Each fall, about 250 million Monarch butterflies migrate from the United States and Canada to Mexico, where they spend their winter until conditions favor a return flight in the spring. Inspired by this spectacular biological event, New York-based, and Mexican-born artist and self-taught lepidopterist Erika Harrsch has created a video and sound installation titled Eros-Thanatos, recorded at the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary in Michoacan, Mexico. Thousands of printed paper butterflies will cover the floor of the gallery to provide visitors with an artificial experience of the natural phenomenon as well as a reminder of the fragility of life and the power of nature.

To complement the installation, Harrsch will have pop-up performances of United States of North America. In an interactive installation, visitors fill out faux paperwork and spin a “wheel of fortune” to see if they can win a passport for “North America”—an imaginary country that combines features of Canada, the USA, and México. The passport combines features of all three countries, and at the center is an emblematic representation of the Monarch Butterfly, which belongs to the three nations—crossing freely without borders.

A Road Through Shore Pine contains 18 photographs made by the photographer in Nehalem Bay State Park, Oregon, in the fall of 2013.  In the exhibition, Adams traces a contemplative journey, first by automobile, then by foot, along an isolated, tree-bordered road to the sea. As presented through Adams’s 11 × 14-inch prints, the passage takes on the quality of metaphor, suggestive of life’s most meaningful journeys, especially its final ones. For this group of photographs, all of which were printed by Adams himself, the artist returned to the use of a medium-format camera, allowing the depiction of an intense amount of detail. Through experience gathered over more than four decades, Adams’s trees, especially the tips of their leaves, are etched with singular sensitivity to the subtleties and meanings of light.

About the artist:

Robert Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937, and moved to Colorado as a teenager. Adams was a professor of English literature for several years before turning his full attention to photography in the mid 1970s. His work is largely concerned with moments of regional transition: the suburbanization of Denver, a changing Los Angeles of the 1970s and 1980s, and the clear-cutting in Oregon in the 1990s. He has published many books well-known to those concerned with the American Landscape.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century John James Audubon created one of the greatest and most famous bodies of North American bird art known today. His more than fifty years of artistic production—consisting of paintings, drawings, prints, and writings—resulted in the body of work for which he became most famous: The Birds of America, Audubon’s unparalleled effort to catalog and describe artistically and scientifically the birds of the North American continent.

Audubon’s enormous undertaking began with the creation of more than five hundred watercolor paintings—the basis for a later edition of double elephant folio of prints called The Birds of America, made by the London engravers Robert Havell, Jr. and Sr. between 1826 and 1838. In 1863, at the height of the Civil War and a little more than a decade after her husband’s death, Lucy Bakewell Audubon, the artist’s widow, sold her family’s personal collection of 471 surviving original watercolor paintings to the New York Historical Society. Of these, 435 were paintings Audubon made in preparation for The Birds of America.

Born Jean Rabin in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1785, the son of a French naval officer and his mistress, he adopted the name John James Audubon when he immigrated to the still-fledgling United States in 1803 at the age of eighteen, avoiding conscription in the Napoleonic wars. Largely self-taught as both an artist and an ornithologist, the paintings from which the prints in this exhibition derive were renowned for their scale and for their inclusion of ornithological information about bird habitats and behaviors, a practice that was both controversial and revolutionary for the time.

Having made many long and difficult excursions through much of frontier America to collect specimens and record them for his project, by the mid-1840s, Audubon’s deteriorating health confined him to his home on New York’s Hudson River. Audubon died there in 1851, at the age of 65, leaving behind the remarkable body of work for which he is remembered.

 All of the prints on view in this exhibition are drawn from the collection of the Nevada Museum of Art. They were purchased with funds in memory of Dana Rose Richardson.

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 1,100 submissions are evaluated annually by a panel of judges made up of local artists and art professionals and exceptional work is awarded either a Gold Key, Silver Key or Honorable Mention. Gold Key artwork goes on to compete in the national Scholastic Art Awards completion. Select award winning regional entries are 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.

Sponsors

U.S. Bancorp Foundation, the Hearst Foundations, and the Nell J. Redfield Foundation.

Additional support

Wild Women Artists

2014 Scholastic Awards List Winners

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 1,100 submissions are evaluated annually by a panel of judges made up of local artists and art professionals and exceptional work is awarded either a Gold Key, Silver Key or Honorable Mention. Gold Key artwork goes on to compete in the national Scholastic Art Awards competition. Select award winning regional entries are 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.

Sponsors

U.S. Bancorp Foundation and the City of Reno Arts & Culture Commission, the Hearst Foundation, and the Nell J. Redfield Foundation

Additional support

Wild Women Artists

The Nevada Museum of Art presents artist Betsabeé Romero’s first solo museum exhibition in the western United States. One of the most revered Mexican artists of her generation, Romero is known for combining indigenous and folkloric designs with non-traditional art-making materials, and for creating inventive installations inspired by literature and diverse cultures. The artist will create a series of four new installations for the exhibition, with an overriding thematic focus on transportation—both literal and metaphorical.

Sponsor

Nevada Museum of Art Volunteers in Art (VIA)

Responding to the tradition of still-life painting, Kostianovsky creates a three-dimensional sculptural representation of the butcher shop scene in Francisco de Goya’s 1808 painting “Bodegón con costillas y cabeza de cordero.” The sculpture, made of recycled clothing, creates a dialogue about issues related to food, bounty, and excess.

Each year for the last ten years, Victoria Sambunaris (American, born 1964) has set out from her home in New York to cross the United States by car, alone with her camera. Her photographs capture the expansive American landscape and the natural and fabricated adaptations that appear throughout it. In conjunction with the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Nevada Museum of Art presents a selection of approximately forty photographs from Sambunaris’s body of work, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition at a major American museum. Hauntingly beautiful in their documentation of the declining American terrain, Sambunaris’s images celebrate the intersection of civilization, geology, and natural history, featuring trains in Texas and Wyoming, trucks in New Jersey and Wisconsin, the oil pipeline in Alaska, uranium tailings in Utah, and a unique view of Arizona’s Petrified Forest. Together, they present a sparse and vast landscape dotted by human intervention that is distinctly American. The exhibition will also include a comprehensive archival installation featuring maps, journals, and additional records of the artist’s travels.

ARTIST BIO

Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1964, Victoria Sambunaris documents, through the lens of her camera, the vast terrain of the United States and the impact that humans have had on the natural landscape. Sambunaris received a BA from Mount Vernon College in 1986 and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 1999. Her work has been widely exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States; however, her exhibition at the Albright-Knox marks her first solo museum exhibition. Her work can also be seen in numerous collections throughout the United States, including those of the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Sambunaris has participated in the Ucross Foundation Residency Program in Wyoming (2010), as well as the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Wendover Residence Program in Nevada (2004), and has been awarded a Lannan Foundation Fellowship (2002) and a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant (2000). She has held numerous teaching positions, and currently lives and works wherever her intuition takes her.

The exhibition Victoria Sambunaris: Taxonomy of a Landscape originated at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York and was organized by Christie Mazuera Davis, Program Director, Contemporary Art and Public Programs at the Lannan Foundation, and Albright-Knox Curator for the Collection Holly E. Hughes.

Additional support

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Mothers–The Art of Seeing  is inspired by land, politics and the spirit in equal measures. Well known for experimenting and pushing the technical aspects of her work with new materials such as plastic, barbed wire, and fine stainless steel wire, Underwood has created three separate series of artworks for this exhibition – each stylistically distinct, all representing interconnectivity both literal and metaphoric.

A site-specific installation inspired by the geologic formations of the nearby Black Rock Desert includes a painted form with a jagged line dividing it into two, alluding to the fence under construction which separates the United States and Mexico. Nails and fibers are integrated into the surface, along with paw prints representing the presence of migratory animals. Jimenez Underwood thereby expresses her concern about the environmental impact of the Mexico-United States Barrier. “The border is one land, always has been and always will,” Underwood says. “The plants, animals and flowers know this.”

A second series of works consists of a series of five rebozos – the long flat garment worn by women, mostly in Mexico. These weavings are notably more refined and elegant than the border piece. In fact, Underwood intends these works to serve as gifts for her maternal ancestors. “Beauty, grace, and flowers soothe the quiet rage that has permeated the Americas for more than five hundred years. Thus, when I weave, sew, or embellish, the viejitas (the old ones) seem to express their encouragement and support of my creations.”

The final series consists of two separate artworks, including a flag-like tapestry that interweaves the United States flag with the flag of Mexico. The artist states, “My audience is the general public: all who live on the American continent, all who have seen and experienced the majestic power and grandeur of the American western landscape, all who care about the environment, and most importantly, it is for those who would want their descendants to be able to enjoy these visual and necessary gifts from Mother Earth.”

Crossing borders and negotiating between three perspectives – American, Mexican, and Indian – has always been a fundamental aspect of Underwood’s persona, and the basis of her creative process. She first learned how to weave from her Mexican mother, eventually refining her knowledge through formal education. She earned a Bachelor’s and two Master’s degrees in Fine Art, eventually shifting her initial interest from painting to fiber arts.

For more than twenty years, Underwood was Professor of Art and Head of the Fiber/Textile Area in the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University in California.

Sponsor

Nevada Arts Council

Hiroshi Sugimoto (born 1948, Tokyo, Japan) explores themes of history and temporal existence through the medium of photography. His interest in art began at a young age when he discovered the writings of French Surrealist author and poet André Breton, which led to his subsequent interest in the work of Dada artist Marcel Duchamp. Sugimoto’s creative philosophy is informed by his ongoing investigation of time, memory, and metaphysics. This exhibition features selections from three of his most prominent ongoing photographic series: Dioramas (1976–), Theaters (1978–), and Seascapes (1980–).

Sugimoto’s work is in the collections of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; The National Gallery, London; The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Smithsonian Institute of Art, Washington, D.C., and Tate, London, among many others. Sugimoto lives and works in New York and Tokyo.