The Lasting World: Simon Dinnerstein and The Fulbright Triptych explores the noted New York artist’s creative arc from early, hyperrealist works through more introspective and fantastical later works. The exhibition’s centerpiece is The Fulbright Triptych, a monumental three-part work measuring fourteen across that Roberta Smith, The New York Times art critic once described as “a crackling, obsessive showboat of a painting, dreamed up during a decade when the medium supposedly teetered on the brink of death.”

The visually complex Triptych is part autobiographical essay, part homage to Renaissance artists and their craft, part reflection on the historical legacies of the 20th century, and part meditation on the power of images to inspire across time and place. In addition to The Fulbright Triptych, the exhibition includes examples of Dinnerstein’s subtly evocative drawings and paintings from the 1960s through the 1990s, which continually interrogate the role of art in lived human experience.

The Lasting World: Simon Dinnerstein and The Fulbright Triptych seeks to engage visitors and the broader public in discussions of what individual works of art mean, and how significance and relevance are constructed from different viewpoints. The exhibition was organized by the Museum of Art & Archaeology, University of Missouri in collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art.

Hear more about the story behind The Fulbright Triptych in this NPR story.

Join the Museum and Classical Tahoe on Friday, July 20 for a one-of-a-kind event that celebrates art, life, and the bonds of family. “A Conversation on the Mysteries of Art and Family” is a discussion between acclaimed musician Simone Dinnerstein and her father, visual artist Simon Dinnerstein. Following this discussion between father and daughter, Simone Dinnerstein will perform selections from Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The evening begins with an intimate reception and exhibition preview. Purchase tickets.

Sponsors

Jan and David Hardie; Charlotte and Dick McConnell; Madylon and Dean Meiling

New Zealand artist Peter Stichbury is fascinated by society’s ongoing obsession with UFO phenomena. He paints historical UFO sightings, as well as portraits of the people who purportedly saw them. With penetrating, but perplexing gazes, Stichbury’s subjects are caught in an alternate reality—forever changed by their sighting experience, but also influenced by the myths, disinformation, and conspiracy theories society imparts on such experiences.

Much like visual art, the enduring tradition of cowboy poetry is a rich and vital form of cultural expression in the American West. This exhibition is inspired by the classic and touching poem Equus Caballus, written by Texas poet Joel Nelson to honor the important role and contributions horses have made to the world. The exhibition combines a unique audiovisual presentation of Nelson reciting the poem with a selection of historical and contemporary paintings, photographs, and sculptural works drawn from the permanent collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, alongside a handful of special items on loan from private collections.

Joel Nelson’s poem Equus Caballus (the scientific or Latin name for “horse”) is especially powerful because it is one of the few poems that gives a voice to an animal whose longtime relationship to humans is emotionally layered and historically complex. Nelson’s poem elicits a range of feelings and emotions that resonate with anyone who has spent time with horses and respects them as patient and faithful animals.

In many ways, the visual artworks included in this exhibition also reflect the myriad roles and relationships that horses have had—and continue to have—with humans. From artworks that relate the longtime importance of horses to indigenous people, to photographs of cowboys with their animal partners on the range, and prints and paintings that capture the stoic pride of these stately animals, visual artists using a variety of media their effort to elucidate the essence of the human relationship to the horse.

This exhibition was developed jointly by the Nevada Museum of Art in collaboration with the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada.

This installation consists of a dozen gilded bronze sculptures representing the animal symbols from the traditional Chinese zodiac. Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei drew inspiration for the twelve heads from those originally located at Yuanming Yuan (Old Summer Palace), an imperial retreat of palaces and European-style gardens built outside of Beijing in the 18th and 19th centuries by Emperor Qianlong. Designed and engineered by two European Jesuits, Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoit, the heads originally functioned as an ornate fountain clock that would spout water at two-hour intervals.

Once accessible only to the elite of 18th-century Chinese society, the garden was destroyed and looted by Anglo-French troops in 1860 during the Second Opium War, displacing the original zodiac heads. The seven heads known to exist (Monkey, Pig, Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, and Horse) have all been returned to China. Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold engages issues of looting, repatriation, and cultural heritage while expanding upon ongoing themes in Ai’s work of the “fake” and “copy” in relation to the original.

This theme comprises one section of the museum-wide exhibition, Tahoe: A Visual History.

In 1878, John Muir derided “the outlandish noise of loggers and choppers and screaming mills” that he witnessed during his stay at Lake Tahoe. The towering pine, cedar, and juniper stands in the Tahoe basin were quickly falling in the name of progress. Lumber was needed to construct railroad trestles and snow sheds over Donner Pass, to buttress the burgeoning underground mines of the Comstock, and to power the steam locomotives used to transport and process the ore. As populations and tourism increased in the region, timber was also used for resort and lodge structures on the panoramic shores of the lake.

The first sawmill at Lake Tahoe was built in 1860. The invention of the V-shaped flume and the completion of a narrow-gauge railroad vastly accelerated the transport of timber out of the Tahoe Basin. Muir returned to Lake Tahoe in 1888 and was deeply distressed by what he saw. Hillsides once covered in trees were barren. With the support of the railroad lobby and local timber baron Duane Bliss (who had, ironically, turned his logging property at Glenbrook into a tourist resort), Muir worked hard to have Lake Tahoe declared a national park. He came within only a few of the necessary votes in Congress, but the measure failed in 1889.

By 1900, almost a billion board feet of lumber had been removed from the Tahoe Basin and 60 percent of its lands had been harvested. Nineteenth-century painters and photographers rarely depicted the transformed landscape, and the few examples showing such subject matter are rare. In the twenty-first century, however, it is common for contemporary artists to explore issues related to forest conservation, reclamation, fire management, and sustainability in the region. Their work is on view alongside that of their historical predecessors.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century John James Audubon created one of the greatest and most famous bodies of North American bird art known today. His more than fifty years of artistic production—consisting of paintings, drawings, prints, and writings—resulted in the body of work for which he became most famous: The Birds of America, Audubon’s unparalleled effort to catalog and describe artistically and scientifically the birds of the North American continent.

Audubon’s enormous undertaking began with the creation of more than five hundred watercolor paintings—the basis for a later edition of double elephant folio of prints called The Birds of America, made by the London engravers Robert Havell, Jr. and Sr. between 1826 and 1838. In 1863, at the height of the Civil War and a little more than a decade after her husband’s death, Lucy Bakewell Audubon, the artist’s widow, sold her family’s personal collection of 471 surviving original watercolor paintings to the New York Historical Society. Of these, 435 were paintings Audubon made in preparation for The Birds of America.

Born Jean Rabin in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1785, the son of a French naval officer and his mistress, he adopted the name John James Audubon when he immigrated to the still-fledgling United States in 1803 at the age of eighteen, avoiding conscription in the Napoleonic wars. Largely self-taught as both an artist and an ornithologist, the paintings from which the prints in this exhibition derive were renowned for their scale and for their inclusion of ornithological information about bird habitats and behaviors, a practice that was both controversial and revolutionary for the time.

Having made many long and difficult excursions through much of frontier America to collect specimens and record them for his project, by the mid-1840s, Audubon’s deteriorating health confined him to his home on New York’s Hudson River. Audubon died there in 1851, at the age of 65, leaving behind the remarkable body of work for which he is remembered.

 All of the prints on view in this exhibition are drawn from the collection of the Nevada Museum of Art. They were purchased with funds in memory of Dana Rose Richardson.

Mothers–The Art of Seeing  is inspired by land, politics and the spirit in equal measures. Well known for experimenting and pushing the technical aspects of her work with new materials such as plastic, barbed wire, and fine stainless steel wire, Underwood has created three separate series of artworks for this exhibition – each stylistically distinct, all representing interconnectivity both literal and metaphoric.

A site-specific installation inspired by the geologic formations of the nearby Black Rock Desert includes a painted form with a jagged line dividing it into two, alluding to the fence under construction which separates the United States and Mexico. Nails and fibers are integrated into the surface, along with paw prints representing the presence of migratory animals. Jimenez Underwood thereby expresses her concern about the environmental impact of the Mexico-United States Barrier. “The border is one land, always has been and always will,” Underwood says. “The plants, animals and flowers know this.”

A second series of works consists of a series of five rebozos – the long flat garment worn by women, mostly in Mexico. These weavings are notably more refined and elegant than the border piece. In fact, Underwood intends these works to serve as gifts for her maternal ancestors. “Beauty, grace, and flowers soothe the quiet rage that has permeated the Americas for more than five hundred years. Thus, when I weave, sew, or embellish, the viejitas (the old ones) seem to express their encouragement and support of my creations.”

The final series consists of two separate artworks, including a flag-like tapestry that interweaves the United States flag with the flag of Mexico. The artist states, “My audience is the general public: all who live on the American continent, all who have seen and experienced the majestic power and grandeur of the American western landscape, all who care about the environment, and most importantly, it is for those who would want their descendants to be able to enjoy these visual and necessary gifts from Mother Earth.”

Crossing borders and negotiating between three perspectives – American, Mexican, and Indian – has always been a fundamental aspect of Underwood’s persona, and the basis of her creative process. She first learned how to weave from her Mexican mother, eventually refining her knowledge through formal education. She earned a Bachelor’s and two Master’s degrees in Fine Art, eventually shifting her initial interest from painting to fiber arts.

For more than twenty years, Underwood was Professor of Art and Head of the Fiber/Textile Area in the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University in California.

Sponsor

Nevada Arts Council

The paintings in No Boundaries were made by nine elderly men from the Western Australian desert. These men were revered as leaders in their communities, their worldview defined by an ancient cosmology in which ancestral spirits exerted a continuing presence in everyday life. But Paddy Bedford, Janangoo Butcher Cherel, Tommy Mitchell, Ngarra, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Tjumpo Tjapanangvka, Billy Joongoorra Thomas, and Prince of Wales (Midpul) transformed the visual traditions of their people into contemporary artworks. Despite coming to art late in life, and being mostly unknown to one another, they were innovators of the highest order. Where their predecessors in the early 1970s had drawn on cartographic and figurative imagery, these men forged a new path in abstract images that broadened the possibilities of Aboriginal art.

During the last three years the Nevada Museum of Art has been working with Aboriginal artists who live in the remote Paruku region of Western Australia on a unique art & science project led by Australian painters Mandy Martin and Kim Mahood, and conservationist-rancher Guy Fitzhardinge. The paintings and materials generated by both the Aboriginal and kartiya (non-indigenous) artists were donated to the Center for Art + Environments Archive Collections in 2013 and exhibited here in the summer and fall of 2014.

There is a close connection between the Paruku paintings and the artworks in No Boundaries, which also hail from the northern part of Western Australia. Hanson Pye, the Aboriginal elder who painted two of the most important works in the Paruku project, learned how to paint from his grandfather, Boxer Milner Tjampitjin, whose works figure prominently in the Scholl collection.

Within the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art there are manifold connections among disparate artists forged through a commonality of mark-making, the preservation of stories and cultural heritage, and the conservation of the natural world. The work of Australian Aboriginal artists is of special import in this context as the roots of their work reach back more than 50,000 years, and represent the oldest continuous cultural production in the world.

All the paintings in No Boundaries are drawn from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, Miami-based collectors and philanthropists.

Lead Sponsors

Nancy & Martin Cohen, and Barrick Gold

Supporting Sponsors

John & Carol Ann Badwick, Bally Technologies, John H.O. La Gatta, Stremmel Gallery, and Whittier Trust Company of Nevada

Late Harvest juxtaposes contemporary art made with taxidermy with historically significant wildlife paintings, resulting in intriguing parallels and startling aesthetic contrasts. The exhibition seeks to simultaneously confirm—through historically-significant wildlife paintings—and subvert—through contemporary art and photography—viewers’ preconceptions of the place of animals in culture. An illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Featured artists

Richard Ansdell, David Brooks, George Browne, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Petah Coyne, Raymond Ching, Kate Clark, Wim Delvoye, Mark Dion, Elmgreen & Dragset, Carlee Fernandez, Richard Friese, François Furet, Nicholas Galanin, George Bouverie Goddard, Damien Hirst, William Hollywood, Idiots (Afke Golsteijn and Floris Bakker), Alfred Kowalski, Robert Kuhn, Wilhelm Kuhnert, Bruno Liljefors, Polly Morgan, John Newsom, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Walter Robinson, George Rotig, Carl Rungius, Yinka Shonibare MBE, David Shrigley, Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson, Amy Stein, Archibald Thorburn, Mary Tsiongas, Joseph Wolf, Brigitte Zieger, Andrew Zuckerman

Late Harvest is organized by the Nevada Museum of Art in consultation with the National Museum of Wildlife Art. The exhibition is curated by JoAnne Northrup, Director of Contemporary Art Initiatives, together with consulting curator Adam Duncan Harris, Ph.D., Petersen Curator of Art & Research, National Museum of Wildlife Art.

Major sponsors

Barrick Gold, Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Supporting sponsors

Anne Brockinton Lee and Robert M. Lee, Nion McEvoy, and Deborah and Andy Rappaport.

The most distinguished name in decorative firearms in America is Tiffany & Co. — a surprise to those who might otherwise recognize the firm as a legendary purveyor of fine silver, jewelry and luxury objects. Founded in 1837 by Charles Lewis Tiffany, what became Tiffany & Co. commenced business just one year after the young inventor Samuel Colt registered his new designs for revolving pistols and long arms with the U.S. Patent Office. In the 175 years since then, the paths of Tiffany & Co. and Colt have crossed many times. Among the other American gun makers with ties to Tiffany & Co. are Henry Deringer, Winchester, and Smith & Wesson.

The Robert M. Lee Collection is recognized as the finest selection of Tiffany & Co. arms privately owned. The collection of items in this exhibition — including three revolvers, four pistols, one rifle, and one presentation sword — is rivaled only by those on display in the Robert M. Lee Gallery of American Arms, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Tiffany’s production of presentation swords and fine guns began in the 1850s, reached a peak during the Civil War period (c. 1861-65), and continued through the close of World War I (c. 1918). The art of Tiffany & Co. arms was revived c. 1982, and remained active until c. 2001, with innovative modern era designs created by the firm’s Corporate Division. The Tiffany and Co. items in the exhibition span just over a century — they were made as early as 1893 and as recently as 1994.

All of the rare arms in the exhibition are featured in a series of books being published by Yellowstone Press, under the umbrella title The Art of the Gun. The first book in the series, Magnificent Colts Selections from the Robert M. Lee Collection, will be released in January 2012. It will be available in the Museum Store.

The objects included in this exhibition are from the private collection of Robert M. Lee. This exhibition will be presented in the Feature Gallery.

Exclusive sponsor

Wayne L. Prim Foundation