With offices in Denver, Phoenix, and Spokane, Dig Studio is a landscape architecture, planning, and urban design firm. They are currently working with the City of Reno on The Truckee River Vision Plan. Learn from Dig Studio leaders about their practice and their approach to creating The Truckee River Vision Plan and implementation of recommended projects.  

*Doors open at 5 pm for networking hour with hosted beer. Program begins at 6 pm. 

Join the Museum and the University of Nevada, Reno College of Liberal Arts and Core Humanities Program for “Thought On Tap,” the collaborative public engagement series. In this episode, the Museum and University faculty will discuss plans and opportunities for collaborative education and research in the new Charles and Stacie Mathewson Education and Research Center. 

During the late summer of 1927, Maynard Dixon headed for Nevada’s northwest corner, initially planning only a two-week excursion, but the trip turned into four extraordinarily productive months. Join author and poet Carolyn Dufurrena, of Nevada’s Quinn River Ranch, as she re-traces Dixon’s 1927 journey with stops along the way at Onion Valley, Alder Creek Ranch, and Rainbow Ridge.

Dr. Mark Sublette, owner of the Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, AZ, is an authority on the life work of western illustrator and artist Maynard Dixon. Join Sublette for a talk that provides an overview of Dixon’s life and work in the American West.

** Due to a rise in COVID cases, Dr. Sublette will not present in person. This lecture will now be pre-recorded with a live Q+A. **

Maynard Dixon’s longtime friend and patron Anita Baldwin hosted the artist and his photographer-wife Dorothea Lange, and their twin-boys, at her 2,000-acre estate at Fallen Leaf Lake near Lake Tahoe in 1932. Anita was the daughter of E. J. “Lucky” Baldwin, who made his fortune on the Comstock Lode in the 1870s. Join Marilyn Long, a longtime volunteer at the Lake Tahoe Historical Society and Tallac Historic Site, as she shares photographs and stories of Anita Baldwin and her Fallen Leaf Lake estate. 

Celebrate National Poetry Month with Nevada Poet Laureate Emerita Gailmarie Pahmeier, longtime Nevada poet Shaun Griffin, and UNR professor and poet-scholar Ann Keniston for a reading and conversation about the challenges and rewards of writing about the U.S. West in the context of Maynard Dixon’s seldom-discussed landscape poems. 

About the Poets: 

Shaun T. Griffin co-founded and directed Community Chest, a rural social justice agency for twenty-seven years.  His new book of poems, No Charity in the Wilderness, is forthcoming from the University of Nevada Press in 2024.  Southern Utah University Press released Anthem for a Burnished Land, a memoir, in 2016.  For thirty years he taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center.  

Ann Keniston is a poet, essayist, and critic interested in the relation of the creative to the scholarly. She is the author of several poetry collections, including, most recently, Somatic (Terrapin 2020), as well as several scholarly studies of contemporary American poetry, including most recently Economies of Scale: Financialization and Contemporary North American Poetry (Palgrave 2023). Recent poems and essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, and Five Points. A professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she teaches poetry workshops and literature classes, she lives in Reno.

Gailmarie Pahmeier, now Emeritus faculty, taught creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno. Widely published, she’s the author of three chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry, the most recent being Of Bone, Of Ash, Of Ordinary Saints (WSC Press, 2020) which was nominated for the High Plains Book Award. In 2015, she was appointed Reno’s first Poet Laureate, in 2016 she was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2017, she was selected as Outstanding Teacher in the Humanities. In 2021, the governor of Nevada appointed her Poet Laureate, State of Nevada. In 2022, she was selected as a Laureate Fellow, Academy of American Poets. 

Image Credit: 

Maynard Dixon, Lonesome Hills of Nevada, 1935, Oil on canvas, 25 x 30 inches. Private Collection. Image courtesy Mark Sublette, Medicine Man Gallery, Tucson, AZ

Join Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, for an engaging presentation on how nature influences developmental psychology, the learning process and mental health. 

*Book signing and cash bar to follow presentation.

Richard Louv is a journalist and author of ten books, including Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder; The Nature Principle; Vitamin N; and most recently, Our Wild Calling: How Connecting With Animals Can Transform Our Lives — and Save Theirs. Translated in 24 languages, his books have helped launch an international movement to connect families and communities to nature. In 2008, he was awarded the Audubon Medal, presented by the National Audubon Society. Prior recipients included Rachel Carson, E. O. Wilson and President Jimmy Carter. Among other awards, Louv is also the recipient of the Cox Award for 2007, Clemson University’s highest honor, for “sustained achievement in public service.” He speaks frequently around the world, including keynote addresses at the American Academy of Pediatrics National Conference, the first White House Summit on Environmental Education, the Congress for the New Urbanism, and the Friends of Nature Conference in Beijing, China. He is a co-founder of the nonprofit Children & Nature Network, which supports the international movement. He would rather hike than write.

From 1912 until 1939, Maynard Dixon maintained a studio at 728 Montgomery Street in San Francisco. In this storied Gold Rush era building he created his striking paintings and hosted an endless parade of painters, writers and others drawn to his restless intellect and glowing artwork. Many of the Nevada paintings in the exhibition emerged from this studio. It is where he developed his distinctive painting style infused by modernist concepts, anchored by his frequent trips to the West’s arid lands, particularly Nevada. This lecture will draw upon period photographs, oral histories from people who knew him, and his own writings, along with selected art.  This lecture will also touch on the studio as a place of refuge, where Dixon could escape the pressure of his tumultuous life and the onslaught of an urban America.

About Donald J. Hagerty

Donald J. Hagerty is the author of Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon, The Life of Maynard Dixon, and The Art of Maynard Dixon. Additional publications include Beyond the Visible Terrain: The Art of Ed Mell, Holding Ground: The Art of Gary Ernest Smith, Canyon de Chelly: 100 Years of Painting and Photography, and Leading the West: One Hundred Contemporary Painters and Sculptors. In addition, he has written numerous articles for Western Art Collector, Montana: The Magazine of Western History, California State Library Bulletin, and American Art Collector, among others. 

Image Credit: 

Isabel Porter Collins, Portrait of Maynard Dixon, circa 1895. California Historical Society, Photographs from the Isabel Porter Collins Collection, MSP 422