms the space into a living organism to be activated by guests. Upon passing through the gallery threshold, they encounter a vibrant, sensual environment that entices them to explore and interact with it.

This installation is part of the exhibition INTO THE TIME HORIZON.

Ellsworth Kelly: Prints from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

Ellsworth Kelly is an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, who in the years following his service in World War II, created artwork that shaped a unique style by employing hard-edged and boldly colored shapes, quite distinctive from the mainstream of American abstraction of the 1950s. This small exhibition features examples of the works for which Kelly became best known, and demonstrate Kelly’s subtle techniques emphasizing line, color, and form. All the works are on loan from the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.

Born in Newburgh, New York, Kelly was attending Pratt Institute in Brooklyn when his schooling was cut short by the rumblings of World War II. He entered U.S. military service in 1943 requesting to be assigned to the 603rd Engineers Camouflage Battalion, a tactical deception unit also known as the Ghost Army. Comprised of artists and designers, the Ghost Army used inflatable tanks, trucks, and other elements of subterfuge to mislead the Axis forces during the last year of World War II, creating entire dummy airfields, motor pools, artillery batteries, and tank formations in a matter of hours. Kelly served with the unit until the end of the European theater of World War II. His exposure to military camouflage became part of his basic art training, instructing him in the use of form and shadow, as well as the construction and deconstruction of the visible.

All the works are on loan from The Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.

Sponsors

Julie and Michael Teel | Raley’s

Water By Design

Water plays a key role in the global economy, informing agricultural, commercial, residential, and industrial development. It also sparks conflict, protest, political debate, activism, and conservation. Our collective dependence on water—and acknowledgment of its dwindling supply—demands innovation, new technologies, and creative solutions. Water by Design, drawn primarily from the permanent collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, explores the ultimate design challenge: sustaining humanity while preserving a limited natural resource.

This exhibition examines water through the lens of artists who have documented the use, exploitation, and preservation of this precious commodity. Artists include Edward Burtynsky, Pilar Cereceda, Robert Dawson, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Ann Johnston, Maya Lin, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Richard Misrach, Mary Miss, Mark O’Connell, Cara Romero, Juane Quick-To-See-Smith, Oscar Tuazon, Takako Yamaguchi, and many others. Their diverse perspectives offer insight into how artists, designers, Indigenous knowledge keepers, engineers and scientists have worked across disciplines to power innovation, question existing systems, and seek visionary solutions to help navigate the future.

This exhibition is organized in conjunction with the 2023 NV STEAM Conference, a statewide education conference focused on exploring ideas and strategies that incorporate Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math education into innovative classroom practices that foster student creativity and innovation. The NV STEAM Conference is presented in partnership with the Desert Research Institute. Learn more or register at nvsteam.org

Lead Sponsor

Tesla

Major Sponsor

Waste Management

Additional Support

Truckee Meadows Water Authority