Victorian Britain was the world’s first industrial nation. Great wealth for the few was accompanied by poverty and pollution. Critics like John Ruskin and William Morris argued that machine-made goods, cheap and plentiful, were inherently ugly and that only a return to natural materials and handicraft could restore the health of society. Join us as Tim Barringer follows the development of a radical socialist and ecological critique of capitalism in Victorian Britain that had effects all over the world, from Britain to the USA, Japan and India.  In this program, we will look at Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings in relation to industrial products of the nineteenth century and the exquisite handmade textiles and metalwork that challenged the supremacy of the machine. Radical Victorians took on the dominant ideologies of the nineteenth century and still have important lessons for our own times.

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

Today, we consider education, career choices, and fulfillment through one’s work to be fundamental rights for women. A little more than a hundred years ago, however, these were mostly only utopian dreams. At the end of the nineteenth century, social reformers, advocates of women’s rights, and followers of the Arts and Crafts movement addressed the question of work for women designers and craftspeople. Join us as Wendy Kaplan examines the role of women designers in the Anglo/American Arts and Crafts movement, focusing on their leadership in social and economic reform as well as the restrictions on their full participation.

Wendy Kaplan has been at LACMA since 2001 and currently serves as the Department Head and Curator of Decorative Arts and Design. Previously, she held curatorial positions at the Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami, Glasgow Museums in Scotland, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. A leading expert on late 19th- and 20th-century design, she has authored, co-authored, or edited many books on the subject such as California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way” (2011), The Arts & Crafts Movement in Europe and America: Design for the Modern World (2004), Leading “The Simple Life”: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain (1999), Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1996), Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion, 1885–1945 (1995), The Arts and Crafts Movement (1991; French edition 1999), and “The Art that is Life”: The Arts and Crafts Movement in America (1987; reprint 1998), as well as organized major exhibitions on these subjects. 

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

The Center for Art + Environment is an internationally recognized research center housed at the Nevada Museum of Art. The Center is home to a focused research library with archive collections from over 1,000 artists and organizations working on all seven continents. Join us as William L. Fox, Director of the Center for Art + Environment shares an intimate look at the exhibition “Technology of the Book” which highlights a diverse selection of artists’ books and journals held in the archive collection of The Center.

This program is designed as a standing tour which will be held in the Museum’s Center for Art + Environment. Limited seating on folding stools will be made available for those who cannot stand for long periods of time. Due to space limitations in The Center, registration is limited to just twenty participants. Pre-registration is recommended to secure a spot.

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. 

NOTE: This program will be hosted on Zoom. Please register by 9 am on August 7 to receive the Zoom link.

Bay Area artist Kal Spelletich is a pivotal figure in the machine art and robotics community who frequently collaborates with scientists, engineers, musicians and audiences to realize his projects. His work in Where Art and Tech Collide celebrates marginalized and overlooked scientists.

Join Spelletich as he discusses his work and process live from his studio. Expect robotics, lasers and chance accidents.

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.

Jean-Michael Basquiat (1960-1988) first gained fame by tagging the streets of New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s – a time when rap, breakdancing,  and street art began to define early hip-hop culture. Critics have often compared Basquiat to a DJ, writing on the ways in which the visuality of his works resonates with early hip-hop culture. Join us as Ruthie Meadows discusses the ways in which the visuality of Basquiat’s work mobilized and referenced emergent sonic techniques in DJ, house and hip-hop culture as they arose in New York in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ruthie Meadows is an assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research focuses on poetics and aurality in the Hispanophone- and circum-Caribbean, including Cuba, the Dominican Republic and New Orleans.

This program is hosted on Zoom. Please register by 9 am on September 11 to receive the Zoom link.

For registration support or questions, please email christian.davies@nevadaart.org.

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. 

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.