For more than two decades Maya Lin (b. 1959) has engaged the vocabulary of a cartographer, making artworks ranging from stand-alone sculptures to room-sized installations that help people visualize the complex natural and cultural systems operating in the world. In 2012 the Nevada Museum of Art invited Lin to make new artworks in response to the unique Lake Tahoe landscape. After visiting with scientists at the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center, Lin created a series of sculptures that make visible the bones of the planet—in part by manufacturing an architecture of its natural features.

Pin River—Tahoe Watershed (2012) is a large-scale wall installation made from thousands of straight pins showing the perimeter of Lake Tahoe and its tributaries. Straight pins have long been used as markers on maps to signify the location of the viewer or the site of a specific place or event. By aggregating thousands of custom-made pins into maps of large-scale geographic features, Lin reverses our standard notion of figure to ground. Viewers begin to realize how rivers and lakes actually consist of many thousands of individual incidents of rain and snow, flood and drought, pools and waterfalls, bays and inlets. By, literally, pinning down the watershed of Lake Tahoe, Lin maps its hydrological complexity, while at the same time unifying it as a whole.

Sponsor:

Jenny and Garrett Sutton | Corporate Direct, Inc.

James Turrell is an artist whose media are light and space, and for the last forty years he has been carefully sculpting the cinder cone of an extinct volcano near Flagstaff into one of the world’s largest and most important land based sculptures.

Turrell first studied psychology and mathematics before earning a Masters of Fine Arts degree in 1966, the year that he first began experimenting with light projections as sculpture. In the 1970s he started building “skyspaces,” which feature openings cut into or constructed as part of roofs. These apertures, which make apparent the way color changes in the sky over time, are also designed to evoke a feeling in the viewer that the sky is close enough to touch. Turrell has been commissioned since then to install dozens of these architectural sculptures in museums across the United States and Europe, and as far away as Australia. He has also created skyspaces for many private clients, including the Louis Vuitton store in Las Vegas.

Turrell has received major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Bund Long Museum of Shanghai, among others. A museum devoted solely to his work opened in Argentina in 2009. He received a MacArthur “Genius” Award in 1984, and the National Medal of Arts in 2013.

The photographs and archival materials on view in this exhibition are on loan from the Lannan Foundation. 

Sponsor

Louise A. Tarble Foundation

The Nevada Museum of Art is the largest provider of arts education in the State of Nevada. As such, one of our primary goals is to give Museum visitors the opportunity to see masterful artworks in an intimate setting and facilitate fluency in the language of art. Manet to Maya Lin presents artworks drawn from the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, augmented by select loans from private collections. These include paintings by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Mark Rothko, among others. Visitors are encouraged to experiment with visual arts literacy tools known as close looking; recognizing technique; and discussion to develop a deeper connection to these extraordinary artworks.

We live in an increasingly visual world, where images are superseding words as our primary form of communication. The ability to interpret, negotiate and make meaning from images impacts our capacity to successfully navigate language, communication, and critical human interaction. As one of the older forms of human communication, the language of art has always been a vital component for navigating our own visual literacy. In this light, constructing meaning from art becomes less an elite skill reserved for the halls of academia and more of an essential aptitude to succeed in a digital world.

Through personal engagements with both historically significant and experimental contemporary artists, we learn to look for details and we recognize important artistic processes and techniques. Most importantly, we learn to actively construct meaning through conversation.  Manet to Maya Lin has the power to show us the ways we create meaning from art: By walking through the galleries and experiencing the works of art on display, we open ourselves to the possibilities of a visually literate society.

Sponsor

Louise A. Tarble 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 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.

More than 2,200 submissions were evaluated by a panel of judges made up of local artists and art professionals. Exceptional works were awarded Gold Key, Silver Key or Honorable Mentions. Gold Key artwork goes on to compete in the national Scholastic Art Awards competition. Select award-winning regional entries will be exhibited in a month-long exhibition at the Holland Project Gallery at 140 Vesta Street in Reno. American Visions Nominees will be displayed in the Donald W Reynolds Grand Hall at the Museum.

2018 Awards: Northern Nevada Awards  |  National Awards

Sponsor

Bank of America and the Hearst Foundations

Additional support

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

EVENTS

2018 Scholastic Art Awards Gold Key Exhibition Opening Reception

Friday February 2, 2018 / 6 – 8 pm

Join us in celebrating the Gold Key award-winning students of 2018 and the opening of their exhibition at the Holland Project gallery at 140 Vesta Street in Reno. FREE Admission

2018 Scholastic Art Awards Ceremony

Thursday February 8, 2018 / 6 – 7 pm

Please join us in honoring the winners of the Scholastic Art Awards 2018. All award winners are invited to this ceremony at the Museum attended by students, parents, teachers and members of the community. Due to limited space, award-winning students may bring up to two guests and educators may bring one guest. FREE Admission

Take Me Home Huey is an art experience dedicated to Americans that served in the Vietnam War. Artist Steve Maloney partnered with Light Horse Legacy, a non-profit outreach organization supporting veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS), to create a 47-foot mixed-media sculpture made from a re-purposed U.S. Army Huey helicopter shot down in Vietnam. It’s a colorful ambassador – literally and figuratively – and a catalyst for conversations for veterans from all conflicts.  Take Me Home Huey promotes healing and aims to bring awareness to PTS, and is dedicated to the 2,709,918 Americans that served in Vietnam and never received a welcome home.

The sculpture will be installed in the Museum parking lot, complemented by a multi-day screening of the award-winning documentary Take Me Home Huey documentary and other veteran-focused programming.

Admission to the Nevada Museum of Art, and to all Take Me Home Huey programs over the three days, will be free for veterans and active service men and women.

For more information visit Take Me Home Huey.

Exclusive Sponsor

Clark/Sullivan Construction

A decade ago, Eleanor Preger never imagined herself taking photographs at Burning Man. Highlights of this Incline Village-based photographer’s work will be on view in the Nightingale Sky Room.

The paintings of Hans Meyer-Kassel (1872-1952) have hung in the castles of kings and the homes of presidents. Still today, decades after his death, his artwork can be found in state capitols, university campuses, historical societies, court houses, government buildings and museums across the United States and Europe. His artwork lives in archives, books, magazines and even on a United States postage stamp—as well as in the homes of scores of Nevada families. Classically trained as a painter at the University of Munich in his native Germany, Meyer-Kassel immigrated to the United States at the end of World War I to escape the post-war tumult. He endured the Great Depression in New York City, but after being invited to exhibit in Pasadena, California in 1935, he became enamored with the American West. Within a year, he and his wife, Maria, moved to Reno, later relocating to Carson City, before settling in Genoa, where he worked from his small studio at the base of the Carson Range. Meyer-Kassel loved Nevada from the time of his first visit, and over the next two decades, he built his reputation as one of the most prolific and successful artists in the region. While his primary interest was portraiture, he also became known for his vividly colored floral still lifes, and his depictions of Nevada’s vast desert expanses, river valleys, and cloud-filled skies.

This exhibition is co-curated by longtime Reno art specialist Jack Bacon and Ann M. Wolfe, Andrea and John C. Deane Family Senior Curator and Deputy Director at the Nevada Museum of Art. It includes more than seventy paintings, with additional drawings, photographs, ephemera and artifacts drawn from private and institutional collections, including the Douglas County Historical Society and the Nevada Historical Society. Particular emphasis is placed on Meyer-Kassel’s romance with Nevada, where from his home in Genoa, his more formal, classically influenced style mellowed into a painterly perfection that resulted in breathtaking interpretations of Nevada’s landscape.

The first major book on Hans Meyer-Kassel, published by Jack Bacon & Company in association with the Nevada Museum of Art, accompanies the exhibition. The primary essay is authored by longtime Nevada historian Guy Clifton, with a foreword by Ann M. Wolfe. The 204-page catalogue includes over 100 full-color plates. Jack Bacon has published numerous books since 1983, including: Jack Johnson vs. James Jeffries “The Fight of the Century,” The Art of Lyle V. Ball, Dempsey in Nevada, Preserving Traces of the Great Basin Indians, and many others.

Major Sponsor

Louise A. Tarble Foundation

Sponsors

Anonymous; The Thelma B. and Thomas P. Hart Foundation; Nevada Arts Council; The Private Bank by Nevada State Bank; Sandy Raffealli/Porsche of Reno; Volunteers in Art of the Nevada Museum of Art; Edgar F. Kleiner

Supporting Sponsors

Anonymous; Irene Drews; Jenny and Garrett Sutton | Corporate Direct, Inc.

Lead Media Sponsor

Sierra Nevada Media Group

Media Sponsors

Getaway Reno-Tahoe; KUNR Reno Public Radio; Nevada Magazine; Reno-Tahoe International Airport; Tahoe Quarterly

The John and Mary Lou Paxton Collection spans over sixty years of art making and collecting. Growing up in Missouri in the 1940s, John Paxton became fascinated with art when the famous American Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton moved in next door. That introduction started John’s life-long passion for collecting fine art.

In the 1950s, John and Mary Lou moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where John joined the board of the Fort Worth Art Museum and began to build his personal collection of contemporary art.  The collection includes important pieces by artists ranging from minimalist compositions and quiet landscapes, to Native American art of the Southwest. After moving to the San Diego area in 1980, John continued to visit galleries, often meeting and becoming friends with the artists whose works he collected.

In 2006, the Nevada Museum of Art mounted an exhibition of highlights from the Paxton Collection and announced the couple’s intention to donate their artworks to the Museum upon their passing. While we mourn the loss of this lovely couple, we celebrate their thoughtful and generous gift to the Nevada Museum of Art and our community.

Kristin Posehn is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer who works with fragments of architecture. Her 2008 public artwork, Reclamation, was based on the facade of a school in the ghost town of Metropolis in remote northeastern Nevada. Metropolis was founded in 1910 as the state’s first master planned community, but by 1925 it was abandoned due to insufficient water rights. The only structure still standing is the brick-and- stone arch that was the school’s entrance. Posehn reconstructed the arch in wood at a 1:1 scale in Almere, the Netherlands, which she then clad in high-resolution color photographs of the original facade. The result was to dis-locate/re-locate the structure into a living context on the last undeveloped plot in the center of Almere. The elaborate but ephemeral work was dismantled and the surviving materials are now housed in the Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections.

Posehn’s 2015 project A House Made of Air and Distance and Echoes was an architectural sculpture built by the artist and assistants on an abandoned airfield outside Vacaville, California. The work references the “Wedding Cake House,” a well-known example of “carpenter gothic” located in Kennebunkport, Maine. From this point of reference, Posehn “wiped away the house and manipulated its architectural frosting via digital process and hours of construction.” After completion of the piece in 2015, she photographed it, often in dense fog.

Posehn–who is a sculptor, writer, and photographer–repositions architecture in the physical world so we can consider the relationships between built and natural environments, between art and architecture, between the real and the fictional. Posehn’s archive materials are part of the Center for Art + Environment’s investigation into the relationships among built and natural and virtual environments.

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.

More than 1,600 submissions were evaluated by a panel of judges made up of local artists and art professionals. Exceptional works were awarded Gold Key, Silver Key or Honorable Mentions. Gold Key artwork goes on to compete in the national Scholastic Art Awards competition. Select award-winning regional entries will exhibited in a month long exhibition at the Holland Project Gallery at 140 Vesta Street in Reno. American Visions Nominees will be displayed in the Donald W Reynolds Grand Hall at the Museum.

All award winners are invited to a ceremony at the Museum attended by over 400 students, parents, teachers and members of the community. National award winners have the opportunity to attend a ceremony in New York City.

2017 Scholastic Art Awards Announcement for Northern Nevada

Related Programs and Events:

2017 Scholastic Art Awards Gold Key Exhibition Opening Reception

2017 Scholastic Art Awards Ceremony

Lead sponsor

Bank of America

Additional support

City of Reno Arts and Culture Commission, the Nell J. Redfield Foundation and the Wild Women Artists