The paintings of Hans Meyer-Kassel (1872-1952) have hung in the castles of kings and the homes of presidents. Still today, decades after his death, his artwork can be found in state capitols, university campuses, historical societies, court houses, government buildings and museums across the United States and Europe. His artwork lives in archives, books, magazines and even on a United States postage stamp—as well as in the homes of scores of Nevada families. Classically trained as a painter at the University of Munich in his native Germany, Meyer-Kassel immigrated to the United States at the end of World War I to escape the post-war tumult. He endured the Great Depression in New York City, but after being invited to exhibit in Pasadena, California in 1935, he became enamored with the American West. Within a year, he and his wife, Maria, moved to Reno, later relocating to Carson City, before settling in Genoa, where he worked from his small studio at the base of the Carson Range. Meyer-Kassel loved Nevada from the time of his first visit, and over the next two decades, he built his reputation as one of the most prolific and successful artists in the region. While his primary interest was portraiture, he also became known for his vividly colored floral still lifes, and his depictions of Nevada’s vast desert expanses, river valleys, and cloud-filled skies.

This exhibition is co-curated by longtime Reno art specialist Jack Bacon and Ann M. Wolfe, Andrea and John C. Deane Family Senior Curator and Deputy Director at the Nevada Museum of Art. It includes more than seventy paintings, with additional drawings, photographs, ephemera and artifacts drawn from private and institutional collections, including the Douglas County Historical Society and the Nevada Historical Society. Particular emphasis is placed on Meyer-Kassel’s romance with Nevada, where from his home in Genoa, his more formal, classically influenced style mellowed into a painterly perfection that resulted in breathtaking interpretations of Nevada’s landscape.

The first major book on Hans Meyer-Kassel, published by Jack Bacon & Company in association with the Nevada Museum of Art, accompanies the exhibition. The primary essay is authored by longtime Nevada historian Guy Clifton, with a foreword by Ann M. Wolfe. The 204-page catalogue includes over 100 full-color plates. Jack Bacon has published numerous books since 1983, including: Jack Johnson vs. James Jeffries “The Fight of the Century,” The Art of Lyle V. Ball, Dempsey in Nevada, Preserving Traces of the Great Basin Indians, and many others.

Major Sponsor

Louise A. Tarble Foundation

Sponsors

Anonymous; The Thelma B. and Thomas P. Hart Foundation; Nevada Arts Council; The Private Bank by Nevada State Bank; Sandy Raffealli/Porsche of Reno; Volunteers in Art of the Nevada Museum of Art; Edgar F. Kleiner

Supporting Sponsors

Anonymous; Irene Drews; Jenny and Garrett Sutton | Corporate Direct, Inc.

Lead Media Sponsor

Sierra Nevada Media Group

Media Sponsors

Getaway Reno-Tahoe; KUNR Reno Public Radio; Nevada Magazine; Reno-Tahoe International Airport; Tahoe Quarterly

The John and Mary Lou Paxton Collection spans over sixty years of art making and collecting. Growing up in Missouri in the 1940s, John Paxton became fascinated with art when the famous American Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton moved in next door. That introduction started John’s life-long passion for collecting fine art.

In the 1950s, John and Mary Lou moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where John joined the board of the Fort Worth Art Museum and began to build his personal collection of contemporary art.  The collection includes important pieces by artists ranging from minimalist compositions and quiet landscapes, to Native American art of the Southwest. After moving to the San Diego area in 1980, John continued to visit galleries, often meeting and becoming friends with the artists whose works he collected.

In 2006, the Nevada Museum of Art mounted an exhibition of highlights from the Paxton Collection and announced the couple’s intention to donate their artworks to the Museum upon their passing. While we mourn the loss of this lovely couple, we celebrate their thoughtful and generous gift to the Nevada Museum of Art and our community.

Kristin Posehn is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer who works with fragments of architecture. Her 2008 public artwork, Reclamation, was based on the facade of a school in the ghost town of Metropolis in remote northeastern Nevada. Metropolis was founded in 1910 as the state’s first master planned community, but by 1925 it was abandoned due to insufficient water rights. The only structure still standing is the brick-and- stone arch that was the school’s entrance. Posehn reconstructed the arch in wood at a 1:1 scale in Almere, the Netherlands, which she then clad in high-resolution color photographs of the original facade. The result was to dis-locate/re-locate the structure into a living context on the last undeveloped plot in the center of Almere. The elaborate but ephemeral work was dismantled and the surviving materials are now housed in the Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections.

Posehn’s 2015 project A House Made of Air and Distance and Echoes was an architectural sculpture built by the artist and assistants on an abandoned airfield outside Vacaville, California. The work references the “Wedding Cake House,” a well-known example of “carpenter gothic” located in Kennebunkport, Maine. From this point of reference, Posehn “wiped away the house and manipulated its architectural frosting via digital process and hours of construction.” After completion of the piece in 2015, she photographed it, often in dense fog.

Posehn–who is a sculptor, writer, and photographer–repositions architecture in the physical world so we can consider the relationships between built and natural environments, between art and architecture, between the real and the fictional. Posehn’s archive materials are part of the Center for Art + Environment’s investigation into the relationships among built and natural and virtual environments.

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.

More than 1,600 submissions were evaluated by a panel of judges made up of local artists and art professionals. Exceptional works were awarded Gold Key, Silver Key or Honorable Mentions. Gold Key artwork goes on to compete in the national Scholastic Art Awards competition. Select award-winning regional entries will exhibited in a month long exhibition at the Holland Project Gallery at 140 Vesta Street in Reno. American Visions Nominees will be displayed in the Donald W Reynolds Grand Hall at the Museum.

All award winners are invited to a ceremony at the Museum attended by over 400 students, parents, teachers and members of the community. National award winners have the opportunity to attend a ceremony in New York City.

2017 Scholastic Art Awards Announcement for Northern Nevada

Related Programs and Events:

2017 Scholastic Art Awards Gold Key Exhibition Opening Reception

2017 Scholastic Art Awards Ceremony

Lead sponsor

Bank of America

Additional support

City of Reno Arts and Culture Commission, the Nell J. Redfield Foundation and the Wild Women Artists

For the first time ever, explore the remarkable story of how the legendary Nevada gathering known as Burning Man evolved through collaborative ritual from humble countercultural roots on San Francisco’s Baker Beach into the world-famous desert convergence it is today. Never-before-seen photographs, artifacts, journals, sketches, and notebooks reveal how this temporary experimental desert city came to be—and how it continues to evolve.

This exhibition is organized by the Nevada Museum of Art.

Many of the items included are drawn from the archive collections of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art.

#CityofDustArchive

Download the Press Release.

Lead Gift

Bently Foundation

Major Gift

Reno-Sparks Convention & Visitors Authority

Supporting Gifts

Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller; Eleanor and Robert Preger; The Private Bank by Nevada State Bank; Volunteers in Art of the Nevada Museum of Art

Additional Gifts

City of Reno; Jan and David Hardie

Media Gifts

KUNR Reno Public Radio; Reno News & Review

City of Dust will travel to the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum March 30, 2018 – September 16, 2018 as part of their exhibition No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man.

An exhibition featuring materials drawn from the archive collections of Jessica Rath in the Center for Art + Environment.

In 1931, a group of civic-minded citizens led by humanities professor and climate scientist Dr. James Church and local art collector Charles Cutts, established what is today known as the Nevada Museum of Art. Sixty years later, in 1993, a major endowment gift from the Carol Franc Buck Foundation established the Altered Landscape Photography Collection that is now one of the institution’s largest focused collecting areas with approximately 2,000 photographs. In these images, artists reveal the ways that individuals and industries have marked, mined, toured, tested, developed, occupied, and exploited landscapes over the last fifty years. While the image makers take various approaches, together they offer a panoramic sweep of the contentious social and political debates that have shaped contemporary discourse on the changing environment. Held in trust for future generations, an art museum’s permanent collection reflects the values and identity of the community it serves.

The photographs in this exhibition are hung on the walls in a manner known as “salon style.” The term refers to the centuries-old French tradition of displaying art in large, grand gallery spaces as a backdrop for conversation and dialogue. In private French homes, invited guests would gather in salons (or grand living rooms) to discuss art, history, politics, and other important matters of the day. Beginning in 1737, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris re-invented the idea of the salon when they opened their student exhibitions to the general public for the first time. Not only were all community members invited to attend salons, visitors were encouraged to debate and share opinions about the works on view—much like what happens in many art museums today.

This exhibition of Aboriginal paintings made by the Spinifex People of the Great Victoria Desert in Western Australia is drawn from the private collection of Seattle-based couple Robert Kaplan and Margaret Levi. The Spinifex Arts Project was established in 1996 as a way for the Spinifex people to record and document land ownership following their forced expulsion from the Great Victoria Desert due to the Australian government’s atomic testing program in the 1950s.

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.

For almost five decades, Robert Adams’s extraordinarily influential photographs have explored the western American landscape and its transformations. In his most recent project, Adams shifts focus to his immediate environs, and finds related complexity, beauty, and mystery through photographs made in and around his home in Astoria, Oregon.