Bringing together visitor favorites alongside more recent acquisitions, Drawings: Selections from the Permanent Collection, highlights contemporary works on paper from the Nevada Museum of Art holdings of over 3,000 artworks. Each work in this small exhibition demonstrates exacting precision and a commitment to the fundamentals of drawing.  Whether using graphite or ink to express a mood, create space, or tell a story, artists including Katie Holten, Anne Lindberg, Jack Malotte, Erika Osborne, Martín Ramírez, and the collective consisting of Wilson Díaz, Amy Franceschini and Renny Pritikin, have made drawing a vital component of their practice.

The artworks that comprise the E. L. Wiegand Collection date from the early twentieth century to the present and represent various manifestations of the work ethic in American art. While many emphasize people undertaking the physical act of labor, others focus on different types of work environments ranging from domestic interiors and rural landscapes to urban cityscapes and industrial scenes. By expanding the definition of the term work ethic to encompass a broad range of activities undertaken by a diverse spectrum of people from various cultural and socioeconomic groups, the collection seeks to acknowledge all those who have devoted their lives to the tireless pursuit of work.

Edwin L. Wiegand was a successful entrepreneur and inventor who made Reno his home in 1971. He died in 1980 at the age of 88, and the E. L. Wiegand Foundation was established in Reno in 1982 for general charitable purposes.

The Nevada Museum of Art thanks the E. L. Wiegand Foundation for their generous, ongoing support of this unique permanent collection.

This exhibition—primarily drawn from the Nevada Museum of Art’s permanent collection—presents work that taps into and explores various kinds of ancestral frequencies. Ranging from Indigenous artists of the Great Basin to Australia, as well as artists examining their African and Latin American roots, the artists in the exhibition explore different modes of artistic expression that inspire connections to diverse cultural histories. The double entendre of the title further underscores how considerations of cultural belonging, in particular with respect to the human relationship to its natural environs, have become irregular and displaced with the advent of modernization and the industrial revolution. Together the works in the exhibition inspire us to listen to and tune in to the frequencies and ancestral wisdoms of the past.

Additional Support

Nevada Arts Council

Guillermo Bert makes artworks that explore the endurance of immigrants who have left their home countries behind. Rooted in his personal story, his primary focus has been the experiences of people and families who enter the United States along the U.S. – Mexico border. His artworks draw metaphorical relationships between the journeys of migrants, harsh and empty desert landscapes, and the commodification and objectification of American values. This mid-career survey includes artworks in a variety of traditional and contemporary media that are drawn from the entirety of Bert’s career, as well as new works produced exclusively for this exhibition.

In his multi-media and conceptually layered works, Bert addresses the ways in which colonization and capitalistic systems contribute to cultural displacement and the loss of Indigenous identities, traditions, and religions. In series such as Encoded Textiles and Border Zone, Bert keeps old traditions alive through new technology, enticing the viewer to actively participate in his art while simultaneously transporting them into the realities of others. Through his different series, he gives voice to people who have been marginalized, silenced, and overlooked.

Bert was born in 1959, raised in Santiago, Chile, and left his home country in the early 1980s before immigrating to Los Angeles in 1981 in search of a more open and inclusive society. Bert worked as an Art Director at the Los Angeles Times and taught art at the Art Center School of Design in Pasadena, California, before dedicating his time exclusively to his own art and design.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a major book published by the Nevada Museum of Art. The book will include an interview between Guest Curator Vivian Zavataro and artist Guillermo Bert. Additional scholarly essays by Alma Ruiz, an independent curator and Senior Fellow at the Center for Business and Management of the Arts, Claremont Graduate University, and former senior curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tressa Berman, Ph.D., an anthropologist, curator, and writer who lives and works in California and New Mexico; Ximena Keogh Serrano is a writer and transdisciplinary scholar based in Portland, Oregon.

A companion exhibition featuring Guillermo Bert’s work will be on view at The John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art from September 5, 2023 to January 27, 2024.

Major Sponsor

National Endowment for the Arts

Sponsors

Barbara and Tad Danz
Kathryn A. Hall and Laurel Trust

Additional Support

Andres Drobny

Over the course of six weeks during the summer of 1969, thousands of people attended the Harlem Cultural Festival to celebrate Black history, culture, music and fashion. Inspired by the Questlove film of the same title, this exhibition showcases select album covers of several of the influential black musicians and artists that continue to inspire music of today.
This exhibition is organized and presented by the Northern Nevada Black Cultural Awareness Society.

Since 1999, Northern Nevada middle and high school students have been invited to submit their artwork to the Scholastic Art Awards competition. The Museum’s annual presentation of the Scholastic Awards is scheduled in conjunction with the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, a national program designed to identify America’s most gifted young artists and writers. This program has honored some of our nation’s most celebrated artists including Truman Capote, Sylvia Plath, Michael Sarich, Cindy Sherman, Robert Redford, and Andy Warhol.

Students in grades 7-12 (age 13 and up) submit their art which is then judged by a panel of local artists and art professionals. Artworks are eligible for the highest award of Gold Key, followed by a Silver Key, or an Honorable Mention based on originality, technical skill, and an emergence of a personal vision. Along with going on to compete in the national competition, select works will be shown in a joint exhibition presented by the Nevada Museum of Art and The Lilley Museum of Art, the School of the Arts, and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Reno.

2022 Award Recipients

Gold Key Works
On view at Sheppard Contemporary / Church Fine Arts building, University of Nevada, Reno

Parking is available at the Brian J. Whalen Parking Complex, bottom floor.

American Visions Nominated Works
On view at Nevada Museum of Art / Donald W. Reynolds Grand Hall

Award Ceremony
Nightingale Concert Hall / Church Fine Arts building, University of Nevada, Reno
Thursday, February 10, 2022 / 6 – 7 pm

We invite Gold and Silver Key award recipients to be honored during this special ceremony. All invited guests are required to RSVP to Jacque Dawson by February 1, 2022 to attend. Due to limited space, Gold and Silver Key award-winning students may RSVP with up to two guests and educators may bring one guest.

Sponsors
Anonymous
City of Reno Arts & Culture Commission
Nell J. Redfield Foundation
Wild Women Artists

Michael Moore is a painter based nomadically in the San Francisco Bay Area, southern Colorado, and the Smoke Creek Desert in Nevada. Moore spends three to five months a year living and painting at his Smoke Creek studio. While in the desert, Moore rises each morning to paint the landscape of the Smoke Creek playa. This meditative practice yields hundreds of watercolor studies that he displays in his studio in large wall grids. He also traverses the Great Basin seeking subjects for his larger paintings made in either watercolor or acrylic. Moore’s thinly applied paints evoke the transparency of the desert and its expansive skies.

Exhibition support provided by Wanda Casazza, in memory of Earl Casazza

This exhibition accompanies a new musical composition commissioned by the Reno Philharmonic in collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art. Jimmy López Bellido, a world-renowned, Finnish-trained, Peruvian-American composer, was invited by Laura Jackson, Music Director of the Reno Philharmonic, to work with curators at the Nevada Museum of Art to select photographs from the Museum’s photography collection to inspire his brand new, Symphony. No. 3: Altered Landscape. The Carol Franc Buck Altered Landscape Photography Collection is the Nevada Museum of Art’s signature collection of photographs featuring more than 2,000 images reflecting changes to the natural and built environment.

Lead Sponsors

The Deborah and T.J. Day Foundation
Jackie and Steve Kane
Charlotte and Dick McConnell
Sandy Raffealli | Bill Pearce Motors

Sponsors

Atlantis Casino Resort Spa | John and Catherine Farahi

Although Spanish-born artist Pablo Picasso is best known as a Modernist who invented the artistic style known as Cubism, he also produced a lesser-known, but equally impressive body of decorative ceramic objects during the latter part of his life. This exhibition features thirty ceramic works designed by Picasso that are on loan from longtime collectors Robert Felton and Lindsay Wallis. The artworks are a generous bequest to the Nevada Museum of Art.  

Following World War II and the liberation of Paris, Picasso began to increasingly spend time in the coastal region of southern France. In 1946, he encountered an exhibition of pottery in Vallauris, a town with a long history of pottery production reaching back to the Roman Empire. It was there that he met Suzanne and Georges Ramié, owners of the Madoura ceramics workshop, who invited him to model some small works from clay. This was the beginning of a longtime friendship and business relationship. 

In 1947, Picasso gave up his urban home in the rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris and set up his principal studio in Vallauris. He remained in Madoura for several years. During this time, the Ramiés allowed Picasso to make and decorate ceramic wares in their workshop whenever he pleased. In exchange, Picasso allowed them to edition his creations and to retain the profits from their sale.  

Over a period of 20 years, Picasso worked with ceramic artists at the studio to create nearly 4,000 objects. His involvement in the production of each piece varied. Sometimes he created the mold used to form an object, other times he sculpted and gouged the clay into unique shapes, and often he simply decorated or painted objects that other ceramicists had already thrown and shaped.    

Whether a plate, pitcher, bowl, mask, tile, or platter, Picasso decorated his objects with a range of colorful and witty subjects. From everyday animals or plants, to mythological creatures and hybrid human-animals, Picasso’s ceramics reflect the joy and newfound freedom he embraced while living in southern France following the war.  

Sponsors

Betsy Burgess and Tim Bailey
Barbara and Tad Danz

Supporting Sponsors

The Collections Committee of the Nevada Museum of Art
Tammy and Michael Dermody
Evercore Wealth Management

Additional Support

Linda Frye

Feature Image: Pablo Picasso, Engraved Bull, 1947, Rectangular dish A.R. white earthenware clay, decoration in engobes, engraved under yellow glaze, 12 1/2 x 15 ½ inches. Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, Promised gift of Robert Felton and Lindsay Wallis. © 2022 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.