Reko Rennie (Gamilaroi/Gamilaraay people) was born in 1974 in Melbourne, Australia, where he lives today. Rennie explores his Aboriginal identity through a broad array of media, including spray paint, prints, sculpture, paste-ups, light projections and site-specific installations. Through his art he provokes discussion surrounding Indigenous culture and identity in contemporary urban environments. Largely autobiographical, his commanding works combine the iconography of his heritage with stylistic elements of graffiti.

Merging traditional diamond-shaped designs, hand-drawn symbols and repetitive patterning to subvert romantic notions of Aboriginal identity, Rennie often uses camouflage patterns to reference the ways in which Aboriginal people have had to hide, blend in, and conceal their identity.

In Australia, Always Was Always Will Be is a familiar and important protest chant, often used by Aboriginal people in demonstrations. The phrase adapted by Rennie as the title of this site-specific mural serves as a reminder that Australia was, and always will be, Aboriginal land. Says the artist, “It’s an important reminder, and also an acknowledgment to the communities of the Washoe, Paiute, and Western Shoshone, who call the Great Basin home.”

Reno-based mural artist Erik Burke assisted Rennie with the realization of Always Was Always Will Be.

Sponsors

Barbara and Tad Danz

Additional Support

Anonymous
Charlotte and Dick McConnell
Sylvia and Jim Thacker
Peggy Lowndes
Jean and Jerry Pfarr

Photographer David Maisel’s archive of the Proving Ground project lends rare insight into his encounter with one of the most secretive of American military zones. The archive reveals the depth of his photographic and time-based media investigation of Dugway Proving Ground, a classified site covering nearly 800,000 acres in a remote region of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. From its inception during World War II to the present day, Dugway’s primary mission has been to develop and test chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs. After more than a decade of inquiry, Maisel was granted rare access to photograph the terrain, testing facilities, and other aspects of this deliberately obscured region of the American atlas. He photographed the site from both the air and the ground.

This body of work explores questions surrounding military power, national security, land use, and the limits of technology and human endeavor. Proving Ground is a critical response to the extraordinary formal and political aspects embedded at Dugway, in Maisel’s words, a “hidden, walled-off, and secret site that offers the opportunity to reflect on who and what we are collectively, as a society.”

Materials for this exhibition are drawn from David Maisel’s archive of the project held at the Center for Art + Environment.

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 Art Awards is scheduled in conjunction with the Scholastic Art and 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.

Every year, students submit their art which is evaluated by a panel of judges made up of local artists and art professionals. Exceptional works are awarded Gold Key, Silver Key, or Honorable Mention. Gold Key artworks advance to compete in the national Scholastic Art Awards competition. Select Gold Key works were also shown in an exhibition at the Holland Project Gallery at 140 Vesta Street in Reno, February 22 through March 20, 2020. American Visions Nominees are displayed concurrently in the Donald W Reynolds Grand Hall at the Museum.

Please note that the American Visions artwork at the Museum will be on view for an extended time. This extension does not apply to the Gold Key exhibition at the Holland Project.

Submissions for the 2020 Scholastic Art Awards were due by December 12. Click here to learn more about the submission process.

Congratulations to the award winners for the Scholastic Art Awards 2020!

Sponsors

City of Reno Arts & Culture Commission
Nell J. Redfield Foundation
Heidemarie Rochlin

Supporting Sponsors

Wild Women Artists

This exhibition features more than 50 large-format photographs by the renowned Italian photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni (1941-2019), who is best known as the premier documentarian of Land Art in America. After meeting the legendary New York gallery owner Leo Castelli in 1969, Gorgoni was introduced to artists including Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude—a veritable Who’s Who of artists in New York City and Europe.

He first became known for making portraits of these individuals, but it was not long before he was invited by Heizer, Smithson, and De Maria to travel to the American West, where they were making some of the most iconic Earthworks of the twentieth century. Gorgoni was the first photographer to collaborate with these artists, and his images often serve as the definitive photographic record of their groundbreaking projects.

In 2016, the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art acquired Gorgoni’s archive, containing more than 2,000 images documenting Land Art. The images offer a unique and unparalleled record of how these artists’ iconic projects were created.

Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs will include Gorgoni’s photographs of works by Christo & Jean-Claude, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Ugo Rondinone, Charles Ross, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson. The photographs will become part of the Carol Franc Buck Altered Landscape Photography Collection at the Nevada Museum of Art.

About the Book

The first career-spanning book of the work of Gianfranco Gorgoni, whose iconic photographs established Land Art as one of the major movements of the twentieth century.

Essays by Ann M. Wolfe, Germano Celant, and William L. Fox

Hardcover, 256 pages, published by Monacelli Press and the Nevada Museum of Art

Major Sponsors

Carol Franc Buck Foundation
The Cashman Foundation
Kim Sinatra + Family

Sponsors

Barbara and Tad Danz
Kathryn A. Hall and Laurel Trust Company
Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller
Linda and Alvaro Pascotto

Many of the photographs in this exhibition were purchased with a bequest from Nancy L. Peppin.

The artworks that comprise the E. L. Wiegand Collection date from the early twentieth century to the present and represent various manifestations of the work ethic in American art. While many emphasize men or women undertaking the physical act of labor, others focus on different types of work environments ranging from domestic interiors and rural landscapes to urban cityscapes and industrial scenes. By expanding the definition of the term work ethic to encompass a broad range of activities undertaken by a diverse spectrum of people from various cultural and socioeconomic groups, the collection seeks to acknowledge all those who have devoted their lives to the tireless pursuit of work.

Edwin L. Wiegand was a successful entrepreneur and inventor who made Reno his home in 1971. He died in 1980 at the age of 88, and the E. L. Wiegand Foundation was established in Reno in 1982 for general charitable purposes.

The Nevada Museum of Art thanks the E. L. Wiegand Foundation for their generous, ongoing support of this unique permanent collection.  

WORK is an exhibition by the artist and Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama. This is his first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The exhibition includes a series of new drawings made on documents and notes that Rama creates during meetings and phone calls, as well as ceramic sculptures and a floor-to-ceiling wallpaper that emulates the wallpaper in his office at the Ministry in Tirana. His drawing practice has developed in close parallel with his career as a politician. Rama views art as an essential element in a functional society. A clear example is his initiative to paint the facades of decaying communist bloc buildings after being elected Mayor of Tirana in 2000, an undertaking Rama has described as “a political action, with colors.”The Exhibition WORK has traveled from Kunsthalle Rostock in Germany and has been adapted to the exhibition space of the Nevada Museum of Art.

Edi Rama lives and works in Tirana. A former professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and author of several books, his works have been exhibited in numerous solo, two-person, or group exhibitions including at the Venice Biennale (2017); São Paulo Biennial (1994); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2004); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); the Musée D’art contemporain de Montréal (2011); Biennale of Marrakesh, Morocco (2015); The New Museum, New York (2016); and Kunsthalle Rostock (2019). Edi Rama began his political career in Albania as the Minister of Culture in 1998. He was the Mayor of Tirana from 2000-2011. Rama was elected Prime Minister of Albania in September 2013, following a landslide victory in the general elections, and his government has since embarked the path of reforms that aim to bring Albania closer to the European Union. He is currently serving his second term as Prime Minister.

A new publication, also entitled WORK, has been published by Hatje Cantz and produced by carlier | gebauer, the Nevada Museum of Art, and Kunsthalle Rostock to accompany the exhibition. WORK is the first publication to present Edi Rama’s drawings, ceramic sculptures, and wallpaper and features texts by Martin Herbert, Ornela Vorpsi and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

The Nevada Museum of Art has been selected to participate in a five-year exhibition partnership with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) made possible by Art Bridges and the Terra Foundation for American Art. The local kickoff to this multi-year, multi-institutional partnership started with “Vote Nevada Art,” a month-long community-wide campaign (July 11 – August 11, 2019) where the public voted to determine which artworks would hang on the walls of the Museum.

SAAM made eight paintings available as contenders for this race, including works by Childe Hassam, David Hockney, Edward Hopper, George Inness, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Angel Rodríguez-Díaz, and Severin Roesen.

The top three winners were Hassam’s The South Ledges, Appledore, 1913; Ryder’s House, 1933, by Hopper; and O’Keeffe’s Hibiscus with Plumeria, 1939.

These three treasures from the nation’s preeminent collection of American Art will be on view in America’s Art, Nevada’s Choice: Community Selections from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, opening during First Thursday on November 7, 2019, with a press conference and Unveiling Celebration.

To learn more about this five-year collaboration with SAAM and four partner museums across the American West read the press release.

From the first voyages to the “new world” in the 1500s to 21st-century late modernity, globalization has impacted quality of life and contributed to a stratified society. This exhibition assembles a multigenerational group of artists working in sculpture, painting, photography, and video art, who uncover markers of class through their work. These markers identify a complex hierarchy in social structures that define and shape us. Without You I Am Nothing explores society’s relationship to labor, consumption, and materiality by examining and encouraging viewers to consider these topics.

This exhibition is curated by Alberto Garcia, UNR Art History graduate.

This exhibition complements Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, a new look at this iconic artist through her art, fashion, and style. On view July 20 – October 20, 2019.

“Maybe it seems mad…that I go out like this and live out under the stars and the sky for a few days—but I am like that.”

Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, 1940

The beauty and elegance of Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings were prompted by the intimacy of her experience with the Southwest’s natural forms, especially in relationship to her paintings of the landscape surrounding her home at Ghost Ranch. Further from home, she made repeated camping trips to draw and paint at three extraordinary sites in the Southwest: Glen Canyon, Utah, and places in New Mexico that she referred to as “The White Place” and “The Black Place.” This exhibition presents a selection of fifty objects of camping gear belonging to O’Keeffe—everything from her flashlight to her Stanley thermos. The long drive from the artist’s home at Ghost Ranch made it an impossible day trip; painting and drawing the barren hills required camping. Between 1936 and 1949, the artist returned to these sites many times to create more than a dozen major works inspired by the astonishing landscape, isolated far off the road and away from all civilization.

Kesler “Kes” Woodward is one of Alaska’s most renowned painters, known for his colorful paintings of northern landscapes. He taught art for two decades at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and is now Professor Emeritus. In 2001 he was appointed the Harriman Scholar and Expedition Artist for the 1899 Harriman Expedition Retraced, a reenactment of one of the most ambitious scientific explorations made during the 19th century.

Organized by Edward Harriman, a wealthy railroad magnate, the Harriman Expedition was a 9,000-mile exploration along the coast of Alaska. The top American experts of the day were invited, including geologists, botanists, foresters, ornithologists, paleontologists, zoologists, painters, photographers, and writers. Explorers John Muir, John Burroughs, and George Bird Grinnell, and the then-unknown photographer Edward Curtis were among the group.

In 2001 Thomas Litwin of Smith College led a trip to follow the path of the original expedition. Two dozen scientists, artists, and writers left Prince Rupert, British Columbia aboard the Clipper Odyssey, to follow Harriman’s itinerary through the Inside Passage, up the Gulf of Alaska and along the Aleutian Archipelago, then northward through the Bering Sea. Four weeks later they made their final stop in Nome, Alaska.

William Cronin, a contemporary team member and a renowned historian, noted: “What we are doing is seeing this landscape at two moments in time. We’re seeing it through that expedition in 1899 and seeing it at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Materials for this exhibition are drawn from Kes Woodward’s archive of the journey held at the Center for Art + Environment.