It is generally agreed that the art historical movement known as Land Art—associated with marking, sculpting, and engaging with the Earth itself—was born in the late 1960s and early 70s as an outgrowth of Conceptual and Minimalist art. While Land Art has global roots, it is most frequently associated with the monumental desert works made in the American West by artists such as Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Robert Smithson.

Land Art is continually changing. Increasingly, contemporary artists and practitioners seek to disrupt conventional definitions of the genre by critiquing, re-contextualizing, performing, and engaging in environmental and social dialogue about art of the land. These creative practices traverse conventional boundaries of art, geography, science, environmentalism and activism, while breathing new life—and needed perspective—into Land Art.

Nevada is home to numerous iconic Land Art interventions, and the Nevada Museum of Art has a long history of commissioning new artworks, publishing books, organizing public programs, and collecting artworks and archives related to this field. Drawn primarily from the permanent art and archive collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, this exhibition combines work by prominent and lesser-known artists whose works interrogate the definition of Land Art and question the established canon. While much of the world remains enchanted by the monumental land-based desert works that emerged in the American West in the late 1960s and 70s, there is equal interest among practitioners seeking to create, critique, contextualize, perform, and engage in environmental and social dialogue about art of the land.

Artists featured include Vito Acconci, Lita Albuquerque, Edgar Arceneaux, Milton Becerra, Marilyn Bridges, Stig Brøgger, Jackie Brookner, Beverly Buchanan, Judy Chicago, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Agnes Denes, Elmgreen & Dragset Chris Drury, Marcos Ramíerz Erre, Justin Favela, Ana Teresa Fernández, Regina José Galindo, Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Maya Lin, Metabolic Studio, Daniel McCormick and Mary O’Brien, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Ana Mendieta, Mary Miss, Dennis Oppenheim, Trevor Paglen, Postcommodity, Cai Guo-Qiang, Reko Rennie, Ugo Rondinone, Cauleen Smith, Michelle Stuart, David Taylor, Oscar Tuazon, Andrea Zittel, and Raheleh Zomorrodinia

This spotlight exhibition highlights a single painting by Harry Fonseca. Stone Poem #4 was recently acquired for the Dorothy S. and Robert J. Keyser Greater West Collection at the Nevada Museum of Art. In addition to the painting, the Center for Art + Environment acquired a gift of significant archive materials related to the artist’s research, design, and creation of the Stone Poem series.

Harry Fonseca (1946-2006) was born in Sacramento, California, and is of Nisenan Maidu, Hawaiian, and Portuguese ancestry. In the late 1980s, he began a major series of paintings called the Stone Poems. The series was inspired by his visits to rock art sites in the Coso Range of the Eastern Sierra and Canyonlands National Park in Utah. Stone Poem #4 evokes figural images similar to those found in the Great Gallery, a prehistoric rock art site located in Horseshoe Canyon in Utah.

In 1995, Fonseca traveled to New Zealand for a cultural exchange and symposium with Indigenous artists from the Pacific Rim and Pacific Islands. During this trip, he befriended Aboriginal painter Judy Watson and collaborated on new works with her. It is possible to draw comparisons between the paintings of Fonseca and other contemporary Aboriginal Australian painters.

Shifting Horizons is an exhibition featuring artworks and archival objects that have been gifted to or purchased by the Nevada Museum of Art in the past three years, demonstrating our ongoing commitment to integrating a range of artistic voices. It includes a diverse range of objects—from painting and sculpture to photography and video—that capture our focus on creative interactions with natural, built, and virtual environments. Artists in the exhibition include both familiar friends and those that are newly associated with the Museum, from Laura Aguilar and Nicholas Galanin to Allison Janae Hamilton and Tony Feher.

This exhibition is generously sponsored by the Nevada Museum of Art Collections Committee: Kathie Bartlett, Barbara Danz, Linda Frye, Marcia Growdon, Martha Hesse, Maureen Mullarkey, Kristi Overgaard, and Peter Stremmel.

Organized on the 90th anniversary of the Nevada Museum of Art, this exhibition brings together landscape paintings by the watercolor painter Lorenzo Latimer, alongside those of the artists he mentored, including Mattie S. Conner, Marguerite Erwin, Dora Groesbeck, Hildegard Herz, Nettie McDonald, Minerva Pierce, Echo Mapes Robinson, Nevada Wilson, and Dolores Samuel Young. These artists joined together to formally found the Latimer Art Club in 1921. The Latimer Art Club is still active and celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2021.

The Latimer Art Club was the founding volunteer organization of the Nevada Art Gallery, which is known today as the Nevada Museum of Art. The San Francisco-based painter Lorenzo Latimer first visited Fallen Leaf Lake on the south side of Lake Tahoe in summer 1914. It was there that he began to teach annual plein air painting classes. In 1916, he was invited by two students to teach a painting class in Reno. He returned for the next twenty years and became a cherished member of the Northern Nevada arts community.

The watercolor paintings by Latimer and his students of the Truckee Meadows, Washoe Valley, Lake Tahoe, and Pyramid Lake are foundational to the history of Northern Nevada’s outdoor painting tradition. By 1931, the Latimer Club joined together with the visionary humanist scholar and scientist Dr. James Church to establish the Nevada Art Gallery, now the Nevada Museum of Art. The founding group planned art exhibitions and interdisciplinary public programs for the nascent museum for many years.

The exhibition is co-curated by Nevada art specialist Jack Bacon and Ann M. Wolfe, Andrea and John C. Deane Family Senior Curator and Deputy Director. The exhibition will be accompanied by a major book with an introduction by Wolfe and an essay by Alfred C. Harrison, a nineteenth-century painting scholar and art historian with a special emphasis on California art.

This exhibition is accompanied by a juried exhibition of the present-day Latimer Art Club members on view in the Wayne L. Prim Theater Gallery from July 10 – September 1, 2021.

About the Book

Commemorating the history of the Latimer Art Club
Essays by Ann M. Wolfe, Alfred C. Harrison, Jr.
Hardcover, 375 pages, published by Jack Bacon & Company

Lead Sponsor

Wayne L. Prim Foundation

Major Sponsors

The Bretzlaff Foundation

Sponsors

The Thelma B. and Thomas P. Hart Foundation
Sandy Raffealli | Bill Pearce Motors
The Phil and Jennifer Satre Family Fund at the Community Foundation of Western Nevada
Jenny and Garrett Sutton | Corporate Direct

Supporting Sponsors

Kathie Bartlett
The Chica Charitable Gift Fund
Michael and Tammy Dermody
Dickson Realty
Irene Drews in memory of J. George Drews, watercolor painter and longtime instructor in the Nevada Museum of Art E. L. Cord Museum School
Edgar F. Kleiner
Sierra Integrated Systems
Betsy and Henry Thumann

Additional Support

Enid Oliver, Financial Consultant & Wealth Manager

Rose B. Simpson is a mixed-media artist, whose work addresses the emotional and existential impacts of living in the 21st century, an apocalyptic time for many analogue cultures. Her figures are often powerful matriarchs or androgynous beings who channel the spirits of high art, hip hop, lowrider culture, and long-lost ancestors. Simpson comes from a tribe famous for the ceramics its women have produced since the 6th century AD. An apprentice to her mother, an acclaimed Native artist, Simpson grew up expressing herself in three-dimensions.

For the Nevada Museum of Art, Simpson has created a new body of work including four abstracted monumental earthen figures of varying sizes that appear to ascend from the gallery floor. Simpson’s work resonates with the awareness that natural resources extracted to create object-based artworks can become powerful tools for social reflection and evolution.

Simpson (b. 1983, Santa Clara Pueblo, NM) has a BFA from the University of New Mexico, an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, and an MA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Solo exhibitions of her work have been mounted at Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Santa Fe, NM; Pomona College Museum of Art; and Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Portland Art Museum; Princeton University Art Museum; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Simpson lives and works at The Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico.

Major Sponsors

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Six Talents Foundation

Since 1999, Northern Nevada middle and high school students have been invited to submit their artwork to the Scholastic Art Awards competition. The Museum’s annual presentation of the Scholastic Awards is scheduled in conjunction with the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, a national program designed to identify America’s most gifted young artists and writers. This program has honored some of our nation’s most celebrated artists including Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, Michael Sarich, Cindy Sherman, Robert Redford, and Andy Warhol.

Students in grades 7-12 (age 13 and up) submit their art which is then judged by a panel of local artists and art professionals. Artworks are eligible for the highest award of Gold Key, a Silver Key, or an Honorable Mention based on originality, technical skill, and an emergence of a personal vision. Along with going on to compete in the national competition, select works will be shown in a joint exhibition presented by the Nevada Museum of Art and The Lilley Museum of Art, the School of the Arts, and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Northern Nevada Award Announcement

Scholastic Art Awards 2021 Announcement

Exhibition

February 5 – March 5, 2021

Gold Key Works
On view at Sheppard Contemporary / Church Fine Arts building, University of Nevada, Reno

Parking is available at the Brian J. Whalen Parking Complex, bottom floor.

American Visions Nominated Works
On view at Nevada Museum of Art / Donald W. Reynolds Grand Hall

Virtual Award Ceremony

Friday, February 19, 2021 / 6 – 7 pm / Facebook LIVE and YouTube

Sponsors

Anonymous
City of Reno Arts & Culture Commission
Nell J. Redfield Foundation
Wild Women Artists

Extreme environments—from the Arctic Circle to outer space—have long provoked curiosity and wonder. In more recent times, these seemingly uninhabitable places have attracted attention as potential sites for development, future migration and colonization. 

Armed with this awareness, artists, designers, and engineers have worked across disciplines to power innovation, question existing systems, and seek visionary solutions to help navigate the future of extremes. These practitioners help us to understand our connection to this world and other worlds. They tackle difficult concepts to make the inaccessible accessible, and the invisible visible.  

This exhibition is organized in conjunction with the 2021 NV STEAM Conference, a statewide education conference focused on exploring ideas and strategies that incorporate Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math education into classroom practices that foster student creativity and innovation. The NV STEAM Conference is presented in partnership with the Desert Research Institute’s Science Alive program and supported by the Nevada Department of Education and the Governor’s STEM Advisory Council. 

This exhibition presents work by a group of artists who use a variety of media–from oil on canvas to computer code—to manifest the concept of flow in different ways. Whether channeling the rhythms of the natural world such as waves or wind into their work, or engaging in meticulous repeated gestures, these artists produce work that manifests finely honed skills and great effort—but that effort is invisible. Featured artists include Rowena Meeks Abdy; Lita Albuquerque; Karl Benjamin; Emilie Clark; Fawn Douglas; Joseph Feddersen; Rachel Hayes; Michael Heizer; Lordy Rodriguez; Hiroshi Sugimoto; Camille Utterback; and Takako Yamaguchi.

Drawn from the Museum’s permanent collection, Animal Crossings includes works that reveal various facets of the human-animal interface. The artists included in the exhibition reflect on ways that humans love, admire, study, hunt, and kill animals for a multitude of different reasons. 

As the world grapples with a pandemic resulting from a novel animal-human virus transmission, some people have chosen to cope with coronavirus-induced isolation by escaping virtually—for example, through video games. This exhibition’s title is inspired by a popular new video game, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released by Nintendo in March 2020, that invites players to interact with cute animal characters in a completely imaginary world. The artworks on view remind us that artists have always sought a deeper understanding of human interactions with animals.

This spotlight exhibition highlights a single painting by John Yoyogi Fortes. Drawing from multiple sources including Filipino culture, comics, pop culture, and art history, Fortes layers symbols, marks, and text into his multi-dimensional works, including this mixed media from the permanent collection of the Nevada Museum of Art.