The paintings in No Boundaries were made by nine elderly men from the Western Australian desert. These men were revered as leaders in their communities, their worldview defined by an ancient cosmology in which ancestral spirits exerted a continuing presence in everyday life. But Paddy Bedford, Janangoo Butcher Cherel, Tommy Mitchell, Ngarra, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Tjumpo Tjapanangvka, Billy Joongoorra Thomas, and Prince of Wales (Midpul) transformed the visual traditions of their people into contemporary artworks. Despite coming to art late in life, and being mostly unknown to one another, they were innovators of the highest order. Where their predecessors in the early 1970s had drawn on cartographic and figurative imagery, these men forged a new path in abstract images that broadened the possibilities of Aboriginal art.

During the last three years the Nevada Museum of Art has been working with Aboriginal artists who live in the remote Paruku region of Western Australia on a unique art & science project led by Australian painters Mandy Martin and Kim Mahood, and conservationist-rancher Guy Fitzhardinge. The paintings and materials generated by both the Aboriginal and kartiya (non-indigenous) artists were donated to the Center for Art + Environments Archive Collections in 2013 and exhibited here in the summer and fall of 2014.

There is a close connection between the Paruku paintings and the artworks in No Boundaries, which also hail from the northern part of Western Australia. Hanson Pye, the Aboriginal elder who painted two of the most important works in the Paruku project, learned how to paint from his grandfather, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, whose works figure prominently in the Scholl collection.

Within the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art there are manifold connections among disparate artists forged through a commonality of mark-making, the preservation of stories and cultural heritage, and the conservation of the natural world. The work of Australian Aboriginal artists is of special import in this context as the roots of their work reach back more than 50,000 years, and represent the oldest continuous cultural production in the world.

All the paintings in No Boundaries are drawn from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, Miami-based collectors and philanthropists.

Lead Sponsors

Nancy & Martin Cohen, and Barrick Gold

Supporting Sponsors

John & Carol Ann Badwick, Bally Technologies, John H.O. La Gatta, Stremmel Gallery, and Whittier Trust Company of Nevada

Dave Eggers’ new drawings and paintings, created especially for this exhibition, feature strange, powerful images of animals, and plaintive text—much from the Old Testament. The resulting effect is oddly spiritual, often profound and sometimes even humorous.

Eggers is widely known as a San Francisco-based writer of six critically acclaimed books, including his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. More recently he has been in the headlines for his literacy advocacy, in particular the non-profit writing and tutoring centers for children and teens that he has established across the country. However, Eggers was first focused on visual arts before he became a writer, and although his literary career is his primary focus, he is still actively engaged in an art and graphic design practice.

According to the artist, living creatures as subject matter holds a special appeal: “This past year I went back to drawing animals. The process for these pictures is pretty simple: I find an old photo of an animal that somehow has some intrigue, and I use a China marker to freehand a version of that animal onto very smooth paper.” Many of the drawings and paintings integrate short phrases, often drawn from the Bible. Eggers explained, “I think of what that animal might be thinking — if that animal had an antagonistic relationship with humans and was vying with those humans for the favor of a Catholic God.”

Eggers’ work has a singular, “stand alone” quality often associated with graphic design. He has created cover art for rock bands, designed posters for film festival, and contributed illustrations to journals and periodicals.

This is Eggers’ first museum exhibition.

In the early 1990s the California artist Daniel McCormick began to go beyond witnessing and documenting environmental damage in photographs to create artworks as ecological interventions, adding aesthetics to ecological restoration. Joined by artist Mary O’Brien, they founded Watershed Sculpture as a studio to address sites in need of environmental remediation. Their sculptures, most of which are located on public lands and in open spaces, work to restore the equilibrium of watersheds and other ecosystems adversely impacted by rural and urban communities. Using elements from the places where they work, such as cuttings from willows and other flora, McCormick and O’Brien weave natural materials into large basket forms that they then live stake onto the site. The sculptures, as they grow into silt traps, erosion control implements, fish habitat, and other ecological enhancements, eventually disappear, becoming part of the land and waters they serve to improve.

McCormick and O’Brien have been commissioned to create watershed sculptures as close as eastern Marin County, where they live, to as far away as the Louisiana coastline, where they worked to restore damage to natural storm surge barriers caused by hurricanes. Their works often become community projects involving land managers, water quality agencies, schools, and local nonprofits. In addition to creating sculptures, they are often engaged as consultants in community master planning.

In 2013, McCormick and O’Brien began working with The Nature Conservancy to create works along both the Carson and Truckee rivers. Part erosion control, part habitat development, the 360-foot-long woven structure built in spring 2014 at the River Fork Ranch Preserve in the Carson Valley is their longest structure to-date. Beginning in summer 2014 the pair drew up sketches for the work to be implemented along the Truckee River at the McCarran Ranch Site just east of Reno. This exhibition draws upon archives donated by the artists from their previous works, as well as these two local projects.

Daniel McCormick is an interdisciplinary artist with integrated skills in sculptural installation, environmental design and ecological restoration. He earned a degree in environmental design from UC Berkeley, and has studied with James Turrell. He is the recipient of numerous awards and his work has been featured in exhibitions at the Oakland Museum of California, Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, Bolinas Art Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, CA and the McColl Center for Visual Art. Mary O’Brien is an award winning sculptor and creative director who works in film, video and sculpture. She received a BA in Political Science from Marquette University, studied environmental communications at the University of Minnesota, and earned a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio Arts from UC Berkeley.

Support

The Nature Conservancy and the J. Robert Anderson Memorial Fund

Additional support

Patagonia, Inc.

Learn more about The Nature Conservancy artist collaboration here: nature.org/nevadaart.

Australian painter Larry Mitchell has been traveling to the South Pacific Islands since the late 1970s, and for more than twenty years sailing to and painting the effects of globalization and climate change on the islands in the Indian Ocean, in particular the Abrolhos group off Western Australia. He has taken these concerns across the Southern Hemisphere to as far away as the Antarctic. His works, often panoramic paintings based on detailed topographical sketches and photographs, use the techniques of visual representation deployed by voyages of exploration during earlier centuries, but ironically now in the cause of documenting the changes wrought as a result of that very colonialization.

More than twenty years ago Mitchell noticed that life in the small islands and fishing villages in the Southern Hemisphere was changing. Tropical storms were becoming more frequent and devastating, palm trees were dying off, the fishing stocks were depleted, and reef life less robust. After the turn of the last century it was apparent that industrial-scale trawler fishing was making it impossible for local fishermen to be economically competitive, and that the warming of the oceans was causing the storms to increase and ocean levels to rise. The islands of the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, and the coastal villages of Papua New Guinea were drowning. To add insult to injury, ill-advised and illegal logging was also taking a toll.

Mitchell, who had started out painting places that he loved, re-conceived this part of his artistic practice into what he now calls the 1ºC Project, which refers to the one-degree centigrade increase in ocean temperatures that is causing so many of the changes he is witnessing. His travels in the waters of the Southern Hemisphere have now taken him around the tip of Patagonia, through Tierra del Fuego, and down into the sub-Antarctic islands. This exhibition is drawn from the extensive archives of the project that Mitchell has donated to the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

Larry Mitchell was born 1953 in Northhampton, just north of Geraldton, Western Australia. Spending as much of his childhood as possible near or in the ocean, he travelled to London in the 1980s, and studied the work of everyone from the abstract expressionists through Lucien Freud with the ambition to be an abstract painter. Upon his return to Australia he worked at more than fifty jobs to support himself before landing a teaching job at St. Patricks College in Geraldton (1976-1987). After working as a lecturer at various TAFE colleges in the Perth district (1989-1992), he became a full-time painter.

Late Harvest juxtaposes contemporary art made with taxidermy with historically significant wildlife paintings, resulting in intriguing parallels and startling aesthetic contrasts. The exhibition seeks to simultaneously confirm—through historically-significant wildlife paintings—and subvert—through contemporary art and photography—viewers’ preconceptions of the place of animals in culture. An illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Featured artists

Richard Ansdell, David Brooks, George Browne, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Petah Coyne, Raymond Ching, Kate Clark, Wim Delvoye, Mark Dion, Elmgreen & Dragset, Carlee Fernandez, Richard Friese, François Furet, Nicholas Galanin, George Bouverie Goddard, Damien Hirst, William Hollywood, Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker), Alfred Kowalski, Robert Kuhn, Wilhelm Kuhnert, Bruno Liljefors, Polly Morgan, John Newsom, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Walter Robinson, George Rotig, Carl Rungius, Yinka Shonibare MBE, David Shrigley, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Amy Stein, Archibald Thorburn, Mary Tsiongas, Joseph Wolf, Brigitte Zieger, Andrew Zuckerman

Late Harvest is organized by the Nevada Museum of Art in consultation with the National Museum of Wildlife Art. The exhibition is curated by JoAnne Northrup, Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives, together with consulting curator Adam Duncan Harris, Ph.D., Petersen Curator of Art & Research, National Museum of Wildlife Art.

Major sponsors

Barrick Gold, Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Supporting sponsors

Anne Brockinton Lee and Robert M. Lee, Nion McEvoy, and Deborah and Andy Rappaport.

The most distinguished name in decorative firearms in America is Tiffany & Co. — a surprise to those who might otherwise recognize the firm as a legendary purveyor of fine silver, jewelry and luxury objects. Founded in 1837 by Charles Lewis Tiffany, what became Tiffany & Co. commenced business just one year after the young inventor Samuel Colt registered his new designs for revolving pistols and long arms with the U.S. Patent Office. In the 175 years since then, the paths of Tiffany & Co. and Colt have crossed many times. Among the other American gun makers with ties to Tiffany & Co. are Henry Deringer, Winchester, and Smith & Wesson.

The Robert M. Lee Collection is recognized as the finest selection of Tiffany & Co. arms privately owned. The collection of items in this exhibition — including three revolvers, four pistols, one rifle, and one presentation sword — is rivaled only by those on display in the Robert M. Lee Gallery of American Arms, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Tiffany’s production of presentation swords and fine guns began in the 1850s, reached a peak during the Civil War period (c. 1861-65), and continued through the close of World War I (c. 1918). The art of Tiffany & Co. arms was revived c. 1982, and remained active until c. 2001, with innovative modern era designs created by the firm’s Corporate Division. The Tiffany and Co. items in the exhibition span just over a century — they were made as early as 1893 and as recently as 1994.

All of the rare arms in the exhibition are featured in a series of books being published by Yellowstone Press, under the umbrella title The Art of the Gun. The first book in the series, Magnificent Colts Selections from the Robert M. Lee Collection, will be released in January 2012. It will be available in the Museum Store.

The objects included in this exhibition are from the private collection of Robert M. Lee. This exhibition will be presented in the Feature Gallery.

Exclusive sponsor

Wayne L. Prim Foundation

Created by Tiffany Studios in New York City at the beginning of the 20th century and named for the angels in the Biblical Book of Revelation, the seven windows in this exhibition were originally installed in the Church of the New Jerusalem in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The church was taken by eminent domain and demolished for highway construction in 1964, and the windows were crated and stored in various garages and sheds for decades until their re-discovery in 2001.

This national exhibition tour debuts the story of these seven rediscovered Tiffany Windows.

Major sponsor

I. Heidi Loeb Hegerich.

Supporting sponsors

Bally Technologies, the Wells Fargo Foundation, the Robert Z. Hawkins Foundation and McDonald Carano Wilson LLP

Additional support

John and Andrea Deane

The Canary Project, founded in 2006 by the artists Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler/Morris) initially consisted of Sayler photographing landscapes throughout the world where scientists are studying the impacts of climate change. Titled A History of the Future, the sites included melting glaciers in Peru, rising waters in the Netherlands and Venice, and post-Katrina New Orleans. Exhibitions of the photographs quickly expanded into multimedia events that were accompanied with contextual research and archival images, and then with installations and sculptures by other artists, and extensive educational and outreach materials.

The Canary Project now includes diverse works involving more than 30 artists, designers, writers, educators and scientists.

The causes and effects of global change, which encompass those of climate change, are increasingly the focus of artists around the world, whether they are working in the Antarctic, Canada, Chile, or Southeast Asia. Many of those projects rely on photographic evidence for working materials. What makes the Canary Project unique is that Sayler and Morris have partnered with local artists and others wherever they have been in residence. This enables them to expand the reach of their concern through the use of other media, including bus ads, billboards, posters, and installations such as the climate poker game Quartet for the End of Time, and the fashion performance Increase your Albedo.

This archive exhibition will include photographs, manuscripts, and objects from 2005 through 2010. The archive is in the collection of Nevada Museum of Art, Center for Art + Environment, Gift of Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris.

Anne Lindberg creates subtle drawings and installations that blur the line between traditional media. Made from colored thread and graphite, her meditative works are studies in formal abstraction, complicating viewers’ perceptions of relationships to the objects themselves.

Lindberg’s graphite drawings made from thousands of parallel lines appear to vibrate on paper. Systemic and non-representational, they are subtle, rhythmic, abstract, and immersive. Her more recent room-sized thread installations consist of thousands of strands of fine threads in different hues suspended carefully from the wall. Viewers peer through the layers to experience a shifting color palette altered by subtle lighting and shadow. In these installations, Lindberg explains that she “discovered an optical and spatial phenomenon that spans the outer reaches of our peripheral vision. The work also references physiological systems—such as heartbeat, respiration, neural paths, equilibrium—and psychological states.”

Lindberg resides in Kansas City and holds a M.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Miami University. She was Visiting Artist-in-Residence/Head of Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2005 and taught for nine years at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work has been shown at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Drawing Center in New York, the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and the Sheldon Memorial Art Museum.

Lindberg was also recently awarded the 2011 Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Award.

Australian sculptor and photographer Andrew Rogers began making large-scale geoglyphs in 1999 to create meditative spaces on each continent of the globe. Geoglyphs are large-scale designs made on the ground by either removing materials such as surface soils, gravel, and small rocks, or by rearranging preexisting stones and natural materials. Ancient geoglyphs are found throughout the desert regions of the world, as well as the Amazon Basin, Europe, and the American West. Rogers completed his series of contemporary geoglyphs in 2010, after finishing forty-seven sculptures in thirteen countries with the help of nearly 7,000 people.

At each of his sites, Rogers incorporates at least two motifs. One of them is typically the Rhythm of Life figure—a personal symbol for Rogers that represents change and is based on his early abstract sculptures. Since construction of the geoglyphs often requires the help of hundreds of residents, the second motif is chosen by the local people with whom Rogers works. Local motifs range from totemic animals, sacred symbols, and historical emblems.

The use of two motifs at each site—one chosen by Rogers and one chosen by local residents—makes these geoglyphs both site-specific, global, and a unique contribution to the history of Land Art. The photographs in this exhibition were either made by Rogers from an aircraft or obtained from commercial satellite imagery.

The photographs in this exhibition are from the Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections.