Judith Lowry will explore the Indigenous histories shared by her father and family, highlighting how these stories shape her art, preserve cultural traditions, and inspire future generations to continue honoring and revitalizing their heritage. 

* Doors open at 10am with coffee and tea

Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee) has worked for decades to shape a national Native American policy agenda that addresses issues at the core of Indigenous identity: sacred places protection and repatriation, religious freedom, treaty and inherent sovereign rights, mascot eradication, and language revitalization. 

During this virtual talk, Harjo, a longtime supporter and admirer of Judith Lowry’s work, will highlight the vital role of culture bearers and visual artists in advancing women’s rights and Native sovereignty. 

This is a virtual program that will be broadcast in the Museum’s theater for those who wish to attend in person. 

For those joining us virtually, please click the link below to join: 

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86576989629?pwd=4Qc4c9OV6OQDTu4gSRdofuGDLgBoXg.1

Passcode: 740531

Free for Tribal Communities. 

Photo by Yatika Starr Fields

Join Peter Loge, a political veteran and director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication as he discusses how AI is being used in political campaigns today, and how it might be used in the future. Loge will highlight that American politics has been full of half-truths and fabrications from the beginning – including Ben Franklin making up fake news to promote the Revolution, the Hudson River School painters creating “composite” scenes of the American West, William Randolph Hearst reportedly telling an illustrator “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war,” and beyond. Peter will suggest that AI and all that has come before it gets to a question Plato raised about the connection between persuasion, ethics and truth – a question we have never really answered.

Peter Loge is an associate professor and director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University, the director of the Project on Ethics in Political Communication and a senior fellow at the Agirre Lehendakaria Center in Bilbao. Over his 30+ year career, Peter has served in senior staff positions in the US House, Senate and administration. Over that time, he has also advised, led and helped lead a range of national and international advocacy campaigns and organizations. Peter lectures on political communication and ethics around the US and in the Basque Country and is regularly quoted in national and international media. 

Join Author Pat Hickey as he discusses his newest book, Here and Hereafter: Nevada Voices on Life and the Great Beyond.

An evocative exploration of the human experience, seen through the eyes of those who call Nevada home, this compelling narrative delves into the profound questions of life and the afterlife. Through intimate interviews and insightful reflections, Hickey captures the diverse voices and stories that shape the Silver State, offering readers a unique perspective on what it means to live, love, and ponder the mysteries of existence.

Purchase Here and Hereafter: Nevada Voices on the Life and the Great Beyond after the lecture and stay to have your copy signed by Hickey and other notable Nevadans.

About Pat Hickey:

Pat Hickey was born in Carson City and grew up in Lake Tahoe, the place where his Irish ancestors settled in the 1870s. Pat has been a ski bum, a seeker, a reporter, an assemblyman, an education advocate, and a proud parent and grandparent. His “Memo from the Middle” Sunday column is carried in the Reno Gazette Journal. Pat received his Master’s Degree from the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno. His lifelong interest in life after death is matched only by his fascination with the lives he and other Nevadans are currently leading.

Please note, Dr. Sander will be giving this lecture in the Sky Room. Due to high demand, this specific program will be a live simulcast to the Theater. 

Join Martin Sander, one of the world’s leading ichthyosaur paleontologists from Bonn, Germany, as he details his 30-year odyssey excavating fossils in Nevada’s Augusta Mountains. Hear his stories of mountaineering for fossils, digging out tons of pounds of ichthyosaur bones, and transporting them to the laboratory via helicopter and in a beer truck. Learn what Sander’s study of these giant animals teaches us about evolution, life on earth, and Nevada’s place in the global scientific community.

Martin Sander divides his research between excavating sea reptiles from the Age of Dinosaurs in Nevada and elsewhere around the globe and understanding dinosaurs as living animals. These interests converge on understanding the evolution of giants in the ocean and on land.

*Registration includes access to the Summer Block Party beginning at 4pm! 

***Parking is limited. Please allow ample time to find parking. Overflow parking is available at the Washoe County public lot off Court Street. ***

Join Nevada Humanities and celebrate the written word in all of its forms in this signature, annual festival kicking off at 11 am with a keynote by author Anthony Doerr and continuing with readings, book signings, and family-friendly activities across the California Avenue corridor.

All events are free. Reservations required for selected events. For more information and to view the full schedule of programs, please visit Nevada Humanities.

Neil Kelley and Randy Irmis will discuss new discoveries from Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park and other Nevada fossil sites that shed new light on the lives of Nevada’s state fossil, Shonisaurus. What did they eat? How did they reproduce? When did they go extinct?  All these questions and more will be answered! 

Neil Kelley is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist with a special interest in extinct marine reptiles that were the top ocean predators during the Mesozoic (the ‘Age of Dinosaurs’). He has participated in fossil excavations in China and across North America, including multiple sites in Nevada, and worked in museum collections around the world. Currently his work includes projects in Nevada, California, Alaska, and Tennessee. His research has been featured in High Country News, Smithsonian Magazine Online and on National Pubic Radio. He completed his PhD at the University of California, Davis and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution before coming to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

Randall Irmis is Curator of Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, and Professor in the Department of Geology & Geophysics, both part of the University of Utah, where he has worked since 2009. He received his BS in Geology (Emphasis in Paleontology) from Northern Arizona University in 2004, and his PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. Randy’s scientific research asks how animals with backbones (and the larger ecosystems they lived in) evolved through deep time, particularly in response to climate change and other global events. This work investigates fossil ecosystems and environments that span in age from over 300 million years old to less than 10,000 years old, and has resulted in many years of fieldwork in Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Argentina, and Ethiopia.

The moviola becomes a “time machine” that transforms trucks into dinosaurs. – Robert Smithson 

Artist Robert Smithson (1938-73) is known for his monumental earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) situated along the shoreline of Great Salt Lake. He is also known for bringing the deep past to the present world of art, positing a world populated with prehistoric motifs: dinosaurs and sea monsters. Speaker Hikmet Sidney Loe will discuss Smithson’s childhood fascination with creatures from past geologic eras, which he carried into and employed in his adult artistic endeavors. Eschewing one specific geographic region and blending high and low images—cutouts and postcards with the contemporary art of the 1970s—he created unique worlds filled with the wonders of metaphor and imagination.  

Hikmet Sidney Loe is Assistant Visiting Professor in art history at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is an author, curator, and public speaker whose work examines the changeable nature of the earth and addresses our perceptual and cultural constructs of the land. Her first book, The Spiral Jetty Encyclo: Exploring Robert Smithson’s Earthwork through Time and Place (2017) won the 15 Bytes Book Award for Art Book (2018). Her next book, The Sun Tunnels Encyclo: Exploring Nancy Holt’s Earthwork through Perception and Site is scheduled to be published in 2026 by The University of Utah Press.

Join Tuan Andrew Nguyen as he retraces the making of We Were Lost in Our Country. Now in the Nevada Museum of Art permanent collection, this moving-image work tells the remarkable story of the Ngurrara Canvas II (1997), which was made by a group of forty men and four women from the Walmajarri, Wangkatjunga, Mangala and Juwaliny communities and language groups. Through interviews with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, Nguyen conveys the story of the Ngurrara Canvas II, exploring themes of personal agency, inherited trauma, and intergenerational transmission.

Courtesy the artist and James Cohan, New York; Photo: Harry Vu

Presented as part of the Debra and Dennis Scholl Distinguished Speaker Series

More fossil ichthyosaur specimens have been found in the Triassic rocks of the Humboldt and Shoshone Mountains than anywhere else in Nevada. In the summer of 1905, portions of 25 specimens were recovered from South American Canyon in the Humboldts and some 37 specimens were identified in West Union Canyon of the Shoshones, where Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park is located. Join David K. Smith as he explores Annie Alexander’s 1905 collecting expedition and the development of Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park.

David spent 19 years with the Education and Outreach unit of the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) as a Visual Communications Specialist, retiring in 2015. In his last few years at UCMP he was the staff archivist on a grant to catalog the Museum’s archives and became interested in its history as a result. Today he continues to volunteer at the Museum, writing online finding aids, fielding archives requests, and pursuing historical projects that strike his fancy.