Desert Dialogues marks the inaugural exhibition in the Museum’s Art + Environment Education Lab, inviting visitors, educators, and learners of all ages to embark on a visual exploration of the diverse motivations that draw people to the desert. Featuring works from the Museum’s Carol Franc Buck Altered Landscape photography collection, this exhibition reveals how the desert and other arid lands have been sites of exploration, discovery, development, solitude, and survival, both historically and today.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a Wagon Station, a pod-like living shelter designed by artist Andrea Zittel and customized by Aaron Noble. Originally installed at A-Z West, Zittel’s 80-acre desert compound in Joshua Tree, California, the sculpture evokes both covered wagons of 19th-century American settlers and modern suburban station wagons or recreational trailers. The Wagon Station embodies a spirit of adaptability and innovation, reflecting the ways in which people engage with harsh yet inspiring desert environments.
Often misperceived as barren and desolate, deserts are vibrant ecosystems, rich in life-sustaining resources. While many artists are drawn to the quiet expanse of these places, where vast skies and rugged terrains provide a reprieve from urban spaces, other artists reveal how the resources of the desert have been harnessed and exploited to provide water, energy, housing, and military protection to sustain modern life as we know it.
About the Art + Environment Education Lab
A new educational space in the Charles and Stacie Mathewson Education and Research Center, the Art + Environment Education Lab is a place for everyone, but especially students and teachers to interact closely with the Museum’s art and archive collections. Host to numerous courses in collaboration with the University of Nevada, Reno, the goal of the space is to build understanding and generate new knowledge about the Museum’s collections and the important role that art and artists serve in helping the public understand environmental issues.
