Michael Heizer is among the greatest, and often least accessible, American artists. As one of the last living figures who launched the Land Art movement, his legacy of works that are literally and metaphorically monumental has an incalculable influence on the world of sculpture and environmental art. But his seclusion in the remote Nevada desert, as well as his notorious obduracy, have resulted in significant gaps in our critical understanding. “Michael Heizer: The Once and Future Monuments” spans the breadth of Heizer’s career, uniquely combining fieldwork, personal narrative, and biographical research to create the first major assessment in years of this titan of American art.

Join us as William Fox, Director for the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art discusses Heizer’s work with Susanna Newbury. Newbury is Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory and criticism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Her first book, Speculation: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global LA will be published in September from University of Minnesota Press. Book signing to follow.

LOCATION:
Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
For location information and campus map click here

This event is presented in partnership with the Nevada Museum of Art, the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art and the College of Fine Arts at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

For additional information on upcoming programs at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, please click here.

More nuclear bombs have been detonated in America than in any other country in the world. Between 1951 and 1992, the Nevada National Security Test Site was the primary location for these activities, withstanding more than a thousand nuclear tests that left swaths of the American Southwest resembling a lunar landscape. In The Nevada Test Site, renowned American photographer Emmet Gowin presents staggering aerial photographs of this powerfully evocative place. Accompanying the photos, Gowin’s essay in the book delves into the history of his work at the site, including his decade-long efforts to secure entry, the photographic equipment and techniques employed, and what the images mean to him today.

Join us as Gowin traces the ways in which his photographic work is informed by his own life experience and coming of age in the Vietnam era with a growing awareness of a complex and nuclear world. These experiences have influenced his photographic representations of the profound and far-reaching environmental impacts of human activity on this world.

Following the talk, Bill Fox, founding Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art will facilitate a continued conversation.  

*Doors open at 5 pm with book sales and cash bar. Book signing to follow. This event is co-presented by Sundance Books and Music.

This program will be held in the Wayne L. Prim Theater.

Contemporary art collector, Jordan D. Schnitzer and JoAnne Northrup, Curatorial Director and Curator of Contemporary Art discuss “The World Stage: Contemporary Art from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.” The exhibition assembles over 100 contemporary artworks by forty artists, from canonical 20th century artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Raushenberg, and Andy Warhol, to leading 21st century artists including Kehinde Wiley, Jeffrey Gibson and Mickalene Thomas.  

This program will be held in the Wayne L. Prim Theater.

Public art can revive urban spaces and change the relationship between citizens and the place they live. The incorporation of art into the public sphere can engage new audiences and has the potential to create a sense of civic pride and ownership. Join us as Vivian Zavataro, Interim Director of the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art, and Megan Berner, Public Art Program Coordinator for the City of Reno discuss the impact of public art from the interventions of Prime Minister Edi Rama’s work in Tirana, Albania to the local streets of Reno.

The Art Bite lecture series is supported by Nevada Humanities with additional sponsorship and free admission for students supported by the Core Humanities Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

In 2004, a Tate Britain poll named Marcel Duchamp’s “readymade,” Fountain, as the most important and influential work of 20th century art. This work is already a shocker to many– it’s a urinal simply turned upside down and emblazoned with the pseudonym “R. Mutt”–is that art, some wonder, and many dislike it to this day. But this work has recently become the center of a new controversy: was Duchamp really its creator? Or was this work the brainchild of a German baroness? Join the ArtCurious Podcast’s host, Jennifer Dasal, for an overview of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and her (potential?) involvement with a touchstone of modern art history.

The ArtCurious Podcast explores the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. The ArtCurious Podcast is written, produced, and hosted by Jennifer Dasal, a contemporary arts curator with nearly twenty years of art-historical studies and experience. ArtCurious has been featured in multiple local and national publications and websites, including O, the Oprah Magazine, PC Magazine, ArtDaily, NPR, Salon and more.

The Art Bite lecture series is supported by Nevada Humanities with additional sponsorship and free admission for students supported by the Core Humanities Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

This program is co-hosted by the Art History Club at the University of Nevada, Reno.

This program will be held in the Wayne L. Prim Theater.

Join Bretton Rodriguez, Ph.D. and Edward Schoolman, Ph.D. as they explore the relationships between medieval cultures and their weapons. The development of new and better martial technology shaped the nature of warfare in the medieval and early modern worlds, and it transformed the practical, decorative, social, and metaphorical values of weapons of war. 

Bretton Rodriguez, Ph.D. is a teaching assistant professor of Core Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno. He is a specialist in the literature, history, and culture of medieval and early modern Iberia. His research focuses on the use and manipulation of the past in historical narratives.

Ned Schoolman, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the History Department at the University of Nevada, Reno.  His current research centers on facets of nobility, the process of migration, and environmental change during the Middle Ages in Italy.

The Art Bite lecture series is supported by Nevada Humanities with additional sponsorship and free admission for students supported by the Core Humanities Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

Carter E. Foster presents a broad overview of Edward Hopper’s creative process. Starting with his early work in New York and his formative travels to Paris, Foster will explore the ways in which Hopper developed his mature style as well as his love of ambiguity and the uncanny. Using suites of drawings for major works, Foster will delve deeply into how Hopper conceived certain paintings, and how observation of the real world combined with his imagination created the disquieting atmospheres for which he is celebrated. During the presentation we will explore Hopper’s masterpieces, including Early Sunday Morning (1930), Nighthawks (1942), New York Movie (1939), and Office at Night (1940).

In a museum career spanning twenty-eight years, Carter E. Foster has specialized in the history of drawing and the continuities of artistic practice from the Renaissance to the present, and has organized dozens of exhibitions covering this range of art history. He started his position as Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art in September of 2016. Carter worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art for over 11 years, serving as the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawing, and he was on the team curators who developed the Whitney’s inaugural display in its new building, America is Hard to See. He developed the 2013 exhibition Hopper Drawing and edited and co-authored its catalogue. Prior to the Whitney, he held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This program will be held in the Wayne L. Prim Theater.

Art History and Labor Studies are often considered false friends, two fields that investigate very different subjects. Yet, there’s a long history of art that represents labor and working conditions. This talk will focus on the intersection of art and labor in painting, photography, and sculpture of the 20th century with a focus on the E. L. Wiegand Collection at the Nevada Museum of Art.

Dr. Brett Van Hoesen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada, Reno.

The Art Bite lecture series is supported by Nevada Humanities with additional sponsorship and free admission for students supported by the Core Humanities Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

Stories come to life through the art of cinema. Join us for a discussion about the art of filmmaking with Elspeth Summers and James Coleman from Tweaking Reality Studios as they discuss their creative process with collaborator Caitlin McCarty of the local dance company Collateral and Co. Program will include a preview of the short dance film “The Space Above.”

The Art Bite lecture series is supported by Nevada Humanities with additional sponsorship and free admission for students supported by the Core Humanities Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

Georgia O’Keeffe famously painted the flowers that grew in her gardens, so how did the tropical and exotic hibiscus and plumeria find their way into her work? Join Theresa Papanikolas, Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art at the Seattle Art Museum, as she traces the genesis and development of O’Keeffe’s floral paintings, follows in the footsteps of her 1939 journey to Hawaii, and reveals how she interpreted nature in modernist terms to reflect her intense—even spiritual—reverence for the American landscape.

Theresa Papanikolas, Ph.D. joined the Seattle Art Museum in 2019 as its Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art. Prior to that, she was Deputy Director of Art and Programs and Curator of European and American Art at the Honolulu Museum of Art, where she led the reinstallation of its galleries and organized the exhibitions From Whistler to Warhol: Modernism on Paper (2010), Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams: The Hawai?i Pictures (2013), Art Deco Hawai?i (2014), and Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West (2017). She was also the curator of the New York Botanical Garden’s 2018 exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe: Visions of Hawaii. At SAM, she is curator of Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstract Variations, forthcoming in 2020.

Dr. Papanikolas has worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Rice University; holds degrees from USC (BA) and the University of Delaware (MA, Ph.D.); and completed a Fellowship at the Center for Curatorial Leadership (2016).

The Art Bite lecture series is supported by Nevada Humanities with additional sponsorship and free admission for students supported by the Core Humanities Program at the University of Nevada, Reno. 

This program will be held in the Wayne L. Prim Theater.