The most distinguished name in decorative firearms in America is Tiffany & Co. — a surprise to those who might otherwise recognize the firm as a legendary purveyor of fine silver, jewelry and luxury objects. Founded in 1837 by Charles Lewis Tiffany, what became Tiffany & Co. commenced business just one year after the young inventor Samuel Colt registered his new designs for revolving pistols and long arms with the U.S. Patent Office. In the 175 years since then, the paths of Tiffany & Co. and Colt have crossed many times. Among the other American gun makers with ties to Tiffany & Co. are Henry Deringer, Winchester, and Smith & Wesson.

The Robert M. Lee Collection is recognized as the finest selection of Tiffany & Co. arms privately owned. The collection of items in this exhibition — including three revolvers, four pistols, one rifle, and one presentation sword — is rivaled only by those on display in the Robert M. Lee Gallery of American Arms, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Tiffany’s production of presentation swords and fine guns began in the 1850s, reached a peak during the Civil War period (c. 1861-65), and continued through the close of World War I (c. 1918). The art of Tiffany & Co. arms was revived c. 1982, and remained active until c. 2001, with innovative modern era designs created by the firm’s Corporate Division. The Tiffany and Co. items in the exhibition span just over a century — they were made as early as 1893 and as recently as 1994.

All of the rare arms in the exhibition are featured in a series of books being published by Yellowstone Press, under the umbrella title The Art of the Gun. The first book in the series, Magnificent Colts Selections from the Robert M. Lee Collection, will be released in January 2012. It will be available in the Museum Store.

The objects included in this exhibition are from the private collection of Robert M. Lee. This exhibition will be presented in the Feature Gallery.

Exclusive sponsor

Wayne L. Prim Foundation

Created by Tiffany Studios in New York City at the beginning of the 20th century and named for the angels in the Biblical Book of Revelation, the seven windows in this exhibition were originally installed in the Church of the New Jerusalem in Cincinnati, Ohio.

The church was taken by eminent domain and demolished for highway construction in 1964, and the windows were crated and stored in various garages and sheds for decades until their re-discovery in 2001.

This national exhibition tour debuts the story of these seven rediscovered Tiffany Windows.

Major sponsor

I. Heidi Loeb Hegerich.

Supporting sponsors

Bally Technologies, the Wells Fargo Foundation, the Robert Z. Hawkins Foundation and McDonald Carano Wilson LLP

Additional support

John and Andrea Deane

The Canary Project, founded in 2006 by the artists Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris (Sayler/Morris) initially consisted of Sayler photographing landscapes throughout the world where scientists are studying the impacts of climate change. Titled A History of the Future, the sites included melting glaciers in Peru, rising waters in the Netherlands and Venice, and post-Katrina New Orleans. Exhibitions of the photographs quickly expanded into multimedia events that were accompanied with contextual research and archival images, and then with installations and sculptures by other artists, and extensive educational and outreach materials.

The Canary Project now includes diverse works involving more than 30 artists, designers, writers, educators and scientists.

The causes and effects of global change, which encompass those of climate change, are increasingly the focus of artists around the world, whether they are working in the Antarctic, Canada, Chile, or Southeast Asia. Many of those projects rely on photographic evidence for working materials. What makes the Canary Project unique is that Sayler and Morris have partnered with local artists and others wherever they have been in residence. This enables them to expand the reach of their concern through the use of other media, including bus ads, billboards, posters, and installations such as the climate poker game Quartet for the End of Time, and the fashion performance Increase your Albedo.

This archive exhibition will include photographs, manuscripts, and objects from 2005 through 2010. The archive is in the collection of Nevada Museum of Art, Center for Art + Environment, Gift of Susannah Sayler and Ed Morris.

Anne Lindberg creates subtle drawings and installations that blur the line between traditional media. Made from colored thread and graphite, her meditative works are studies in formal abstraction, complicating viewers’ perceptions of relationships to the objects themselves.

Lindberg’s graphite drawings made from thousands of parallel lines appear to vibrate on paper. Systemic and non-representational, they are subtle, rhythmic, abstract, and immersive. Her more recent room-sized thread installations consist of thousands of strands of fine threads in different hues suspended carefully from the wall. Viewers peer through the layers to experience a shifting color palette altered by subtle lighting and shadow. In these installations, Lindberg explains that she “discovered an optical and spatial phenomenon that spans the outer reaches of our peripheral vision. The work also references physiological systems—such as heartbeat, respiration, neural paths, equilibrium—and psychological states.”

Lindberg resides in Kansas City and holds a M.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Miami University. She was Visiting Artist-in-Residence/Head of Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2005 and taught for nine years at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work has been shown at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, The Drawing Center in New York, the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art and the Sheldon Memorial Art Museum.

Lindberg was also recently awarded the 2011 Painters & Sculptors Joan Mitchell Foundation Award.

Australian sculptor and photographer Andrew Rogers began making large-scale geoglyphs in 1999 to create meditative spaces on each continent of the globe. Geoglyphs are large-scale designs made on the ground by either removing materials such as surface soils, gravel, and small rocks, or by rearranging preexisting stones and natural materials. Ancient geoglyphs are found throughout the desert regions of the world, as well as the Amazon Basin, Europe, and the American West. Rogers completed his series of contemporary geoglyphs in 2010, after finishing forty-seven sculptures in thirteen countries with the help of nearly 7,000 people.

At each of his sites, Rogers incorporates at least two motifs. One of them is typically the Rhythm of Life figure—a personal symbol for Rogers that represents change and is based on his early abstract sculptures. Since construction of the geoglyphs often requires the help of hundreds of residents, the second motif is chosen by the local people with whom Rogers works. Local motifs range from totemic animals, sacred symbols, and historical emblems.

The use of two motifs at each site—one chosen by Rogers and one chosen by local residents—makes these geoglyphs both site-specific, global, and a unique contribution to the history of Land Art. The photographs in this exhibition were either made by Rogers from an aircraft or obtained from commercial satellite imagery.

The photographs in this exhibition are from the Center for Art + Environment Archive Collections.

Slime mold: you’ve noticed it growing on a fallen tree in the forest, or even possibly growing on old lettuce in your compost pile; but have you really looked at it and appreciated its unique attributes? Artist Gail Wight has lovingly regarded these protists, which typically grow on dead logs or other plant material, feeding on the microorganisms that grow as the plant decays. She has seen the beauty of this simple organism as it takes in energy and reproduces using spores, shifting shapes as it develops. Her process has a great deal in common with scientific inquiry.

To create Hydraphilia (2009), Wight prepared agar slides tinted with non-toxic dyes, added the slime mold, and began videotaping the resulting growth patterns. The video is a microscopic time-lapsed view (30x) of the Physarum Polycephalum or slime mold. Polycephalum is Latin for “many-headed” and Wight’s title for her video installation references a mythological nine-headed monster, the Hydra of Greek myths that grew two heads when one was lopped off. According to the artist, “This video evokes a love for the beauty and occasional grotesqueness of this many-headed creature.”

Gregory Euclide’s intricately crafted sculptural works explore the tension between idealized, picturesque views of landscapes and actual experiences of being in nature. Using traditional methods of landscape painting combined with natural materials and found objects, Euclide constructs three dimensional encapsulated worlds where pristine notions of landscape meet the reality of our current environment.

This exhibition features over 100 pieces of Southwestern pottery produced by some of the most active pottery-producing Native American tribal groups in the Southwest region of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. The exhibition compares and contrasts techniques, styles, designs, and materials used by artists working in the following pueblos: Acoma, Cochiti, Hopi, Kewa, Maricopa, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, and others.

All of the works in the exhibition are from the private collection of Brenda and John Blom. Since the early 1990s, they have acquired fine examples modern pottery from potters, traders, shops, and pueblo villages in the Southwest. “Southwestern pottery is not only one of the world’s important art forms,” Blom explains, “it is the most accessible.” The Bloms began collecting pottery during a trip to Santa Fe in 1991 with their friends Allan and Carol Hayes. Since then, John Blom and Al Hayes have co-authored three books on Southwestern pottery, and the Bloms have amassed a collection of over 1,500 pots.

All of the works in the exhibition are from the private collection of Brenda and John Blom.

Edward Burtynsky: Oil is an examination of one the most important subjects of our time by one of the most respected and recognized contemporary photographers in the world. From 1997 through 2009, Burtynsky traveled internationally to chronicle the production, distribution, and use of this critical fuel. In addition to revealing the rarely seen mechanics of its manufacture, he photographs the effects of oil on our lives, depicting landscapes altered by its extraction from the Earth and by the sprawl generated around its use.

These images tell an epic story of mankind expressed through our discovery, exploitation, and celebration of this vital natural resource.

Edward Burtynsky: Oil is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

Lead Sponsor

Carol Franc Buck Foundation

Major Sponsor

The Phil and Jennifer Satre Family Fund of the Community Foundation of Western Nevada

Support

Scotiabank Group

Additional Support

Barrick Gold of North America, Kathie Bartlett, Mark E Pollack Foundation, and Lance and Karyn Tendler

Arthur and Lucia Mathews are widely acknowledged as two of California’s most prolific artists working in what is widely known as the California Decorative Style during the early twentieth century. The aesthetic they fostered incorporated classical references, idyllic landscapes and a muted tonal color palette applied to a variety of works from murals and paintings to wooden frames and decorative objects. Their careers unfolded during the height of the American Arts & Crafts movement, when an emphasis on fine design and craftsmanship was placed on the hand-made production of material goods and objects.

As residents of San Francisco, their philosophical emphasis on the importance of aesthetics and design contributed to the revitalization of the city following the 1906 earthquake. In many of their paintings, California is represented as a new Arcadia, with mythological figures wearing fanciful Greek robes dancing or frolicking in idyllic settings. They often incorporated stylized motifs based on swans, peacocks, zodiacal figures, and botanicals into their work, and their landscape paintings of cypress trees on the Monterey Peninsula—where they spent many summers—have become icons of that region.

All of the artworks in this exhibition are from the collection of the Oakland Museum of California.

Major Sponsors

George and Irene Drews, Edgar F. and Ella C. Kleiner, Gordon and Cecile Peters, and John H. O. La Gatta