The Nevada Museum of Art has been selected to participate in a five-year exhibition partnership with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) made possible by Art Bridges and the Terra Foundation for American Art. The local kickoff to this multi-year, multi-institutional partnership started with “Vote Nevada Art,” a month-long community-wide campaign (July 11 – August 11, 2019) where the public voted to determine which artworks would hang on the walls of the Museum.

SAAM made eight paintings available as contenders for this race, including works by Childe Hassam, David Hockney, Edward Hopper, George Inness, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Angel Rodríguez-Díaz, and Severin Roesen.

The top three winners were Hassam’s The South Ledges, Appledore, 1913; Ryder’s House, 1933, by Hopper; and O’Keeffe’s Hibiscus with Plumeria, 1939.

These three treasures from the nation’s preeminent collection of American Art will be on view in America’s Art, Nevada’s Choice: Community Selections from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, opening during First Thursday on November 7, 2019, with a press conference and Unveiling Celebration.

To learn more about this five-year collaboration with SAAM and four partner museums across the American West read the press release.

From the first voyages to the “new world” in the 1500s to 21st-century late modernity, globalization has impacted quality of life and contributed to a stratified society. This exhibition assembles a multigenerational group of artists working in sculpture, painting, photography, and video art, who uncover markers of class through their work. These markers identify a complex hierarchy in social structures that define and shape us. Without You I Am Nothing explores society’s relationship to labor, consumption, and materiality by examining and encouraging viewers to consider these topics.

This exhibition is curated by Alberto Garcia, UNR Art History graduate.

This exhibition complements Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern, a new look at this iconic artist through her art, fashion, and style. On view July 20 – October 20, 2019.

“Maybe it seems mad…that I go out like this and live out under the stars and the sky for a few days—but I am like that.”

Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz, 1940

The beauty and elegance of Georgia O’Keeffe’s New Mexico paintings were prompted by the intimacy of her experience with the Southwest’s natural forms, especially in relationship to her paintings of the landscape surrounding her home at Ghost Ranch. Further from home, she made repeated camping trips to draw and paint at three extraordinary sites in the Southwest: Glen Canyon, Utah, and places in New Mexico that she referred to as “The White Place” and “The Black Place.” This exhibition presents a selection of fifty objects of camping gear belonging to O’Keeffe—everything from her flashlight to her Stanley thermos. The long drive from the artist’s home at Ghost Ranch made it an impossible day trip; painting and drawing the barren hills required camping. Between 1936 and 1949, the artist returned to these sites many times to create more than a dozen major works inspired by the astonishing landscape, isolated far off the road and away from all civilization.

Kesler “Kes” Woodward is one of Alaska’s most renowned painters, known for his colorful paintings of northern landscapes. He taught art for two decades at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and is now Professor Emeritus. In 2001 he was appointed the Harriman Scholar and Expedition Artist for the 1899 Harriman Expedition Retraced, a reenactment of one of the most ambitious scientific explorations made during the 19th century.

Organized by Edward Harriman, a wealthy railroad magnate, the Harriman Expedition was a 9,000-mile exploration along the coast of Alaska. The top American experts of the day were invited, including geologists, botanists, foresters, ornithologists, paleontologists, zoologists, painters, photographers, and writers. Explorers John Muir, John Burroughs, and George Bird Grinnell, and the then-unknown photographer Edward Curtis were among the group.

In 2001 Thomas Litwin of Smith College led a trip to follow the path of the original expedition. Two dozen scientists, artists, and writers left Prince Rupert, British Columbia aboard the Clipper Odyssey, to follow Harriman’s itinerary through the Inside Passage, up the Gulf of Alaska and along the Aleutian Archipelago, then northward through the Bering Sea. Four weeks later they made their final stop in Nome, Alaska.

William Cronin, a contemporary team member and a renowned historian, noted: “What we are doing is seeing this landscape at two moments in time. We’re seeing it through that expedition in 1899 and seeing it at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Materials for this exhibition are drawn from Kes Woodward’s archive of the journey held at the Center for Art + Environment.

“Sincere,” first recorded in English in the 1530s, is from the Latin word sincerus, meaning “clean, pure, sound, etc.,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Born 1959 in Reno, artist Galen Brown creates work in drawing, printmaking, mixed media sculpture, and photography that embodies the adjective and resonates with intelligence and formal beauty. This exhibition takes a retrospective view of the Carson City-based artist’s work from the 1990s to the present, highlighting process-based bodies of work—including his massive drawings on scrap museum board, like Sine Cere—which he assembles over the course of many years. Educated at the San Francisco Art Institute, Brown’s painstaking and often obsessive practice results in works that demonstrate his commitment to erasing the boundaries between art and everyday life.

Sponsors

Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller

The Nevada Museum of Art is known, in part, for its permanent collection that includes artworks with a thematic focus on how humans interact with natural, built, and virtual environments. For many artists, this means responding to how landscapes change as a result of using natural resources to power the world. Today, energy resources are classified as either renewable or non-renewable—and include everything from water, air, coal, minerals and forests, to wind, geothermal, and solar.

The works on view in this exhibition often reveal what is hidden from everyday view: the massive industrial infrastructure needed to power life in the twenty-first century. Increasingly, visual artists have turned their attention to lesser-known sociocultural impacts that such large-scale operations bring about. Taken together, these artistic responses bear witness to the complex system of exchange required for the extraction, collection, storage, and transmission of natural resources.

This exhibition is designed to address the Nevada Academic Content Standards for Science. In grades six through twelve, students are required to explore Human Impacts on Earth Systems. By engaging with the works and themes in this exhibition, students are presented with opportunities to evaluate, explain, debate, and analyze the management and use of our natural resources, and the impacts of human activities on natural systems.

This exhibition features paintings by esteemed wildlife painter John Banovich, alongside historical artworks dating from the 15th through 20th centuries by internationally renowned artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and George Stubbs, all focused on depicting the extraordinary African lion. An internationally recognized artist who has studied lions for decades, Banovich has created a body of work that is also an homage to these animals. King of Beasts features more than thirty artworks that explore questions about humankind’s deep fear, love, and admiration for these creatures. The exhibition spans nearly twenty-five years of work and assembles his body of work focused on African lions for the very first time.

In Africa, the lion has served as a symbol of strength, bravery, and physical prowess among many cultures. However, today nearly all wild lions are found within small regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, and a tiny population exists in India. Outside of protected areas, the African lion is disappearing at an alarming rate. Conservationists agree that the remaining population must be protected if these magnificent creatures are to survive.

Born 1964 in Butte, Montana, John Banovich is known internationally for his large, dramatic portrayals of iconic wildlife. Today, Banovich’s work can be found in private and corporate collections, as well as museums throughout the world. In addition to his artworks, he uses his paintings to raise awareness about imperiled species through Banovich Wildscapes Foundation. Funds generated from artwork sales are reinvested to support grassroots conservation efforts that promote habitat protection, science-based wildlife management and sustainable tourism.

Sponsors
Bank of America
Victoria Zoellner

Supporting Sponsors
Eldorado Resorts, Inc.
Alan and Nancy Maiss

Additional Support
Baranof Jewelers
Coeur d’Alene Art Auction
Phelps Engineering Services, Inc.
Donald Schupak
Scottsdale Art Auction
E.J. and Emil Solimine and Family

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a group of iconoclastic creators pushed against industrialization to enlighten humanity with their revolutionary take on beauty. Drawn from the collection of the city of Birmingham, United Kingdom, Victorian Radicals brings together more than 145 paintings, works on paper, and decorative objects—many of which have never been exhibited outside the U.K.—to illuminate this dynamic period of British art. 

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the champions of the Arts & Crafts Movement offered a radical vision of art and society inspired by pre-Renaissance culture. Works by pioneering artists Ford Madox Brown, Kate Elizabeth Bunce, Edward Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others, represent the response of Britain’s first modern art movement to the industrialization of the period.  

Artists and designers explored vital concerns of their time—the relationship between art and nature, religious themes, questions of class and gender identity, the value of the handmade versus machine production, and the search for beauty in an age of industry. 

This is the final opportunity to see this unparalleled exhibition before it leaves the West Coast.   

Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts and Crafts Movement is organized by the American Federation of Arts and Birmingham Museums Trust. The national tour is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional funding provided by Clare McKeon and the Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation.

Lead Sponsors

Wayne and Rachelle Prim
The Six Talents Foundation

Major Sponsors

Carole K. Anderson
The Deborah and T.J. Day Foundation

Sponsors

Blanchard, Krasner & French
Barbara and Tad Danz
Nancy and Brian Kennedy
Jenny and Garrett Sutton | Corporate Direct
Whittier Trust, Investment & Wealth Management

Supporting Sponsors

Haynie & Company
Dinah O’Brien
Pat and Marshall Postman

Additional Support

Kathie Bartlett

Promotional Partner

Reno-Tahoe International Airport

In 1980, Ellen Crawford arrived in Australia while working as an itinerant archaeologist. Initially, she worked under the direction of the legendary archaeologist John Mulvaney at the Australia National University, followed by fieldwork under his direction in Western Australia south of Perth, before she ventured to Darwin on the northern edge of the continent.

Most of Crawford’s collection came from Arnhem Land, which lies east of Darwin, but some works in this exhibition—such as the toy woomera and spears, the paperbark collage paintings, and the coolamon originated in the northern reaches of Western Australia known as the Kimberley and the Central Desert. Crawford began collecting Aboriginal objects before the existence of art centers run by Aboriginal communities in remote places such as Maningrida and Yirrkala. She was able to buy a few items from a trading post at Maningrida and other items from commercial galleries elsewhere in Australia.

The objects in the Crawford collection range from paintings and small sculptures through spears, dilly bags (used for transporting food), and coolamon (used for carrying food, but also cradling babies). They illustrate both craft and artistry, their designs reflecting the inherited family responsibilities for keeping alive the stories of ancestral beings in the Dreamtime stories. While not formerly regarded as art objects in Western traditions, now they are seen as objects residing along a cultural spectrum where the lines between utilitarian and ceremonial objects, and painting and sculpture, are less fixed and more permeable.

To commemorate the 150^th Anniversary of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, the Nevada Museum of Art presents an exhibition featuring the art of Zhi Lin, who has spent much of his career making artworks that recall the sacrifices of Chinese migrant workers in the Sierra Nevada. The completion of the railroad—which linked the United States from east to west—is often celebrated as the grand achievement of America’s Manifest Destiny and the 19^th-century rallying cry for westward expansion of the United States. Zhi Lin’s mixed-media canvases, video installation, and watercolor paintings honor the nearly 1,200 Chinese workers who lost their lives to accidents, avalanches, and explosions in treacherous Sierra terrain near Donner Summit. While names of most railroad workers have been lost to history, Zhi Lin is part of a growing group of artists and scholars working to weave their stories into America’s broader historical narrative.

Media Sponsor
KUNR Reno Public Radio