This special exhibition features highlights from the personal collection of Judith Lowry, an accomplished Native American artist and enrolled member of the Pit River Tribe, who recently donated over 125 artworks to the Nevada Museum of Art.

Assembled over many decades by Lowry and her husband Brad Croul, the Lowry Croul Collection of Contemporary Native American Art includes paintings by prominent Native American contemporary artists with a West Coast and Great Basin focus.

The collection contains works by some of the West Coast’s most noted Native American artists, including paintings by Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu/Hawaiian/Portuguese), Frank LaPena (Nomptipon Wintu), and Frank Day (Konkow Maidu). Important and rare story paintings by Dalbert Castro (Maidu) are also included, along with works by Jean LaMarr (Northern Paiute/Pit River) and George Longfish (Seneca and Tuscarora). An exceptional selection of photography by Lowry’s cousin Dugan Agular (Northern Paiute/Maidu/Pit River) is included, as well as many traditional beaded and woven works by Lorena Gorbet (Mountain Maidu), Shiwaya Peck (Maidu), and Tiffany Adams (Chemehuevi/Koyoomk’awi/Nisenan).

This exhibition is presented in conjunction with The Art of Judith Lowry.

In her large-scale and colorful paintings, Judith Lowry (born 1948) chronicles the stories of her family and the legends, traditions, and complexities of her Indigenous ancestry. Born to a Euro-Australian mother, and a father who traced his roots to Hammawi Band Pit River/Mountain Maidu/Washoe/Scots-Irish cultures, Lowry’s works reflect the Maidu/Pit River creation stories her father shared. She considers her paintings a modern extension of storytelling and a way of recording the oral histories of her family and community.

This retrospective exhibition features Lowry’s paintings alongside a concurrent exhibition featuring highlights from Lowry’s personal art collection that she recently donated to the Nevada Museum of Art. The conversations that unfold in Lowry’s paintings and the work of her friends and colleagues represent a lifetime of dialogue about ideas and issues that have shaped her life.

Lowry earned her B.A. in fine art from Humboldt State University, followed by an M.A. in painting and drawing from Chico State University. A resident of both Nevada City and Susanville, CA, and is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Pit River Tribe.

Lowry’s work has been exhibited widely and her paintings are included in the permanent collections of major museums including the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; the Peabody Essex Museum; the Crocker Art Museum; the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, the Denver Art Museum, and the Nevada Museum of Art.

The first retrospective exhibition of one of midcentury America’s most innovative artists to occur in nearly sixty years, Adaline Kent: The Click of Authenticity features approximately 120 works that span Adaline Kent’s (1900-1957) entire career and chart major thematic developments in the artist’s work as it progressed from figuration to abstraction. Encompassing a diverse range of media, the exhibition includes drawings, original pictures incised on Hydrocal (a type of plaster), sculptures both large and small, and a collection of terracottas—many of which have not been seen by the public in over half a century.

The exhibition title comes from the artist herself; Kent often wrote down many of her ideas on art, filling notebooks with her thoughts. In one poetic note entitled Classic Romantic Mystic, dated April 17, 1956, Kent mused, “I want to hear the click of authenticity.” The exhibition title underscores the drive that propelled her forward in her work and life: to create art that expressed a unique approach to timeless subjects.

Kent grew up in the shadow of Mt. Tampalais, and therefore with a love of the natural world that she shared with her husband Robert B. Howard. They often spent their summers exploring the High Sierra. Kent and Howard also spent winters skiing in the Tahoe region, often staying with close friend and fellow artist Jeanne Reynal, who had a house at nearby Soda Springs. They were among the first investors of Sugar Bowl Ski Resort, and Kent’s brother-in-law, Henry Temple Howard, would design the first chairlift in California. Kent was a self-admitted “addict of the High Sierra,” and the landscape infused her work as she translated her experience of time and space in the mountains into aesthetic form.

Although Kent’s work is not widely known today, she was featured in key 1940s and 1950s exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Bienal de São Paulo, and she exhibited with the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. She was a peer of artists such as Ruth Asawa, Isamu Noguchi, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. Kent was also a member of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most productive mid-century artistic clan, which included Charles H. Howard, Madge Knight, John Langley Howard, Robert Boardman Howard, Henry Temple Howard, and Jane Berlandina.

Major Sponsors

Jenny and Garrett Zook Sutton | Corporate Direct

Sponsors

Charles and Margaret Burback Foundation
Barbara and Tad Danz
Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller
Linda and Alvaro Pascotto
Six Talents Foundation
Roswitha Kima Smale, PhD
Kaya and Kevin Stanley

Supporting Sponsors

Carole Anderson
Kathie Bartlett
Betsy Burgess and Tim Bailey
Chica Charitable Trust
Evercore Wealth Management
Galen Howard Hilgard

Additional Support

KQED
Pamela Joyner and Fred Giuffrida
PBS Reno

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

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

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

Tahoe’s hydrological impact extends far beyond its shores. The 400-square-mile greater Lake Tahoe watershed contains 63 tributaries, or streams, that flow into it from adjacent Sierra peaks. Lake Tahoe’s waters flow out and down the Truckee River 122 miles to the north and east before feeding Pyramid Lake, a terminus desert lake whose surface area rivals that of Tahoe and whose resources sustain the indigenous Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe.

Nineteenth-century artists depicted the region’s water in abundance—as a plentiful resource that could seemingly never be depleted. Recreation and agriculture, however, began to impact the larger watershed system’s water levels, clarity, and ecological makeup. The politics of how the lake’s water is distributed outside the Tahoe basin continues to be a complicated matter.

Today scientists race to study human impacts on Lake Tahoe so that conservation measures can be implemented to help manage the diverse interests that depend on the lake’s output. Federal officials declared parts of the Tahoe Basin a natural disaster area in 2014 due to severe drought and lack of water from diminishing snowmelt. Many living artists have created works that reflect on how issues related to water quality, distribution, and conservation affect the lake’s future.

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)

This powerful and haunting series of fifty photographs documents and examines the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities in the United States.

For the past five years, photographer Richard Ross has interviewed and photographed both pre-adjudicated and committed youth in the juvenile justice system. To date, he has visited more than 250 facilities in 30 states—including Nevada. Ross has photographed in group homes, police departments, youth correctional facilities, juvenile courtrooms, high schools, shelters, classrooms, interview rooms, and maximum security lock-down and non-lock-down shelters, to name just a few. By photographing the children from behind or by obscuring their faces, the children’s identities are always kept anonymous.

Ross received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Florida, Gainesville and teaches art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was principal photographer for the Getty Museum and their Villa Project and does editorial work for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, Vogue, La Repubblica, and Architectural Digest.

Exclusive Sponsor

Wilhelm Hoppe Family Trust

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

This exhibition samples the Nevada Museum of Art’s diverse and growing contemporary art collection alongside a selection of artworks on loan from private collectors. The Museum recognizes Contemporary Art as a crucial area of investment, and curators seek out works for the permanent collection that reflect the institution’s ongoing commitment to artists’ creative interactions with natural, built, and virtual environments.

Recent additions to the collection include Anne Lindberg’s ethereal graphite and colored pencil piece Motion Drawing 25, Helen and Newton Harrison’s monumental mixed media drawing, 8 Yuba Mappings: A Disagreement in All Cases, as well as a studio-made photographic book by San Francisco-based artist and pilot Michael Light, who also photographed Roden Crater/Meteor Crater 07.07.11 and James Turrell’s Roden Crater Earth Work.

These artworks from the Museum’s collection are complemented by a concise selection of paintings by artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell, Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, and Takashi Murakami, on loan from leading West Coast art collectors.