Drawn from the permanent collections of the Nevada Museum of Art with several key loans from contemporary artists, Where Art and Tech Collide highlights the various ways that artists use technology to inspire wonder and curiosity. Featuring artworks by Andy Diaz-Hope, Trevor Paglen, Kal Spelletich, Leo Villareal, and Gail Wight, among others, the exhibition ignites an exploration of the human relationship to the increasingly digital and artificial world of the future. Camille Utterback’s interactive digital work, Precarious, provides the centerpiece, where the motion of visitors results in colorful, constantly changing forms projected onto the gallery wall. 

Every year, the Museum, in partnership with the Desert Research Institute’s Science Alive program, hosts a statewide conference to explore best practices in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (STEAM) Education. The 2020 NV STEAM Conference focuses on the T in STEAM, highlighting and celebrating the ways artists and interdisciplinary practitioners leverage new and emerging technologies to change the way we see the world. Art about technology, art made with technology, and art made by technology serve as springboards for thought, learning, and discussion.

Organized in conjunction with the 2020 NV STEAM Conference, a statewide education initiative.

Lead Sponsor

Tesla

Major Sponsor

Odyssey Foundation

Sponsor

City National Bank | An RBC Company

This exhibition honors the late Nancy Peppin, a Reno-based artist and steadfast supporter of the arts who passed away in 2015. Known for her great sense of humor, Peppin made a name for herself as a graphic designer and watercolorist. Her favorite subjects to paint were Twinkies—the popular snack cake with a creamy white filling—and her obsession eventually led to national acclaim. Peppin’s artworks grace the homes of friends and family throughout northern Nevada. This exhibition will be drawn from those private collections. Upon her passing, Peppin generously left a significant gift to the Nevada Museum of Art to support the acquisition of artworks for the Museum’s permanent collections.

The Art of Jean LaMarr is on view in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts through January 7, 2024.

Jean LaMarr (born 1945) makes art that addresses issues such as cultural stereotypes, representations of women and Native American people, and the traditions of her ancestors. Although she has worked primarily as a printmaker, she is also known for her paintings, assemblages, videos, and installation work. LaMarr is of Paiute/Pit River ancestry with family ties to Northern Nevada and northern California, and was born in Susanville, California, in 1945.  Her artistic development was critically influenced by the time she spent at UC Berkeley from 1973-76 where she earned her BFA and was involved with activist politics. LaMarr describes herself as a community artist-activist. She lives on the Susanville Indian Rancheria in northeastern California, where she continues to operate the Native American Graphic Workshop.

Sponsors

Carole K. Anderson
Nevada Arts Council
Kristi Overgaard
Sandy Raffealli | Bill Pearce Motors
The Phil and Jennifer Satre Family Fund at the Community Foundation of Western Nevada

Supporting Sponsors

Kathie Bartlett

Additional Support

In memory of Bernadette Kaye, sharing her culture.
Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities

Prototype for New Understanding, a title inspired by an artwork by Brian Jungen, debuts recent artwork acquisitions alongside longtime favorites from the Nevada Museum of Art permanent collection. Over the past decade, the Museum has worked diligently to grow its permanent collection and to establish itself as a leader in the field of art and environment, examining ways people interact with natural, built, and virtual environments. This field of inquiry stems from the Museum’s geographic location in a region known for diverse indigenous cultures; an extreme desert environment; rich natural resources; military, industrial, and nuclear history; complex land and water issues; and legacies of colonialism. The Museum’s integrated art, archive, and library collections are at the heart of this field of inquiry and reflect this unique thematic orientation.

The artworks on view in the exhibition were chosen to promote curiosity and connect ideas across time, space, geographies, disciplines, and cultures, and to catalyze interdisciplinary conversations about our changing world.

Reko Rennie (Gamilaroi/Gamilaraay people) was born in 1974 in Melbourne, Australia, where he lives today. Rennie explores his Aboriginal identity through a broad array of media, including spray paint, prints, sculpture, paste-ups, light projections and site-specific installations. Through his art he provokes discussion surrounding Indigenous culture and identity in contemporary urban environments. Largely autobiographical, his commanding works combine the iconography of his heritage with stylistic elements of graffiti.

Merging traditional diamond-shaped designs, hand-drawn symbols and repetitive patterning to subvert romantic notions of Aboriginal identity, Rennie often uses camouflage patterns to reference the ways in which Aboriginal people have had to hide, blend in, and conceal their identity.

In Australia, Always Was Always Will Be is a familiar and important protest chant, often used by Aboriginal people in demonstrations. The phrase adapted by Rennie as the title of this site-specific mural serves as a reminder that Australia was, and always will be, Aboriginal land. Says the artist, “It’s an important reminder, and also an acknowledgment to the communities of the Washoe, Paiute, and Western Shoshone, who call the Great Basin home.”

Reno-based mural artist Erik Burke assisted Rennie with the realization of Always Was Always Will Be.

Sponsors

Barbara and Tad Danz

Additional Support

Anonymous
Charlotte and Dick McConnell
Sylvia and Jim Thacker
Peggy Lowndes
Jean and Jerry Pfarr

Photographer David Maisel’s archive of the Proving Ground project lends rare insight into his encounter with one of the most secretive of American military zones. The archive reveals the depth of his photographic and time-based media investigation of Dugway Proving Ground, a classified site covering nearly 800,000 acres in a remote region of Utah’s Great Salt Lake Desert. From its inception during World War II to the present day, Dugway’s primary mission has been to develop and test chemical and biological weaponry and defense programs. After more than a decade of inquiry, Maisel was granted rare access to photograph the terrain, testing facilities, and other aspects of this deliberately obscured region of the American atlas. He photographed the site from both the air and the ground.

This body of work explores questions surrounding military power, national security, land use, and the limits of technology and human endeavor. Proving Ground is a critical response to the extraordinary formal and political aspects embedded at Dugway, in Maisel’s words, a “hidden, walled-off, and secret site that offers the opportunity to reflect on who and what we are collectively, as a society.”

Materials for this exhibition are drawn from David Maisel’s archive of the project held at the Center for Art + Environment.

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 Art Awards is scheduled in conjunction with the Scholastic Art and 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.

Every year, students submit their art which is evaluated by a panel of judges made up of local artists and art professionals. Exceptional works are awarded Gold Key, Silver Key, or Honorable Mention. Gold Key artworks advance to compete in the national Scholastic Art Awards competition. Select Gold Key works were also shown in an exhibition at the Holland Project Gallery at 140 Vesta Street in Reno, February 22 through March 20, 2020. American Visions Nominees are displayed concurrently in the Donald W Reynolds Grand Hall at the Museum.

Please note that the American Visions artwork at the Museum will be on view for an extended time. This extension does not apply to the Gold Key exhibition at the Holland Project.

Submissions for the 2020 Scholastic Art Awards were due by December 12. Click here to learn more about the submission process.

Congratulations to the award winners for the Scholastic Art Awards 2020!

Sponsors

City of Reno Arts & Culture Commission
Nell J. Redfield Foundation
Heidemarie Rochlin

Supporting Sponsors

Wild Women Artists

This exhibition features more than 50 large-format photographs by the renowned Italian photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni (1941-2019), who is best known as the premier documentarian of Land Art in America. After meeting the legendary New York gallery owner Leo Castelli in 1969, Gorgoni was introduced to artists including Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Richard Serra, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude—a veritable Who’s Who of artists in New York City and Europe.

He first became known for making portraits of these individuals, but it was not long before he was invited by Heizer, Smithson, and De Maria to travel to the American West, where they were making some of the most iconic Earthworks of the twentieth century. Gorgoni was the first photographer to collaborate with these artists, and his images often serve as the definitive photographic record of their groundbreaking projects.

In 2016, the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art acquired  Gorgoni’s archive, containing more than 2,000 images documenting Land Art. The images offer a unique and unparalleled record of how these artists’ iconic projects were created.

Gianfranco Gorgoni: Land Art Photographs will include Gorgoni’s photographs of works by Christo & Jean-Claude, Nancy Holt, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, Ugo Rondinone, Charles Ross, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson. The photographs will become part of the Carol Franc Buck Altered Landscape Photography Collection at the Nevada Museum of Art.

About the Book

The first career-spanning book of the work of Gianfranco Gorgoni, whose iconic photographs established Land Art as one of the major movements of the twentieth century.

Essays by Ann M. Wolfe, Germano Celant, and William L. Fox

Hardcover, 256 pages, published by Monacelli Press and the Nevada Museum of Art

Major Sponsors

Carol Franc Buck Foundation
The Cashman Foundation
Kim Sinatra + Family

Sponsors

Barbara and Tad Danz
Kathryn A. Hall and Laurel Trust Company
Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller
Linda and Alvaro Pascotto

Many of the photographs in this exhibition were purchased with a bequest from Nancy L. Peppin.

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 men or women 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.  

WORK is an exhibition by the artist and Prime Minister of Albania, Edi Rama. This is his first solo museum exhibition in the United States. The exhibition includes a series of new drawings made on documents and notes that Rama creates during meetings and phone calls, as well as ceramic sculptures and a floor-to-ceiling wallpaper that emulates the wallpaper in his office at the Ministry in Tirana. His drawing practice has developed in close parallel with his career as a politician. Rama views art as an essential element in a functional society. A clear example is his initiative to paint the facades of decaying communist bloc buildings after being elected Mayor of Tirana in 2000, an undertaking Rama has described as “a political action, with colors.”The Exhibition WORK has traveled from Kunsthalle Rostock in Germany and has been adapted to the exhibition space of the Nevada Museum of Art.

Edi Rama lives and works in Tirana. A former professor of painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and author of several books, his works have been exhibited in numerous solo, two-person, or group exhibitions including at the Venice Biennale (2017); São Paulo Biennial (1994); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2004); the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2010); the Musée D’art contemporain de Montréal (2011); Biennale of Marrakesh, Morocco (2015); The New Museum, New York (2016); and Kunsthalle Rostock (2019). Edi Rama began his political career in Albania as the Minister of Culture in 1998. He was the Mayor of Tirana from 2000-2011. Rama was elected Prime Minister of Albania in September 2013, following a landslide victory in the general elections, and his government has since embarked the path of reforms that aim to bring Albania closer to the European Union. He is currently serving his second term as Prime Minister.

A new publication, also entitled WORK, has been published by Hatje Cantz and produced by carlier | gebauer, the Nevada Museum of Art, and Kunsthalle Rostock to accompany the exhibition. WORK is the first publication to present Edi Rama’s drawings, ceramic sculptures, and wallpaper and features texts by Martin Herbert, Ornela Vorpsi and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.