This series of eight, large-scale paintings by Robert Beckmann reveals the potential effects of a nuclear detonation on an American-built, single-family home. The series is based on real-life, Cold War-era testing undertaken on the Nevada Test Site (now the Nevada National Security Site). The deep-red images are based on footage from a 1953 documentary film about the detonation of a 16-kiloton nuclear bomb nicknamed “Annie.” The artist remembers watching the film as a young boy growing up during the Cold War era.

In 2018, the State of Israel marks seventy years since its founding by the United Nations following World War II. For this occasion, the Nevada Museum of Art presents work by two female Israeli artists who create work that is simultaneously grounded in the history of photography, while delivering a fresh and independent viewpoint to the dialogue surrounding art and environment.

Several years ago, the Nevada Museum of Art partnered with John and Catherine Farahi to organize a trip to Israel for Museum patrons that combined historical and cultural site visits with architecture tours, museum visits and stops at artists’ studios. Two of the contemporary artists that the group encountered—established sculptor and video artist Michal Rovner, and mid-career photographer Tal Shochat—resonated with the group and with the Museum’s focus on artists and their creative interactions with natural, built, and virtual environments. Works by Rovner and Shochat have been brought together for this exhibition marking Israel’s anniversary.

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Premier Sponsor

Atlantis Casino Resort Spa | Catherine and John Farahi

Lead Sponsor

Anonymous

Major Sponsor

John and Carol Ann Badwick

Sponsor

Susan Baker, Wawona Foundation
Crystal Family Foundation

Supporting Sponsors

Nancy Flanigan; Heidi Allyn Loeb; Mary Catherine and Ken Pierson; Sandy Raffealli | Bill Pearce Motors; Suzanne Silverman and Dennis Dworkin

Additional Support

Iris and Mark Frank; Mimi Ellis-Hogan; Sharon and Gary Jacobson; Hy Kashenberg; Gary Lieberthal; Cary Lurie; Nancy and Alan Maiss; Jacob Margolis; Leslie and Steve Pansky; Joan and Michael Pokroy; Jean Venneman and YaYa Jacoby; Darby and David Walker

This exhibition is drawn from the Martha Hesse Dolan and Robert E. Dolan Collection.

Country is spoken about in the same way non-Aboriginal people may talk about their living human relatives. Aboriginal people cry about country, they worry about country, they listen to country, they visit country and long for country.

−Nici Cumpston

This exhibition presents a concise selection of paintings by Aboriginal Australian female artists, drawn from the collection of Martha Hesse Dolan and Robert E. Dolan. Inspired by the 2015 exhibition, No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting, which was organized by the Nevada Museum of Art, the Nevada-based couple began researching Aboriginal Australian art, and acquiring work by female artists, as well as collaborative work or group projects.

The Indigenous people of Australia are inextricably bound to their land. Although the artists in this exhibition are from diverse communities across Australia, each shares a commitment and responsibility to country. For Aboriginal Australian people, country comprises the land, sea, sky, and everything contained therein. Each artist engages with country in various ways through their work. The artists in this exhibition paint the natural features of their country in a non-representational style that enables the artists to keep secret and sacred elements hidden from uninitiated viewers. They depict songlines, also called Dreaming Tracks, which describe the paths taken by the Ancestors as they created the world during the Dreaming. The Dreaming encodes the location of essential waterholes and food sources into stories, dances, and songs that artists translate into visual form.

Aboriginal people who have memorized the songlines can navigate across Australia by following the landmarks made by the Ancestors—such as hills, valleys and watercourses—that are described in the songs. This is called “singing up country,” which is also considered a sacred duty that is necessary to keep the world in existence. The Dreaming and the paintings arising from it are thus both systems of geography and of belief.

Anna McKee’s Reliquary is a sculptural installation comprised of 3,405 glass ampules that she sewed to 678 silk panels in a long hanging row creating a subtly swaying wave form. The entire piece suggests a graph. Shifting hues hint at untold levels of information and a deep measure of time. Though abstract, the installation’s form is the expression of 68,000 years of temperature history from an ice sheet.

McKee collaborated with Seattle composer/sound artist Steve Peters, who created a multi-channel sound piece, taken from recordings of the reliquary ampules. Steve makes music and sound for many contexts and occasions using environmental recordings, found/natural objects, electronics, acoustic instruments, and voices. His work is often site-based, attentive to the subtle nuances of perception and place.

McKee’s art practice is informed by an interest in history and environmental sciences. She seeks evidence of time and meaning in the land, especially at the intersections of human activity. Glacial ice became a metaphor for the deep memory of the natural world. Living in the Puget Sound Basin, a glacially sculpted environment has been a potent influence.

In 2009, McKee visited the WAIS Divide Ice Core field camp in Antarctica through the National Science Foundations Artist and Writers program. She interviewed scientists, watched ice being drilled from a two-mile deep ice sheet and spent hours drawing the white open space.

Time on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was a powerful influence on her work, and for several years she gestated ideas for a larger installation. In 2012, Eric Steig, Professor of Glaciology at the University of Washington, invited her to fabricate the glass ampules for the WAIS Reliquary at his research lab, using surplus water samples from over three kilometers of glacier ice. He and several graduate students also shared data and insights that contributed to the design of the reliquary.

Dave Eggers’ new drawings and paintings, created especially for this exhibition, feature strange, powerful images of animals, and plaintive text—much from the Old Testament. The resulting effect is oddly spiritual, often profound and sometimes even humorous.

Eggers is widely known as a San Francisco-based writer of six critically acclaimed books, including his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. More recently he has been in the headlines for his literacy advocacy, in particular the non-profit writing and tutoring centers for children and teens that he has established across the country. However, Eggers was first focused on visual arts before he became a writer, and although his literary career is his primary focus, he is still actively engaged in an art and graphic design practice.

According to the artist, living creatures as subject matter holds a special appeal: “This past year I went back to drawing animals. The process for these pictures is pretty simple: I find an old photo of an animal that somehow has some intrigue, and I use a China marker to freehand a version of that animal onto very smooth paper.” Many of the drawings and paintings integrate short phrases, often drawn from the Bible. Eggers explained, “I think of what that animal might be thinking — if that animal had an antagonistic relationship with humans and was vying with those humans for the favor of a Catholic God.”

Eggers’ work has a singular, “stand alone” quality often associated with graphic design. He has created cover art for rock bands, designed posters for film festival, and contributed illustrations to journals and periodicals.

This is Eggers’ first museum exhibition.

Anne Lindberg creates subtle drawings and installations that blur the line between traditional media. Made from colored thread and graphite, her meditative works are studies in formal abstraction, complicating viewers’ perceptions of relationships to the objects themselves.

Lindberg’s graphite drawings made from thousands of parallel lines appear to vibrate on paper. Systemic and non-representational, they are subtle, rhythmic, abstract, and immersive. Her more recent room-sized thread installations consist of thousands of strands of fine threads in different hues suspended carefully from the wall. Viewers peer through the layers to experience a shifting color palette altered by subtle lighting and shadow. In these installations, Lindberg explains that she “discovered an optical and spatial phenomenon that spans the outer reaches of our peripheral vision. The work also references physiological systems—such as heartbeat, respiration, neural paths, equilibrium—and psychological states.”

Lindberg resides in Kansas City and holds a M.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Miami University. She was Visiting Artist-in-Residence/Head of Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2005 and taught for nine years at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work has been shown at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Drawing Center in New York, the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and the Sheldon Memorial Art Museum.

Lindberg was also recently awarded the 2011 Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Award.

The Nevada Museum of Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition of drawings by German artist Jorinde Voigt, recent winner of the prestigious Guerlain Drawing Prize in 2012. Although Voigt has exhibited widely internationally, this will be her first solo exhibition at an art museum in the United States.

In her large-scale drawings, Voigt makes reference to a wide-range of subjects—from weather and geography to music, literature, and philosophy. Far from objective representations, however, her lyrical notations are rendered in a unique visual language that is not easily deciphered. Composed of both objective and subjective elements, Voigt’s algorithmic systems make visible an invisible world that is complex in its shifting movements and overlapping influences.

Jorinde Voigt was born in Frankfurt, Germany and currently lives in Berlin. The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Musée d’art moderne du Centre Pompidou in Paris have recently acquired Voigt’s work for their permanent collections. She has had exhibitions at the Museum Van Bommel van Dam, in The Netherlands, the NKV Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Germany, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands, and the Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany, and the David Nolan Gallery, New York.

“Although my work has taken other forms (folds, slabs, sheets, zip folds) my fundamental interest in the detachability of signification as a way to re-construct form and desire continues to be an underlying motivation in my work.” –Linda Besemer

Linda Besemer (b. 1957) is an abstract painter based in Southern California celebrated for her stunning, optical works that upend commonly held notions of what makes a painting. Her work subtly expresses, through formal means, her distinct political outlook. Normally one expects a painting to consist of pigment, whether oil, acrylic or watercolor, applied to some sort of ground, whether canvas, panel or paper. In an exciting subversion of tradition, Besemer creates double-sided paintings (“folds”) of pure acrylic pigment without a ground. Rather than framing her paintings, Besemer drapes these pliable works over rods attached to the wall. More recently, she began creating sculptural “slabs,” in which layer after layer of vibrant acrylic color is built up to a thickness of up to five inches, then the mass is sculpted, revealing colors, shapes and patterns.

In the early 20th century, abstraction was envisioned as a revolutionary common language. In the 2nd half of the century, abstraction became increasingly apolitical. While updating abstraction for the 21st century, Besemer’s work contains implicit political and social critique, hearkening back to the movement’s radical roots.

Born in South Bend, Indiana, and educated at Indiana University (BFA) and the Tyler School of Art (MFA), Besemer lives in Los Angeles where she teaches painting, drawing, and critical studies at Occidental College.

Colorado artist Hunt Rettig’s three-dimensional, mixed media assemblages are made with unexpected combinations of materials, including polyester film, synthetic rubber, plastic, wood, silicone, metal nuts and bolts, and acrylic paints. Possessed of preternatural luminosity and largely indecipherable construction, these works are suggestive of the organic, the cellular, the sensual, and the bodily.

With respect to his vision, Rettig explains: “Within my terrain I see cross sections of cross sections, unnatural confluences, unnavigable borders, unrestricted constriction and breath-like expansion. Especially with plantlike forms I see what I can best describe as the invisibly visible…landscapes unnatural yet natural at the same time.”

New York-based artist Emilie Clark creates art installations informed by the history of science and natural history. The latest in series of works focused on the work and lives of Victorian women scientists and naturalists, Sweet Corruptions departs from the work of Ellen H. Richards—a sanitary chemist who studied air, water, and food.

Richards was the first female student and then professor at MIT, and had a profound interest in the relationship between people and their environment. She also brought the word “ecology” into the English language. Clark uses Richards’s work as a structure and guide, treating her own studio like a laboratory.

The work in this project includes the collection and preservation of the artist’s family’s food waste for one year; an interactive Research Station sculpture that includes an audio piece, specimens, a dissecting microscope (for the public’s use) and terraria; a book; and, drawings and paintings.

Sponsors

Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller