From a Palestinian-Kuwaiti family, Tarek Al-Ghoussein was born in 1962 and raised in Kuwait. He is a prominent photographer known for his works that combine elements of landscape and portrait photography.  This exhibition features twelve photographic prints from the artist’s K Files series, as well as a sampling of new works from his Al Sawaber series, both focused on his experience in his native Kuwait.

New Zealand artist Peter Stichbury is fascinated by society’s ongoing obsession with UFO phenomena. He paints historical UFO sightings, as well as portraits of the people who purportedly saw them. With penetrating, but perplexing gazes, Stichbury’s subjects are caught in an alternate reality—forever changed by their sighting experience, but also influenced by the myths, disinformation, and conspiracy theories society imparts on such experiences.

Drawn from the collections of Bruce C. Paltenghi and Dr. Richard Paltenghi, this exhibition features drawings and paintings by American artist Maynard Dixon. Inspired to begin collecting by their father, the Paltenghi brothers have amassed over seventy artworks that offer an intimate look at Dixon’s life in the American West. Included are many never-before-seen drawings with subjects ranging from mountain and desert landscapes, to portraits and nude figure studies.

Major Sponsors

The Thelma B. and Thomas P. Hart Foundation; Brian and Nancy Kennedy; the Satre Family Fund at the Community Foundation of Western Nevada; Whittier Trust, Investment & Wealth Management

Supporting Sponsors

Denise Cashman; Deborah C. Day; Dickson Realty; Gigi and Lash Turville

Marking the Infinite presents the work of nine of Australia’s leading Aboriginal women artists. While many of them have established reputations in Australia, for many this exhibition represents their American debut. Revered as matriarchs in their communities, the artworks made by these women are proud assertions of who they are and represent the pride they have in their communities. This strength of vision is immediately evident in works that shimmer and swirl, that assert their authority like lightning bolts, or sparkle like the night sky.

Although hailing from some of the most remote communities on the planet, the work of the nine women artists in Marking the Infinite speaks loudly and clearly to our contemporary age. The artists are: Nonggirrnga Marawili, Wintjiya Napaltjarri, Yukultji Napangati, Angeline Pwerle, Carlene West, Regina Pilawuk Wilson, Lena Yarinkura, Gulumbu Yunupingu, and Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. The works in Marking the Infinite are drawn from the collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, Miami-based collectors and philanthropists.

The exhibition was originated by the Nevada Museum of Art, where it was organized by William L. Fox, Director, Center for Art and Environment, and Henry Skerritt, Curator, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia.

Exhibition Tour Schedule for Marking the Infinite:
Newcomb Art Museum, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA: August 20, 2016 – December 21, 2016
Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Miami, FL: January 28, 2017 – May 14, 2017
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV: February 17, 2018 – May 13, 2018
The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC: June 2 – September 9, 2018
Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, November 2018 – February 2019

Lead Sponsor

The Collections Committee of the Nevada Museum of Art:

Barbara and Tad Danz
Martha Hesse Dolan and Robert E. Dolan
Dolan Law LLC
Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller
Kathie Bartlett
John C. Deane
Turkey and Peter Stremmel
Nancy and Harvey Fennell
Linda Frye
Marcia and Charles Growdon
Sari and Ian Rogoff
Darby and David Walker

Sponsors

Sandy Raffealli/Bill Pearce Motors of Reno

Supporting Sponsors

Maria and Mark Denzler

Media Sponsors

The Believer powered by the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute; Western Art & Architecture

The exhibition examines and celebrates work by artists on both sides of the Mexican-American border to reveal a variety of cultural aspects as they emerged in the years after the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) to the present day. This unique survey of over 100 works takes a close look at paintings, prints and photographs created over the past eighty years. The works included are by some of the best-known Mexican artists—Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Gabriel Orozco, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Flor Garduño—as well as Mexican-American artists such as Judithe Hernández, Roberto Juarez and Robert Graham. Visitors to the Miradas exhibition will have the opportunity to observe the works of a number of artists who have been attracted to and inspired by Mexico’s ancient civilizations and modern artistic theories alike.

Many artists of Mexican descent working in the United States continue to implement social ideas and educational theories first taken up by modern Mexican artists at the end of the Mexican Revolution. They also understand and react to the sociopolitical climate in the United States and the global art and theories of the second half of the twentieth century, incorporating contemporary regional politics along with their broad understanding of their diverse heritages. The Miradas exhibition allows visitors to survey this rich trajectory.

This exhibition was originally curated by Cesáreo Moreno of the National Museum of Mexican Art in collaboration with Bank of America’s corporate art program staff. This exhibition is provided by Bank of America Art in Our Communities program.

Dennis Parks is a ceramist who moved to the rural ghost town of Tuscarora, Nevada in 1966, where he established the internationally-known Tuscarora Pottery School. Parks is regarded as a leading practitioner of the single-firing method (normally pottery is fired twice) and for firing with discarded crankcase oil. His techniques are spelled out in his guide published by Charles Scribner’s Sons. More than 10,000 copies have been sold.

In April 2013, a patron and staff group from the Nevada Museum of Art visited A27 Atelier Haus in Berlin, Germany. After spending a week visiting the city’s cutting-edge contemporary galleries, museums, and alternative spaces, entering Leiko Ikemura’s lofty, light-filled, minimalist space was an entirely different experience—like stepping into a temple dedicated to art. In her spacious studio, large scale-paintings punctuated the walls, and ceramic and bronze sculptures were elevated on low pedestals.

Swiss architect Philipp von Matt designed this combination studio and residence for his wife, Japanese-born artist Ikemura. This exhibition presents a selection of paintings and sculptures by this accomplished and well-established artist, with a special focus on work that addresses aspects of the natural world: landscape and the female figures and animal creatures that inhabit it. Ikemura’s works describe conditions of loneliness, longing, and existential searching. Solitary doll-like female figures recline, dreaming with closed eyes, while a sculptural figure covers her face with her hands, a gesture of both grief and transcendence of earthly reality. Other figures sit pensively, seeming to morph into features of the landscape they inhabit, becoming indivisible from the natural world. Oval ceramics in the form of human faces, displayed low on the ground, feature holes for their mouths, alluding to breathing and thereby existence. These works are informed by the artist’s experiences as an expatriate, her personal relationships, and the historically significant things that have occurred in her lifetime, such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011.

Born in Tsu, Japan, Ikemura left her native land at age twenty-one to escape “the strictness of Japanese tradition.” Beginning in the late 1970s, she pursued language studies in Spain, and attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Seville. She moved to Switzerland in the 1980s, living in Lucerne and Zurich, where she began to exhibit her work in group exhibitions. Ikemura’s first major solo exhibition was held in Bonn in 1983, launching her career in Germany. Before long she moved to Germany permanently, settling in Cologne in 1984. By 1992, she was offered a teaching post at the Berlin University of Fine Arts, where she taught painting from 1992 to 2015.

Her work is documented in numerous catalogues and books, and is included in internationally prominent public collections, such as the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France; The Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland; the Kunstmuseum Linz, Lentos, Museum of Modern Art Linz, Austria; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan; and the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Osaka, Japan, among others. Ikemura’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions throughout Europe and Asia, however this is her first solo exhibition in the United States.

Exhibition sponsors

Kathie Bartlett; Barbara and Tad Danz; John C. Deane; Linda Frye; Marcia and Charles Growdon; Mae and Walter Minato; Maureen Mullarkey and Steve Miller; Suzanne Silverman

A Shared Legacy: Folk Art in America tells the story of extraordinary American folk art made in New England, the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and the South between 1800 and 1925. Created by self-taught or minimally trained artists, the works exemplify the breadth of American creative expression during a period of enormous political, social, and cultural change in the United States.

Rooted in the family as well as the preservation of personal and cultural identity, the diverse works on view showcase a distinguished collection of American paintings, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts.  Highlights include rare portraits by such artists as Ammi Phillips and John Brewster, Jr.; vivid still lifes and landscapes, including a mature Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks; whimsical trade signs and figure and animal sculptures; and distinctive examples of furniture from the German American community. These unique works are drawn from the collection of Barbara L. Gordon who, over two decades, assembled a broad-reaching collection of American paintings, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts of the highest quality.

This exhibition is drawn from the Barbara L. Gordon Collection and is organized and circulated by Art Services International, Alexandria, Virginia.

Lead Sponsor

The Bretzlaff Foundation

Major Sponsors

Clark/Sullivan Construction; Eldorado Resorts; Sandy Raffealli, Porsche of Reno

Supporting Sponsors

Carol Ann and John Badwick; Blanchard, Krasner & French; Irene Drews in memory of J. George Drews; Whittier Trust Company of Nevada

Anna McKee’s Reliquary is a sculptural installation comprised of 3,405 glass ampules that she sewed to 678 silk panels in a long hanging row creating a subtly swaying wave form. The entire piece suggests a graph. Shifting hues hint at untold levels of information and a deep measure of time. Though abstract, the installation’s form is the expression of 68,000 years of temperature history from an ice sheet.

McKee collaborated with Seattle composer/sound artist Steve Peters, who created a multi-channel sound piece, taken from recordings of the reliquary ampules. Steve makes music and sound for many contexts and occasions using environmental recordings, found/natural objects, electronics, acoustic instruments, and voices. His work is often site-based, attentive to the subtle nuances of perception and place.

McKee’s art practice is informed by an interest in history and environmental sciences. She seeks evidence of time and meaning in the land, especially at the intersections of human activity. Glacial ice became a metaphor for the deep memory of the natural world. Living in the Puget Sound Basin, a glacially sculpted environment has been a potent influence.

In 2009, McKee visited the WAIS Divide Ice Core field camp in Antarctica through the National Science Foundations Artist and Writers program. She interviewed scientists, watched ice being drilled from a two-mile deep ice sheet and spent hours drawing the white open space.

Time on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was a powerful influence on her work, and for several years she gestated ideas for a larger installation. In 2012, Eric Steig, Professor of Glaciology at the University of Washington, invited her to fabricate the glass ampules for the WAIS Reliquary at his research lab, using surplus water samples from over three kilometers of glacier ice. He and several graduate students also shared data and insights that contributed to the design of the reliquary.

Commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art, New York-based artist Anthony McCall has created a new immersive light installation—a compelling example of a virtual environment. British-born McCall is known for his ‘solid-light’ installations. Occupying a space between sculpture, cinema and drawing, the new work will become part of the Museum’s Contemporary Art Collection.

Anthony McCall (born 1940) is a British-born artist known for his ‘solid-light’ installations, a series that he began in 1973 with his seminal Line Describing a Cone, in which a volumetric form composed of projected light slowly evolves in three-dimensional space.

McCall’s work is represented in numerous collections, including Tate, London, England; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; SFMoMA, San Francisco; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and the Hirshhorn, Washington, DC.

Major Sponsor

Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne