This exhibition assembles photographs, films, and performance documentation by women artists who situate the nude female body in outdoor landscapes. It is organized in conjunction with a major retrospective exhibition of modern American photographer Anne W. Brigman, who was noted for her pioneering nude self-portraits made in the early twentieth century.

Laid Bare in the Landscape brings together a range of imagery: from beautiful and sensual self-portraits, to sometimes-surreal and provocative statements by feminist artists beginning in the 1970s. The artists interrogate ideas surrounding beauty, femininity, vulnerability, ritual, identity, and body politics, as they relate to nature and the environment. Artists in the exhibition include Laura Aguilar, Judy Chicago, Imogen Cunningham, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Judy Dater, Mary Beth Edelson, Regina Jose Galindo, Kirsten Justesen, Ana Mendieta, Otobong Nkanga, Joan Myers, Cara Romero, Xaviera Simmons, Jo Spence, Carolee Schneemann, and Francesca Woodman.

To compare the proto-feminist landscape photographs of Brigman to her feminist counterparts of the latter twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries is to weave a new thread through generations of visionary women artists who have aimed to further alternative ways of seeing and knowing.

#ConfrontingTradition

Supporting Sponsor

Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson investigate relationships between nature and culture, human and non-human animals, and domesticity and what is often referred to as “wild nature.” Working from both Reykjavik and London, they create installations that combine sculpture, text, photography, and video. Their most well-known exhibition, Nanoq: Flat Out and Bluesome (2001 – 2006), was a survey of all the taxidermied polar bears in the United Kingdom.

While researching the history of each bear, they identified the date, place and people associated with the animal’s death. They also created a photographic archive of each specimen and its taxidermic context—whether in storage, on display, or undergoing restoration.

Although Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson have worked with a number of other species, including birds and fishes, polar bears remain a subject of great interest to them. Since 2015 they have been artists-in-residence at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska in its Polar Labs program. Their work is on the denning habits and structures of the Alaskan bears, and how we must minimize disturbance of their dens by oil companies on the North Slope.

The materials for this exhibition are drawn from the Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections.

Bloom is an internet-based Earthwork that transforms cold, hard data into an experience of playfulness and unpredictability. A seismograph measures the Hayward Fault’s movements and transmits this information by way of the Internet. With special permission from the UC Berkeley Seismological Lab, these data sets are captured and run through a computer program designed by the artists. The result is a field of colorful, circular blooms that changes constantly in response to the live movements of the Earth.

With Bloom, the artists explore the contrast between virtual and natural environments. The project references Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) and other Color Field painters of the 1960s.

Special thanks to Richard Allen, Doug Neuhouser, and Peggy Hellweg of the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory for the live data feed from the Hayward Fault seismometer station and to David Nachum, Vijay Vasudevan, Woj Matusek for work on earlier versions, and to Anne Wagner for insights.

Painter and Guggenheim Fellow Judith Belzer visited the recently expanded Panama Canal Zone in 2015. Spending time both in Panama City and aboard a tugboat in the canal, her paintings deal with what she calls a “landscape of the Anthropocene” at both the small scale of intimate details and the grand scale of construction and the world’s largest ships.

Randolph Sims helped American Land Artist Michael Heizer use land moving equipment for the first time on Nevada’s Coyote Dry Lake in 1968.  Sims became an early Earthworks artist in his own right when Heizer encouraged him to use a backhoe on the playa “on the spur of the moment.” This archive exhibition includes drawings of Sims’ earthworks that were both proposed and fully-realized between 1968-1991.

While working in the field with the Land Arts Program of the American West, Bethany Wood collected images and impressions of major land features, such as Spiral Jetty and the Bingham Copper Pit. But she also kept note of the nomadic encampment deployed by the class, and from that created a unique metal-and-paper pop-up “book.” Her works take some of the largest land interventions in the West and transform them into small intricate sculptures you can hold in your hand.

Using vintage sheet music of the “Great American Song Book” as his backdrop, Paul Valadez re-envisions the idea of the songbook, integrating nostalgic images with “Spanglish” text, resulting in a dichotomy of oblique visual ideas that are equal parts humor and social commentary. Valadez uses metal, acrylics, text, and mixed media to create a concept of “old signage,” with subtle hints of race, culture and history. His current work is autobiographical with semi-satirical social commentary inspired by his childhood memories of growing up in a bi-cultural household.

These works are drawn from the Nevada Museum of Art’s permanent collection.

Enrique Chagoya’s provocative works incorporate diverse symbolic elements from pre-Columbian mythology, Western religious iconography, and American popular culture. Chagoya often appropriates the visual tropes of Western modernism in his works, just as the masters of Modern art cannibalized so-called primitive forms without properly contextualizing them. This exhibition highlights some of Chagoya’s most fascinating pieces: artist’s books that take their form from pre-Columbian codices. His contemporary codices illustrate an imagined world in which the European conquest of the New World failed and the normative culture of the Americas is based in indigenous ideology.

The artworks in this exhibition are drawn from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.

The Robert S. and Dorothy J. Keyser Art of the Greater West Collection at the Nevada Museum of Art aims to make connections between artistic practices and diverse cultures of the Greater West super-region—a geographic area that spans from Alaska to Patagonia, and from Australia to the American West. The artworks included in this small, focused, survey exhibition encourage conversations surrounding indigenous cultural practices such as mark-making and mapping; visual representations of settlement and expansion; and depictions of changes to the landscape brought about by colliding cultures.

The interpretive materials designed for this exhibition are directly tied to Nevada Department of Education K-12 Social Studies Standards.  

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.