In celebration of the Museum’s 80^th Anniversary in 2011, contemporary artist Jacob Hashimoto was commissioned to create a large-scale, site-specific artwork to hang in the Donald W. Reynolds Grand Hall and Atrium. Hashimoto’s sculptures—fabricated from thousands of small “kites”—are made from bamboo-stiffened rice papers not unlike those used for centuries to make traditional Japanese kites. The three-dimensional cascading form—which could be interpreted as a peaceful, floating cloud or a spiraling vortex—is suspended by nylon monofilament and responds specifically to the Museum’s unique architecture and changing light.

Born and raised in Greeley, Colorado, Hashimoto studied at Carleton College in Minnesota, and then the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois. He has installed major sculptures all over the world—from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Saatchi Gallery in London to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome and the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice. Hashimoto lives and works in New York.

Major sponsors

Volunteers in Art (VIA) and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

Organized on the occasion of the Nevada Museum of Art’s 80^th anniversary in 2011, this special exhibition will celebrate the institution’s early founders, Dr. James Church, Charles Cutts, and volunteer members of the Latimer Art Club, revealing how their vision for a regional art gallery evolved into the robust and vigorous institution that the Museum is today.

The Nevada Museum of Art’s founding was championed eighty years ago by Dr. James Church, a University of Nevada, Reno humanities professor and early climate scientist who established the first snow laboratory in the world in the Sierra Nevada during the early 20th century. The interdisciplinary interests of Dr. James Church were widely felt during the earliest years of the institution’s founding. This philosophy continues to foster the dynamic and multidimensional public programs and open dialogue offered by the Museum today.

The exhibition traces eighty years of this unique focuson art and science up until the 2009 founding of the Center for Art + Environment (CA+E)—the only museum-based art research institute in the world devoted to the support and study of how people perceive and interact with their natural, built, and virtual environments. The CA+E encourages the creation of new artworks, convenes artists, scholars, and communities to document, research, and analyze artworks, and increases public knowledge of these creative and scholarly endeavors.

Nuclear waste, which ranges from highly radioactive plutonium to materials such as clothing and tools with only low levels of radiation, has been accumulating in the United States since the beginning of the atomic weapons program in the 1940s. In 1957, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that the government excavate deep geologic repositories for the waste, which was considered the safest method of disposal.

In fall 2012, smudge studio (Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse) spent twelve days driving the routes along which nuclear waste is moved in the American West from sites of waste generation to disposal stations. Locations they documented with a car-mounted video camera ranged from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where nuclear weapons research is conducted to Rocky Flats in Colorado, the former site of a plutonium plant.

Disposal facilities included the uranium tailings disposal cell at Mexican Hat in Utah and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico. The WIPP facility is America’s only deep geologic repository for nuclear waste, where waste is buried 1,250 feet below the surface in a salt dome. WIPP operations are currently suspended as a result of radiological release in February, 2014.

Ellsworth and Kruse also visited the Department of Energy’s TRANSCOM field office in Carlsbad, New Mexico. TRANSCOM monitors, 24-hours a day via satellite, the transportation of nuclear waste in trucks between sites. A map of the disposal routes and the artists’ journeys appears to the right of the gallery entry.

The U. S. government’s Environmental Protection Agency policies currently require the Department of Energy to prove that Yucca Mountain in southern Nevada—the planned repository for high level radioactive nuclear waste—can safely store wastes through earthquakes, volcanic activity, climate change, and container corrosion for up to one million years. No nation has yet determined a safe way to store high-level waste for that length of time.

This research-based art project also included extensive photography and performance-based art by Ellsworth and Kruse along the journey.

Field Research for Look Only at the Movement was funded in part by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 2012.
                                                                                           

Sponsor

The John Ben Snow Memorial Trust

Each fall, about 250 million Monarch butterflies migrate from the United States and Canada to Mexico, where they spend their winter until conditions favor a return flight in the spring. Inspired by this spectacular biological event, New York-based, and Mexican-born artist and self-taught lepidopterist Erika Harrsch has created a video and sound installation titled Eros-Thanatos, recorded at the Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary in Michoacan, Mexico. Thousands of printed paper butterflies will cover the floor of the gallery to provide visitors with an artificial experience of the natural phenomenon as well as a reminder of the fragility of life and the power of nature.

To complement the installation, Harrsch will have pop-up performances of United States of North America. In an interactive installation, visitors fill out faux paperwork and spin a “wheel of fortune” to see if they can win a passport for “North America”—an imaginary country that combines features of Canada, the USA, and México. The passport combines features of all three countries, and at the center is an emblematic representation of the Monarch Butterfly, which belongs to the three nations—crossing freely without borders.

A Road Through Shore Pine contains 18 photographs made by the photographer in Nehalem Bay State Park, Oregon, in the fall of 2013.  In the exhibition, Adams traces a contemplative journey, first by automobile, then by foot, along an isolated, tree-bordered road to the sea. As presented through Adams’s 11 × 14-inch prints, the passage takes on the quality of metaphor, suggestive of life’s most meaningful journeys, especially its final ones. For this group of photographs, all of which were printed by Adams himself, the artist returned to the use of a medium-format camera, allowing the depiction of an intense amount of detail. Through experience gathered over more than four decades, Adams’s trees, especially the tips of their leaves, are etched with singular sensitivity to the subtleties and meanings of light.

About the artist:

Robert Adams was born in New Jersey in 1937, and moved to Colorado as a teenager. Adams was a professor of English literature for several years before turning his full attention to photography in the mid 1970s. His work is largely concerned with moments of regional transition: the suburbanization of Denver, a changing Los Angeles of the 1970s and 1980s, and the clear-cutting in Oregon in the 1990s. He has published many books well-known to those concerned with the American Landscape.

In the first decades of the nineteenth century John James Audubon created one of the greatest and most famous bodies of North American bird art known today. His more than fifty years of artistic production—consisting of paintings, drawings, prints, and writings—resulted in the body of work for which he became most famous: The Birds of America, Audubon’s unparalleled effort to catalog and describe artistically and scientifically the birds of the North American continent.

Audubon’s enormous undertaking began with the creation of more than five hundred watercolor paintings—the basis for a later edition of double elephant folio of prints called The Birds of America, made by the London engravers Robert Havell, Jr. and Sr. between 1826 and 1838. In 1863, at the height of the Civil War and a little more than a decade after her husband’s death, Lucy Bakewell Audubon, the artist’s widow, sold her family’s personal collection of 471 surviving original watercolor paintings to the New York Historical Society. Of these, 435 were paintings Audubon made in preparation for The Birds of America.

Born Jean Rabin in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1785, the son of a French naval officer and his mistress, he adopted the name John James Audubon when he immigrated to the still-fledgling United States in 1803 at the age of eighteen, avoiding conscription in the Napoleonic wars. Largely self-taught as both an artist and an ornithologist, the paintings from which the prints in this exhibition derive were renowned for their scale and for their inclusion of ornithological information about bird habitats and behaviors, a practice that was both controversial and revolutionary for the time.

Having made many long and difficult excursions through much of frontier America to collect specimens and record them for his project, by the mid-1840s, Audubon’s deteriorating health confined him to his home on New York’s Hudson River. Audubon died there in 1851, at the age of 65, leaving behind the remarkable body of work for which he is remembered.

 All of the prints on view in this exhibition are drawn from the collection of the Nevada Museum of Art. They were purchased with funds in memory of Dana Rose Richardson.

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 1,100 submissions are evaluated annually by a panel of judges made up of local artists and art professionals and exceptional work is awarded either a Gold Key, Silver Key or Honorable Mention. Gold Key artwork goes on to compete in the national Scholastic Art Awards completion. Select award winning regional entries are 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.

Sponsors

U.S. Bancorp Foundation, the Hearst Foundations, and the Nell J. Redfield Foundation.

Additional support

Wild Women Artists

2014 Scholastic Awards List Winners

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 1,100 submissions are evaluated annually by a panel of judges made up of local artists and art professionals and exceptional work is awarded either a Gold Key, Silver Key or Honorable Mention. Gold Key artwork goes on to compete in the national Scholastic Art Awards competition. Select award winning regional entries are 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.

Sponsors

U.S. Bancorp Foundation and the City of Reno Arts & Culture Commission, the Hearst Foundation, and the Nell J. Redfield Foundation

Additional support

Wild Women Artists

View this year’s winners: Scholastic Art Awards 2015

The Nevada Museum of Art presents artist Betsabeé Romero’s first solo museum exhibition in the western United States. One of the most revered Mexican artists of her generation, Romero is known for combining indigenous and folkloric designs with non-traditional art-making materials, and for creating inventive installations inspired by literature and diverse cultures. The artist will create a series of four new installations for the exhibition, with an overriding thematic focus on transportation—both literal and metaphorical.

Sponsor

Nevada Museum of Art Volunteers in Art (VIA)

Responding to the tradition of still-life painting, Kostianovsky creates a three-dimensional sculptural representation of the butcher shop scene in Francisco de Goya’s 1808 painting “Bodegón con costillas y cabeza de cordero.” The sculpture, made of recycled clothing, creates a dialogue about issues related to food, bounty, and excess.