The exhibition examines and celebrates work by artists on both sides of the Mexican-American border to reveal a variety of cultural aspects as they emerged in the years after the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) to the present day. This unique survey of over 100 works takes a close look at paintings, prints and photographs created over the past eighty years. The works included are by some of the best-known Mexican artists—Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Gabriel Orozco, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Flor Garduño—as well as Mexican-American artists such as Judithe Hernández, Roberto Juarez and Robert Graham. Visitors to the Miradas exhibition will have the opportunity to observe the works of a number of artists who have been attracted to and inspired by Mexico’s ancient civilizations and modern artistic theories alike.

Many artists of Mexican descent working in the United States continue to implement social ideas and educational theories first taken up by modern Mexican artists at the end of the Mexican Revolution. They also understand and react to the sociopolitical climate in the United States and the global art and theories of the second half of the twentieth century, incorporating contemporary regional politics along with their broad understanding of their diverse heritages. The Miradas exhibition allows visitors to survey this rich trajectory.

This exhibition was originally curated by Cesáreo Moreno of the National Museum of Mexican Art in collaboration with Bank of America’s corporate art program staff. This exhibition is provided by Bank of America Art in Our Communities program.

Dennis Parks is a ceramist who moved to the rural ghost town of Tuscarora, Nevada in 1966, where he established the internationally-known Tuscarora Pottery School. Parks is regarded as a leading practitioner of the single-firing method (normally pottery is fired twice) and for firing with discarded crankcase oil. His techniques are spelled out in his guide published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. More than 10,000 copies have been sold.

In April 2013, a patron and staff group from the Nevada Museum of Art visited A27 Atelier Haus in Berlin, Germany. After spending a week visiting the city’s cutting-edge contemporary galleries, museums, and alternative spaces, entering Leiko Ikemura’s lofty, light-filled, minimalist space was an entirely different experience—like stepping into a temple dedicated to art. In her spacious studio, large scale-paintings punctuated the walls, and ceramic and bronze sculptures were elevated on low pedestals.

Swiss architect Philipp von Matt designed this combination studio and residence for his wife, Japanese-born artist Ikemura. This exhibition presents a selection of paintings and sculptures by this accomplished and well-established artist, with a special focus on work that addresses aspects of the natural world: landscape and the female figures and animal creatures that inhabit it. Ikemura’s works describe conditions of loneliness, longing, and existential searching. Solitary doll-like female figures recline, dreaming with closed eyes, while a sculptural figure covers her face with her hands, a gesture of both grief and transcendence of earthly reality. Other figures sit pensively, seeming to morph into features of the landscape they inhabit, becoming indivisible from the natural world. Oval ceramics in the form of human faces, displayed low on the ground, feature holes for their mouths, alluding to breathing and thereby existence. These works are informed by the artist’s experiences as an expatriate, her personal relationships, and the historically significant things that have occurred in her lifetime, such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011.

Born in Tsu, Japan, Ikemura left her native land at age twenty-one to escape “the strictness of Japanese tradition.” Beginning in the late 1970s, she pursued language studies in Spain, and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Seville. She moved to Switzerland in the 1980s, living in Lucerne and Zurich, where she began to exhibit her work in group exhibitions. Ikemura’s first major solo exhibition was held in Bonn in 1983, launching her career in Germany. Before long she moved to Germany permanently, settling in Cologne in 1984. By 1992, she was offered a teaching post at the Berlin University of Fine Arts, where she taught painting from 1992 to 2015.

Her work is documented in numerous catalogues and books, and is included in internationally prominent public collections, such as the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France; The Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland; the Kunstmuseum Linz, Lentos, Museum of Modern Art Linz, Austria; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Osaka, Japan, among others. Ikemura’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe and Asia, however this is her first solo exhibition in the United States.

Exhibition sponsors

Kathie Bartlett; Barbara and Tad Danz; John C. Deane; Linda Frye; Marcia and Charles Growdon; Mae and Walter Minato; Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller; Suzanne Silverman

A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America tells the story of extraordinary American folk art made in New England, the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and the South between 1800 and 1925. Created by self-taught or minimally trained artists, the works exemplify the breadth of American creative expression during a period of enormous political, social, and cultural change in the United States.

Rooted in the family as well as the preservation of personal and cultural identity, the diverse works on view showcase a distinguished collection of American paintings, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts.  Highlights include rare portraits by such artists as Ammi Phillips and John Brewster, Jr.; vivid still lifes and landscapes, including a mature Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks; whimsical trade signs and figure and animal sculptures; and distinctive examples of furniture from the German American community. These unique works are drawn from the collection of Barbara L. Gordon who, over two decades, assembled a broad-reaching collection of American paintings, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts of the highest quality.

This exhibition is drawn from the Barbara L. Gordon Collection and is organized and circulated by Art Services International, Alexandria, Virginia.

Lead Sponsor

The Bretzlaff Foundation

Major Sponsors

Clark/Sullivan Construction; Eldorado Resorts; Sandy Raffealli, Porsche of Reno

Supporting Sponsors

Carol Ann and John Badwick; Blanchard, Krasner & French; Irene Drews in memory of J. George Drews; Whittier Trust Company of Nevada

Anna McKee’s Reliquary is a sculptural installation comprised of 3,405 glass ampules that she sewed to 678 silk panels in a long hanging row creating a subtly swaying wave form. The entire piece suggests a graph. Shifting hues hint at untold levels of information and a deep measure of time. Though abstract, the installation’s form is the expression of 68,000 years of temperature history from an ice sheet.

McKee collaborated with Seattle composer/sound artist Steve Peters, who created a multi-channel sound piece, taken from recordings of the reliquary ampules. Steve makes music and sound for many contexts and occasions using environmental recordings, found/natural objects, electronics, acoustic instruments, and voices. His work is often site-based, attentive to the subtle nuances of perception and place.

McKee’s art practice is informed by an interest in history and environmental sciences. She seeks evidence of time and meaning in the land, especially at the intersections of human activity. Glacial ice became a metaphor for the deep memory of the natural world. Living in the Puget Sound Basin, a glacially sculpted environment has been a potent influence.

In 2009, McKee visited the WAIS Divide Ice Core field camp in Antarctica through the National Science Foundations Artist and Writers program. She interviewed scientists, watched ice being drilled from a two-mile deep ice sheet and spent hours drawing the white open space.

Time on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was a powerful influence on her work, and for several years she gestated ideas for a larger installation. In 2012, Eric Steig, Professor of Glaciology at the University of Washington, invited her to fabricate the glass ampules for the WAIS Reliquary at his research lab, using surplus water samples from over three kilometers of glacier ice. He and several graduate students also shared data and insights that contributed to the design of the reliquary.

Commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art, New York-based artist Anthony McCall has created a new immersive light installation—a compelling example of a virtual environment. British-born McCall is known for his ‘solid-light’ installations. Occupying a space between sculpture, cinema and drawing, the new work will become part of the Museum’s Contemporary Art Collection.

Anthony McCall (born 1940) is a British-born artist known for his ‘solid-light’ installations, a series that he began in 1973 with his seminal Line Describing a Cone, in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly evolves in three-dimensional space.

McCall’s work is represented in numerous collections, including Tate, London, England; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Hirshhorn, Washington, DC.

Major Sponsor

Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne

Much like visual art, the enduring tradition of cowboy poetry is a rich and vital form of cultural expression in the American West. This exhibition is inspired by the classic and touching poem Equus Caballus, written by Texas poet Joel Nelson to honor the important role and contributions horses have made to the world. The exhibition combines a unique audiovisual presentation of Nelson reciting the poem with a selection of historical and contemporary paintings, photographs, and sculptural works drawn from the permanent collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, alongside a handful of special items on loan from private collections.

Joel Nelson’s poem Equus Caballus (the scientific or Latin name for “horse”) is especially powerful because it is one of the few poems that gives a voice to an animal whose longtime relationship to humans is emotionally layered and historically complex. Nelson’s poem elicits a range of feelings and emotions that resonate with anyone who has spent time with horses and respects them as patient and faithful animals.

In many ways, the visual artworks included in this exhibition also reflect the myriad roles and relationships that horses have had—and continue to have—with humans. From artworks that relate the longtime importance of horses to indigenous people, to photographs of cowboys with their animal partners on the range, and prints and paintings that capture the stoic pride of these stately animals, visual artists using a variety of media their effort to elucidate the essence of the human relationship to the horse.

This exhibition was developed jointly by the Nevada Museum of Art in collaboration with the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada.

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.

Over the past century, American artists have approached the subject of work from many points of view and with a variety of artistic styles. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, artists frequently chose to idealize scenes of work. Often this idealization took the form of agricultural landscapes featuring hard-working, farmers who epitomized the spirit of American democracy. During the 1920s and 1930s, this attention was re-focused on industrialization, and images of physically-fit, muscular workers came to symbolize the nation’s advanced industrial technology. Simultaneously, however, many Realist painters sought to convincingly portray the deplorable urban working conditions that were encountered by many of the nation’s poorest workers—a trend that continued during the era of the Great Depression, when artists shifted their attention to documenting the hardships faced by migratory, agricultural workers.

Perhaps the most influential event to impact the production of art in the United States was the launch of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal Program that was intended to put millions of unemployed Americans back to work in the 1930s. The inauguration of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—a special fine arts component of the New Deal—aimed to employ thousands of artists across the country. While many of the paintings, sculptures, and public murals produced under the auspices of the program featured American men and women at work, the program itself helped to validate the important contributions artists make to society and formally invited them to join the venerable ranks of the American workforce.

For nearly fifty years, Don Dondero was celebrated as one of Reno’s most notable and accomplished publicity photographers. From capturing civic celebrations and commercial commissions, to significant regional events and Reno’s illustrious celebrity nightlife, Dondero was one of northern Nevada’s most called-upon photographers for over fifty years. Dondero loved taking pictures and rarely turned down a job.

Born in Ely, Nevada in 1920 and raised in Carson City, Dondero served as a lieutenant in the United States Navy in World War II before taking up photography. Upon Dondero’s return to Reno, he picked up his first camera and never looked back. Along with his wife Liz Dondero, he built a successful photography business—focusing on freelance work, Don worked primarily out of a downtown Reno studio located above the CalNeva Casino (located at 150 N. Virginia St.) From 1973 to 1978, the Dondero family operated a popular camera shop—Parklane Cameras — located in Park Lane Mall.

A prolific photographer, Dondero supplied a steady stream of images to both regional and San Francisco Bay Area newspapers. As northern Nevada’s primary Associated Press photographer, his work was also distributed widely round the world. Upon Dondero’s passing in 2003, he left a treasure trove of visual material that documents and memorializes a bygone era—and cements his legacy as one of northern Nevada’s most prolific and important photographers

The photographs on view are on loan from the private collection of Debbie Dondero and were all shot in Reno, Nevada during the 1950s.  The exhibit was organized by guest curator Carol Buckman.

This exhibition presents eleven extraordinary paintings by Southern California artist Daniel Douke dating from 2007-15. (more…)