“All voluntary travel is characterized by longing for some elusive element that lies out of reach in daily life.” –Lucy Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place

In her Off Road series, photographer Hoor Al Qasimi (Emirati, b. 1980) adopts travel as her subject matter. These images speak of physical displacement, of removing oneself from one’s customary environment, of seeking insight by looking beyond the obvious well-worn path and gazing to the territory that lies beyond. The landscapes documented by these photographs consist of everything that was visible to Al Qasimi from the highway during a trip across the US; yet the title, Off Road, suggests a fascination with the terrain invisible from the vantage point of the vehicle. Which stunning vistas might have been captured had the artist ventured beyond the familiarity of the highway?

In these landscape photographs mood is conveyed by weather as the skies shift from bright and sunny, to gloomy and overcast, to blustery and dark. Telephone poles, road markers, and fences define boundaries and mark the presence of civilization, alluding to land ownership, government presence, and communications systems. The ploughed fields and farmland which appear early in the “journey” are quickly replaced by vast plains, towering buttes, and arid desert. Moving through space, traveling down the “open road,” serves as a metaphor for emotional passage.

The final image in the series, a side-view mirror of the vehicle offering a reflected glimpse of the artist’s hand grasping the camera,recalls photographer Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) and his America by Car series.

Celebrate a bygone era during this exhilarating presentation of vintage neon signs that once graced some of Nevada’s most iconic restaurants, casinos, hotels, and business establishments. From flashing incandescent bulbs to candy-colored neon tubes, the nostalgic pieces featured in The Light Circus: Art of Nevada Neon Signs have not been seen publicly since they illuminated street side locales decades ago. Presented in the Museum’s Feature Gallery, the exhibition on view October 13 through February 10, 2013.

The iconic M-shaped cowboy chaps from the long-demolished Mapes Hotel Casino have been re-electrified and will hang alongside the flickering bulbs of Reno’s Harold’s Club and Nevada Club signs, as well as those of the Sahara, a longtime casino icon of the Las Vegas stip. Other forgotten favorites that have been refurbished for the exhibition include signs from Parker’s Western Wear, the Holiday Hotel, and El Cholo, one of Nevada’s oldest Mexican restaurants located in Las Vegas. A last minute addition to the exhibition includes the sign that hung for many years above Reno’s legendary Deux Gros Nez coffee shop, which closed in 2006.

For well over a decade, Reno- collector Will Durham has worked to build this collection of vintage neon signs. For the past year, Durham and the Nevada Museum of Art spent countless hours restoring the light fixtures, controls, and electrical components of each piece, along with their painted and porcelain surfaces. For Durham, who acquired his first sign in 1996, collecting the pieces has been a labor of love. In many cases, he has gone to great lengths to save signs that would have otherwise been discarded. In some cases, salvaging the signs took years of persistence, but Durham recognized that saving them was crucial to preserving Nevada’s history—and that sharing them with the public was even more important.

Lead sponsor

The Bretzlaff Foundation

Major sponsors

Earl and Wanda Casazza, Casazza SLV, IGT, E. L. Cord Foundation and George and Irene Drews

Supporting sponsor

E. L. Wiegand Foundation

Additional support

City of Reno Arts and Culture Commission, Charlotte and Dick McConnell and the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency

This exhibition surveys contemporary art made by American Indians in the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada region. In January 2011, the Nevada Museum of Art, in association with the Pyramid Lake Museum/Visitors Center in Nixon, Nevada, issued a call for artists to submit works addressing issues relating to concepts of the changing environment. The purpose of the project is to encourage the creation of new artworks in a range of media.

The 400,000-square mile-region known as the Great Basin is the largest watershed in North America which does not drain to an ocean.

Featuring contemporary artworks by Dugan Aguilar, Ben Aleck, Melvin J. Brown, Farrell Cunningham, Black Eagle, Billy Hawk Enos, Donna Featherstone, Micqaela Jones-Crouch, Jean LaMarr, Frank LaPena, Judith Lowry, Jack Malotte, Melissa Melero, Ramon Murillo, Clayton B. Sampson, Paul Stone, Ray Valdez and Alan Wallace.

Artists were encouraged to consider the following themes: a) ecology, ecosystems, and natural environments, b) animals, animal life and the environment, c) land use, the built environment, conflict, and politics; d) spiritual worldviews and the environment; e) changing relationships to the environment.

Premiere sponsor

Charles Redd Center for Western Studies

Major sponsor

Barrick Gold of North America and the National Endowment for the Arts

Additional sponsor

The Nevada Arts Council, a state agency

Additional support

Eldorado Hotel Casino

Kim Abeles is a Los Angeles artist who explores and maps her urban environment to chronicle broad social issues. Trained originally as a painter in the 1970s, she began working on community based art projects in the 1980s. Abeles is widely regarded as an important figure in Southern California activist and feminist art, both movements that are closely connected to art and environment. Abeles uses a variety of media to bring attention to problems such as air pollution, waste generation, and the scarcity of fresh water. Instead of using traditional art materials such as paint and canvas, however, she draws with smog, quilts with trash, and uses common materials such as clothing, furniture, and household goods to connect people’s everyday lives with larger issues.

Abeles began to garner national attention with The Smog Collector, a project in which she used smog as a medium to create portraits of everything from politicians to food, making apparent the sources and effects of pollution. The project was covered by many media outlets, among them the CBS Evening News, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal. Her work has since toured internationally and been collected by major institutions throughout the country. Abeles was born in Missouri, received a B.F.A. degree in painting from Ohio University and then a M.F.A. degree in studio art from the University of California, Irvine in 1980. Kim Abeles continues to live and work in downtown Los Angeles.

The materials in this exhibition are drawn from the artist’s extensive donation to the Archive Collections of the Center for Art + Environment. Rich with sketches, manuscripts, correspondence, and notebooks from throughout her career, the archive provides a unique story of how an artist who was first trained to work in a studio developed into an avant-garde activist and leader in the eco-art movement.

Support

John Ben Snow Memorial Trust and Metabolic Studio

The Oxford English Dictionary defines our contemporary understanding of the word “draw” as “to form a line by drawing a tracing instrument from point to point of a surface.” A drawing is “an arrangement of lines which determine form.” But the root of the word in Old English, dragan, meant to pull or drag; in other Teutonic tongues it indicated to carry or bear something.

Hook, Line & Sinker is an exhibition of drawings construed in the widest sense, an anthology of practices deployed by artists to configure the world, examples of the singular discipline that underlies every other way of making a mark in the world. All of visual art sits atop a line, even if one is not visible within the work itself; a line is present if for no other reason than all art has a boundary, a frame, an ending where it abuts the rest of the world. That’s because lines are the fundamental fact of vision, which at all times seeks to define what is seen.

Based in Miami, Debra and Dennis Scholl have been fearless and strategic collectors of contemporary art for 35 years. This exhibition, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, offers viewers an opportunity to expand their understanding of how drawing is defined in the 21st century. From Alice Channer’s Untitled (hair clips), to Jason Hedges’ Caymus and caymus special select cabernet sauvignon, experimental art-making materials abound in this selection of 40 works by 18 artists.

Lead sponsor

Enid A. Oliver, ChFC/Ameriprise Financial

Supporting sponsor

Sotheby’s

Additional support

Stremmel Gallery

Jean-Pierre Bonfort’s Travelling project is comprised of cellphone photographs taken during multiple trips over a five-year period from a moving train between Grenoble and Paris, France. The images do not appear in sequence, but instead are arranged by the artist to balance subject matter, light, and color. The work is thus not a record of the journey so much as of the artist’s state of mind.

Bonfort trained as a traditional landscape photographer, but in 2005 he began to use his cellphone’s camera as his primary tool. This modest appliance does not allow him to manipulate the image: to zoom, to change lenses, to choose shutter speeds, depth of field, or any of the thousands of options available on digital cameras. The cellphone camera limits his view of the world to a fixed wide-angle gaze.

Bonfort often prints his images on inexpensive materials, and creates small books. In 2011 Bonfort visited Reno, Virginia City, and Pyramid Lake and took hundreds of pictures with his cellphone. Bonfort’s books from that trip, and other trips, are featured in the CA+E Research Library.

Support

John Ben Snow Memorial Trust and the Metabolic Studio

Frohawk Two Feathers is the artistic alter-ego of Umar Rashid, born in 1976 in Chicago, Illinois. A performer, writer and artist, his work is filled with real and imagined colonial histories and often takes the form of mixed media paintings that resemble Native American ledger paintings. Central to the understanding of Two Feather’s work is a construct he calls “Frengland.” The artist explained, “Frengland is a place I created that presupposes that 18th century England and France were never at war with each other and that they merged into one huge, unstoppable colonial empire. Imagine all the countries they conquered put together. They’d put a flag in most of the world.” And Those Figures Through the Leaves. And That Light Through the Smoke is the second installment of Two Feathers’ “The Americas” series, which takes place on the continents of North and South America.

The title of this exhibition derives from “Sleeping Ute,” a song by the Brooklyn, New York-based band Grizzly Bear. It tells the story of the 1792-1794 journeys of two young, optimistic “Frenglish” military scouts and their companions.

Although they have lost support for their mission—the Frenglish Republic withdrew all funding due to the threat of war on the European continent—and are harried at all sides by man and nature, the scouts and their entourage continue on their mission to reach the Pacific.

The exhibition will include acrylic and ink portraits of key Frenglish characters featured in Two Feather’s narrative, and imaginary colonial maps, among other objects based on the artist’s extensive research into the customs, clothing and weaponry, and geography of the areas represented.

“Although my work has taken other forms (folds, slabs, sheets, zip folds) my fundamental interest in the detachability of signification as a way to re-construct form and desire continues to be an underlying motivation in my work.” –Linda Besemer

Linda Besemer (b. 1957) is an abstract painter based in Southern California celebrated for her stunning, optical works that upend commonly held notions of what makes a painting. Her work subtly expresses, through formal means, her distinct political outlook. Normally one expects a painting to consist of pigment, whether oil, acrylic or watercolor, applied to some sort of ground, whether canvas, panel or paper. In an exciting subversion of tradition, Besemer creates double-sided paintings (“folds”) of pure acrylic pigment without a ground. Rather than framing her paintings, Besemer drapes these pliable works over rods attached to the wall. More recently, she began creating sculptural “slabs,” in which layer after layer of vibrant acrylic color is built up to a thickness of up to five inches, then the mass is sculpted, revealing colors, shapes and patterns.

In the early 20th century, abstraction was envisioned as a revolutionary common language. In the 2nd half of the century, abstraction became increasingly apolitical. While updating abstraction for the 21st century, Besemer’s work contains implicit political and social critique, hearkening back to the movement’s radical roots.

Born in South Bend, Indiana, and educated at Indiana University (BFA) and the Tyler School of Art (MFA), Besemer lives in Los Angeles where she teaches painting, drawing, and critical studies at Occidental College.

The Nevada Museum of Art, long known for exhibitions and collections related to the natural and built environment, now ventures into virtual environments with the commission of Bloom. Created by collaborators Ken Goldberg, Sanjay Krishnan, Fernanda Viégas, and Martin Wattenberg, Bloom was envisioned as a tribute to the late American painter Kenneth Noland (1924-2010). Noland was a pioneer of Color Field painting with an innovative approach to color.

In this internet-based Earthwork, unpredictable live movements of the Hayward Fault are detected by a seismograph, transmitted continuously via the Internet, and processed to generate an evolving field of circular blooms. The size and position of each bloom is based on real-time changes in the Earth’s motion, measured as a vertical velocity continuously updated from the seismometer. Horizontal position based on time; vertical based on magnitude of rate of change; and size based on time between events. Colors come from photographs of flowers found on photo-sharing site Flickr.

Referencing landscape painting and abstraction, Bloom creates a sublime experience of the growth and fragility of the natural world.

Special thanks to Richard Allen, Doug Neuhouser, and Peggy Hellweg of the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory for the live data feed from the Hayward Fault seismometer station and to David Nachum, Vijay Vasudevan, Woj Matusek for work on earlier versions, and to Anne Wagner for insights.

Launching a long-term collaboration with New York’s El Museo del Barrio—the leading Latino cultural institution in the U.S. dedicated to Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean art—the Nevada Museum of Art presents a wide-ranging and diverse survey of their stellar art collection. This lively exhibition presents more than fifty objects including sculpture, painting, prints, photographs, and mixed media installations addressing themes such as identity politics, colonialism, emotional connections to homeland, and contemporary visual culture. Artworks created by living artists are contextualized with a concise selection of ancient Taίno stone carvings.

Voces y Visiones: Highlights from the Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York, was jointly organized by the El Museo del Barrio and the Nevada Museum of Art.

Major sponsor

IGT

Media sponsor

Entravision