For Your Eyes Only is an exhibition of artist’s books that explores the structural possibilities of the book, and includes works by artists and printers Julie Chen, Tim Ely, Peter Koch, Eunkang Koh, Patti Scobey, Barbara Tetenbaum, and more.

As long as there have been books, artists have been experimenting with the form of their construction. In the latter half of the 20th century, techniques in the visual arts and traditions in the art of the book from the previous century onwards met, mingled, and hybridized, resulting in the broad and energetic genre known as the artist’s book. This collision has resulted in an amazing array of beautiful, delightful, and downright strange books that are folded, cut, glued, and otherwise modified to make objects that are often more sculptural than text to be read.

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer who creates bridges between sound art and contemporary visual culture. Through music, photographs and film stills from his journey to the Antarctic, along with original artworks, and re-appropriated archival materials, Miller uses Antarctica as an entry point for contemplating humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Based on The Book of Ice—part fictional manifesto, part history, and part science book—this exhibition combines video footage of past performances with graphics and dynamic data visualizations related to climate change in the Earth’s polar regions.

DJ Spooky has collaborated with drummer Dave Lombardo of thrash metal band Slayer; singer, songwriter and guitarist Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth; Chuck D of Public Enemy fame; rapper Kool Keith; Towa Tei, formerly of Deee-Lite; Vernon Reid of Living Colour; The Coup; artists Yoko Ono and Shepard Fairey and many others. Miller is currently featured on Syfy Channel’s Let’s Imagine Greater web series, and has performed around the world from France to Japan to Mexico City. In 2010, DJ Spooky became one of the first DJ’s to create an iPhone app, called DJ Mixer.

Bovey Lee’s meticulously crafted paper-cut drawings explore the struggle between nature, urbanization, and the ownership of natural resources. Lee’s drawings are rooted in her study of Chinese calligraphy and pencil drawing, mediums in which she was immersed while growing up in Hong Kong.

Lee begins by sketching out her ideas by hand. She then devises a digital template made up of photographs, downloaded images, scans from magazines and books, and vector graphics. After her template is in place, she hand cuts the image with a knife onto a single sheet of Chinese rice paper.

The often airy and fragile, lace-like structures she creates contrast sharply with the themes of power, sacrifice, and survival underlying her work.

“Cutting paper is a visceral reaction and natural response to my affection for immediacy, detail, and subtlety,” Lee explains. “The physical demand from cutting is extreme and thrilling, slows me down and allows me to think clearly and decisively.”

While teaching art at the University of California, Santa Barbara during the 1980s, artist Ciel Bergman discovered increasing amounts of plastic trash washing up on the local beaches. She began to pick up the detritus with her friend Nancy Merrill. Together they created an installation titled Sea of Clouds What Can I Do that was exhibited in 1987 at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum.

During the artmaking process, and prompted by “witnessing the suffering of many beached, garroted and dying sea mammals, strangling in plastic” Bergman conceived the idea for recycling waste plastic to create a sustainable road paving material to reduce our dependence on oil. As a result, she helped launch the product known as Plasphalt™, which combines recycled plastic and asphalt. Plasphalt™ provides superior performance and reduced costs compared to traditional asphalt paving, but to date has yet to be adopted widely by roadbuilders.

The Nevada Museum of Art is pleased to present a solo exhibition of drawings by German artist Jorinde Voigt, recent winner of the prestigious Guerlain Drawing Prize in 2012. Although Voigt has exhibited widely internationally, this will be her first solo exhibition at an art museum in the United States.

In her large-scale drawings, Voigt makes reference to a wide-range of subjects—from weather and geography to music, literature, and philosophy. Far from objective representations, however, her lyrical notations are rendered in a unique visual language that is not easily deciphered. Composed of both objective and subjective elements, Voigt’s algorithmic systems make visible an invisible world that is complex in its shifting movements and overlapping influences.

Jorinde Voigt was born in Frankfurt, Germany and currently lives in Berlin. The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Musée d’art moderne du Centre Pompidou in Paris have recently acquired Voigt’s work for their permanent collections. She has had exhibitions at the Museum Van Bommel van Dam, in The Netherlands, the NKV Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Germany, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands, and the Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal, Germany, and the David Nolan Gallery, New York.

This powerful and haunting series of fifty photographs documents and examines the placement and treatment of American juveniles housed by law in facilities in the United States.

For the past five years, photographer Richard Ross has interviewed and photographed both pre-adjudicated and committed youth in the juvenile justice system. To date, he has visited more than 250 facilities in 30 states—including Nevada. Ross has photographed in group homes, police departments, youth correctional facilities, juvenile courtrooms, high schools, shelters, classrooms, interview rooms, and maximum security lock-down and non-lock-down shelters, to name just a few. By photographing the children from behind or by obscuring their faces, the children’s identities are always kept anonymous.

Ross received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Florida, Gainesville and teaches art at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was principal photographer for the Getty Museum and their Villa Project and does editorial work for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner, Vogue, La Repubblica, and Architectural Digest.

Exclusive Sponsor

Wilhelm Hoppe Family Trust

“All voluntary travel is characterized by longing for some elusive element that lies out of reach in daily life.” –Lucy Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place

In her Off Road series, photographer Hoor Al Qasimi (Emirati, b. 1980) adopts travel as her subject matter. These images speak of physical displacement, of removing oneself from one’s customary environment, of seeking insight by looking beyond the obvious well-worn path and gazing to the territory that lies beyond. The landscapes documented by these photographs consist of everything that was visible to Al Qasimi from the highway during a trip across the US; yet the title, Off Road, suggests a fascination with the terrain invisible from the vantage point of the vehicle. Which stunning vistas might have been captured had the artist ventured beyond the familiarity of the highway?

In these landscape photographs mood is conveyed by weather as the skies shift from bright and sunny, to gloomy and overcast, to blustery and dark. Telephone poles, road markers, and fences define boundaries and mark the presence of civilization, alluding to land ownership, government presence, and communications systems. The ploughed fields and farmland which appear early in the “journey” are quickly replaced by vast plains, towering buttes, and arid desert. Moving through space, traveling down the “open road,” serves as a metaphor for emotional passage.

The final image in the series, a side-view mirror of the vehicle offering a reflected glimpse of the artist’s hand grasping the camera,recalls photographer Lee Friedlander (American, b. 1934) and his America by Car series.

The Nevada Museum of Art presents a video installation by artist and designer Rebeca Méndez, recipient of the 2012 Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award.

Méndez’s work investigates the nature of matter through a focus on cycles and systems, specifically the forces and cross-rhythmic tensions that make natural phenomena emerge. This interest stems from her childhood in Mexico City and the Mexican jungle, where she would follow her father in pursuit of Mayan archaeology. Common to both environments is hypercomplexity, multiplicity, and constant change. Méndez’s move to Los Angeles and her expeditions to geologically young Iceland have furthered this impetus.

Says Méndez: “In my work I have always been interested in limits, and I am interested in where those limits are blurred. Always, when those categories are leaking or meshing together they create the grotesque and ambiguous. It is in those areas that I really like operating.”

Born in Mexico City, Méndez earned her BFA and her MFA at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and currently teaches in the University of California, Los Angeles Design Media Arts Department.

Celebrate a bygone era during this exhilarating presentation of vintage neon signs that once graced some of Nevada’s most iconic restaurants, casinos, hotels, and business establishments. From flashing incandescent bulbs to candy-colored neon tubes, the nostalgic pieces featured in The Light Circus: Art of Nevada Neon Signs have not been seen publicly since they illuminated street side locales decades ago. Presented in the Museum’s Feature Gallery, the exhibition on view October 13 through February 10, 2013.

The iconic M-shaped cowboy chaps from the long-demolished Mapes Hotel Casino have been re-electrified and will hang alongside the flickering bulbs of Reno’s Harold’s Club and Nevada Club signs, as well as those of the Sahara, a longtime casino icon of the Las Vegas stip. Other forgotten favorites that have been refurbished for the exhibition include signs from Parker’s Western Wear, the Holiday Hotel, and El Cholo, one of Nevada’s oldest Mexican restaurants located in Las Vegas. A last minute addition to the exhibition includes the sign that hung for many years above Reno’s legendary Deux Gros Nez coffee shop, which closed in 2006.

For well over a decade, Reno- collector Will Durham has worked to build this collection of vintage neon signs. For the past year, Durham and the Nevada Museum of Art spent countless hours restoring the light fixtures, controls, and electrical components of each piece, along with their painted and porcelain surfaces. For Durham, who acquired his first sign in 1996, collecting the pieces has been a labor of love. In many cases, he has gone to great lengths to save signs that would have otherwise been discarded. In some cases, salvaging the signs took years of persistence, but Durham recognized that saving them was crucial to preserving Nevada’s history—and that sharing them with the public was even more important.

Lead sponsor

The Bretzlaff Foundation

Major sponsors

Earl and Wanda Casazza, Casazza SLV, IGT, E. L. Cord Foundation and George and Irene Drews

Supporting sponsor

E. L. Wiegand Foundation

Additional support

City of Reno Arts and Culture Commission, Charlotte and Dick McConnell and the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency

This exhibition surveys contemporary art made by American Indians in the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada region. In January 2011, the Nevada Museum of Art, in association with the Pyramid Lake Museum/Visitors Center in Nixon, Nevada, issued a call for artists to submit works addressing issues relating to concepts of the changing environment. The purpose of the project is to encourage the creation of new artworks in a range of media.

The 400,000-square mile-region known as the Great Basin is the largest watershed in North America which does not drain to an ocean.

Featuring contemporary artworks by Dugan Aguilar, Ben Aleck, Melvin J. Brown, Farrell Cunningham, Black Eagle, Billy Hawk Enos, Donna Featherstone, Micqaela Jones-Crouch, Jean LaMarr, Frank LaPena, Judith Lowry, Jack Malotte, Melissa Melero, Ramon Murillo, Clayton B. Sampson, Paul Stone, Ray Valdez and Alan Wallace.

Artists were encouraged to consider the following themes: a) ecology, ecosystems, and natural environments, b) animals, animal life and the environment, c) land use, the built environment, conflict, and politics; d) spiritual worldviews and the environment; e) changing relationships to the environment.

Premiere sponsor

Charles Redd Center for Western Studies

Major sponsor

Barrick Gold of North America and the National Endowment for the Arts

Additional sponsor

The Nevada Arts Council, a state agency

Additional support

Eldorado Hotel Casino