Art Bites provide opportunities for community conversation, learning, and informed dialogue about art and creativity, followed by questions and dialogue designed to engage the audience. Join highly skilled and knowledgeable Docents in the gallery for an in-depth discovery of the works of Hans Meyer-Kassel.

Artist Enrique Chagoya is well known for his innovative take on the printmaking medium which ranges from accordion-style codices to soup can labels. His work juxtaposes symbolic elements borrowed from pre-Columbian mythology, religious iconography, and popular culture to highlight cultural and historic collisions between Western and non-Western cultures that includes borders and immigration issues based on the artist’s concepts of reverse Modernism and reverse anthropology. All of this is applied with a sense humor. Join us for an artist talk as Chagoya discusses the exhibition “Enrique Chagoya: Reimagining the New World,” which illustrates an imagined world in which the European conquest of the New World has failed and the normative culture of the Americas is based in Indigenous ideology.

Born in Mexico City and residing in Berkeley, CA, Enrique Chagoya is currently Full Professor at Stanford University’s department of Art and Art History. His work can be found in many public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others.

The Rational Dress Society is a counter-fashion collective and the designers of JUMPSUIT, the ungendered, open-source monogarment to replace all clothes in perpetuity. Join founders Abigail Glaum-Lathbury and Maura Brewer to explore how they use design and controversy to challenge identity and buying practices.

Social hour at 5:00 pm, event begins at 6:00 pm

Sponsorship for the 2018 BRDI Series is provided by Henriksen Butler and Herman Miller, the Nevada Arts Council, and Northern Nevada AIA.

By the time Hans Meyer-Kassel settled in Nevada in 1935, he was sixty-three-years-old with a lifetime of experience and artistic accomplishments. Drawn to the American West, the German émigré artist and his wife relocated for a short time to Reno, and then Carson City, before settling in the small town of Genoa on the eastern slope of the Sierras. Longtime Nevada author and researcher, Guy Clifton will recount the life of Hans Meyer-Kassel, revealing new materials recently discovered through his research of newspaper reviews, archives, and other unpublished articles.

William L. Fox serves as the Director of the Center for Art and Environment, at the Nevada Museum of Art.  As one of the show’s curators, Fox will explore the significance of Marking the Infinite and the diverse island continent which influences the artistic practices of Aboriginal Australians.  Join Fox in the galleries for an in-depth discovery of the works in Marking the Infinite.

Join Babelito (Emmanuel Ortega Ph.D.) and FavyFav (Justin Favela) from the podcast Latinos Who Lunch for a special lecture on one of Mexico’s most important 19th century painters: Jose Maria Velasco. Velasco’s landscapes have represented Mexico throughout the world. In this talk, the dynamic Latinos Who Lunch duo will deconstruct the myth of the nation as it pertains to academic painting in the 19th and 20th centuries, and address the romanticism of Velasco’s landscapes, which Favela re-contextualizes in his own work, now on view in the exhibition Unsettled.

Support for the Art Bite series comes from Nevada Arts Council and Nevada Humanities & the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Born in Tampico, Mexico and residing and working today in San Francisco, performance artist and painter Ana Teresa Fernández’s work addresses issues of place, identity and community. Join us for a presentation and panel discussion inspired by her installation in the Unsettled exhibition, Erasing the Border (Borrando la Frontera), a documentation of her performance piece based at the US/Mexico border. 

Along with Ana Teresa Fernández, panel participants will include Dr. Daniel Enrique Pérez, associate professor of Chicanx and Latinx studies in the Department of World Languages and Literatures and the director of the Core Humanities program at the UNR, Dr. Linda Curcio Nagy, associate professor of History at UNR specializing in Mexican and Latin American cultural history and Alejandra Hernández Chávez, an active immigrant rights activist, born in Mexico, raised in Reno and formerly undocumented. Panel discussion will be moderated by Alberto Garcia, UNR Art History student, activist, and first-generation Mexican-American.

The artworks in Unsettled raise provocative questions about westward expansion, colonization and artistic experimentation.  Join Curatorial Director and Curator of Contemporary Art JoAnne Northrup in the Unsettled galleries as she explores the feminine voice and perspective of the diverse cultures and artists of the Greater West.

Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Art & Ecology and Lannan Endowed Chair, College of Fine Art, University of New Mexico, Bill Gilbert explores the revival of and contemporary evolution from Indigenous pottery traditions in the American Southwest and Northern Mexico. Join Bill, in conversation with Bill Fox, Director of the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, as they debate the connection of the southwestern and pre-Columbian traditions to lands old and new.

NOTE: Registration for this event is now full. To view the full schedule of Literary Crawl activities, please visit nevadahumanities.org

Join us for Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl Keynote Event: An Evening with Adam Johnson. The evening features award-winning novelist Adam Johnson reading from his recent work. Johnson is the author of several books, including Fortune Smiles, and the novel The Orphan Master’s Son, which was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. There will be a question and answer session following the reading which will be moderated by Dr. Hugh Shapiro, associate professor of history at the University of Nevada, Reno.

This event is free and open to the public, but pre-registration is required. NOTE: Pre-resgistration is now sold out.

For more information on the Nevada Humanities Literary Crawl, please visit nevadahumanities.org