Kim Abeles is a Los Angeles artist who explores and maps her urban environment to chronicle broad social issues. Trained originally as a painter in the 1970s, she began working on community based art projects in the 1980s. Abeles is widely regarded as an important figure in Southern California activist and feminist art, both movements that are closely connected to art and environment. Abeles uses a variety of media to bring attention to problems such as air pollution, waste generation, and the scarcity of fresh water. Instead of using traditional art materials such as paint and canvas, however, she draws with smog, quilts with trash, and uses common materials such as clothing, furniture, and household goods to connect people’s everyday lives with larger issues.

Abeles began to garner national attention with The Smog Collector, a project in which she used smog as a medium to create portraits of everything from politicians to food, making apparent the sources and effects of pollution. The project was covered by many media outlets, among them the CBS Evening News, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal. Her work has since toured internationally and been collected by major institutions throughout the country. Abeles was born in Missouri, received a B.F.A. degree in painting from Ohio University and then a M.F.A. degree in studio art from the University of California, Irvine in 1980. Kim Abeles continues to live and work in downtown Los Angeles.

The materials in this exhibition are drawn from the artist’s extensive donation to the Archive Collections of the Center for Art + Environment. Rich with sketches, manuscripts, correspondence, and notebooks from throughout her career, the archive provides a unique story of how an artist who was first trained to work in a studio developed into an avant-garde activist and leader in the eco-art movement.

Support

John Ben Snow Memorial Trust and Metabolic Studio

The Oxford English Dictionary defines our contemporary understanding of the word “draw” as “to form a line by drawing a tracing instrument from point to point of a surface.” A drawing is “an arrangement of lines which determine form.” But the root of the word in Old English, dragan, meant to pull or drag; in other Teutonic tongues it indicated to carry or bear something.

Hook, Line & Sinker is an exhibition of drawings construed in the widest sense, an anthology of practices deployed by artists to configure the world, examples of the singular discipline that underlies every other way of making a mark in the world. All of visual art sits atop a line, even if one is not visible within the work itself; a line is present if for no other reason than all art has a boundary, a frame, an ending where it abuts the rest of the world. That’s because lines are the fundamental fact of vision, which at all times seeks to define what is seen.

Based in Miami, Debra and Dennis Scholl have been fearless and strategic collectors of contemporary art for 35 years. This exhibition, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, offers viewers an opportunity to expand their understanding of how drawing is defined in the 21st century. From Alice Channer’s Untitled (hair clips), to Jason Hedges’ Caymus and caymus special select cabernet sauvignon, experimental art-making materials abound in this selection of 40 works by 18 artists.

Lead sponsor

Enid A. Oliver, ChFC/Ameriprise Financial

Supporting sponsor

Sotheby’s

Additional support

Stremmel Gallery

Jean-Pierre Bonfort’s Travelling project is comprised of cellphone photographs taken during multiple trips over a five-year period from a moving train between Grenoble and Paris, France. The images do not appear in sequence, but instead are arranged by the artist to balance subject matter, light, and color. The work is thus not a record of the journey so much as of the artist’s state of mind.

Bonfort trained as a traditional landscape photographer, but in 2005 he began to use his cellphone’s camera as his primary tool. This modest appliance does not allow him to manipulate the image: to zoom, to change lenses, to choose shutter speeds, depth of field, or any of the thousands of options available on digital cameras. The cellphone camera limits his view of the world to a fixed wide-angle gaze.

Bonfort often prints his images on inexpensive materials, and creates small books. In 2011 Bonfort visited Reno, Virginia City, and Pyramid Lake and took hundreds of pictures with his cellphone. Bonfort’s books from that trip, and other trips, are featured in the CA+E Research Library.

Support

John Ben Snow Memorial Trust and the Metabolic Studio

Frohawk Two Feathers is the artistic alter-ego of Umar Rashid, born in 1976 in Chicago, Illinois. A performer, writer and artist, his work is filled with real and imagined colonial histories and often takes the form of mixed media paintings that resemble Native American ledger paintings. Central to the understanding of Two Feather’s work is a construct he calls “Frengland.” The artist explained, “Frengland is a place I created that presupposes that 18th century England and France were never at war with each other and that they merged into one huge, unstoppable colonial empire. Imagine all the countries they conquered put together. They’d put a flag in most of the world.” And Those Figures Through the Leaves. And That Light Through the Smoke is the second installment of Two Feathers’ “The Americas” series, which takes place on the continents of North and South America.

The title of this exhibition derives from “Sleeping Ute,” a song by the Brooklyn, New York-based band Grizzly Bear. It tells the story of the 1792-1794 journeys of two young, optimistic “Frenglish” military scouts and their companions.

Although they have lost support for their mission—the Frenglish Republic withdrew all funding due to the threat of war on the European continent—and are harried at all sides by man and nature, the scouts and their entourage continue on their mission to reach the Pacific.

The exhibition will include acrylic and ink portraits of key Frenglish characters featured in Two Feather’s narrative, and imaginary colonial maps, among other objects based on the artist’s extensive research into the customs, clothing and weaponry, and geography of the areas represented.

“Although my work has taken other forms (folds, slabs, sheets, zip folds) my fundamental interest in the detachability of signification as a way to re-construct form and desire continues to be an underlying motivation in my work.” –Linda Besemer

Linda Besemer (b. 1957) is an abstract painter based in Southern California celebrated for her stunning, optical works that upend commonly held notions of what makes a painting. Her work subtly expresses, through formal means, her distinct political outlook. Normally one expects a painting to consist of pigment, whether oil, acrylic or watercolor, applied to some sort of ground, whether canvas, panel or paper. In an exciting subversion of tradition, Besemer creates double-sided paintings (“folds”) of pure acrylic pigment without a ground. Rather than framing her paintings, Besemer drapes these pliable works over rods attached to the wall. More recently, she began creating sculptural “slabs,” in which layer after layer of vibrant acrylic color is built up to a thickness of up to five inches, then the mass is sculpted, revealing colors, shapes and patterns.

In the early 20th century, abstraction was envisioned as a revolutionary common language. In the 2nd half of the century, abstraction became increasingly apolitical. While updating abstraction for the 21st century, Besemer’s work contains implicit political and social critique, hearkening back to the movement’s radical roots.

Born in South Bend, Indiana, and educated at Indiana University (BFA) and the Tyler School of Art (MFA), Besemer lives in Los Angeles where she teaches painting, drawing, and critical studies at Occidental College.

The Nevada Museum of Art, long known for exhibitions and collections related to the natural and built environment, now ventures into virtual environments with the commission of Bloom. Created by collaborators Ken Goldberg, Sanjay Krishnan, Fernanda Viégas, and Martin Wattenberg, Bloom was envisioned as a tribute to the late American painter Kenneth Noland (1924-2010). Noland was a pioneer of Color Field painting with an innovative approach to color.

In this internet-based Earthwork, unpredictable live movements of the Hayward Fault are detected by a seismograph, transmitted continuously via the Internet, and processed to generate an evolving field of circular blooms. The size and position of each bloom is based on real-time changes in the Earth’s motion, measured as a vertical velocity continuously updated from the seismometer. Horizontal position based on time; vertical based on magnitude of rate of change; and size based on time between events. Colors come from photographs of flowers found on photo-sharing site Flickr.

Referencing landscape painting and abstraction, Bloom creates a sublime experience of the growth and fragility of the natural world.

Special thanks to Richard Allen, Doug Neuhouser, and Peggy Hellweg of the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory for the live data feed from the Hayward Fault seismometer station and to David Nachum, Vijay Vasudevan, Woj Matusek for work on earlier versions, and to Anne Wagner for insights.

Launching a long-term collaboration with New York’s El Museo del Barrio—the leading Latino cultural institution in the U.S. dedicated to Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean art—the Nevada Museum of Art presents a wide-ranging and diverse survey of their stellar art collection. This lively exhibition presents more than fifty objects including sculpture, painting, prints, photographs, and mixed media installations addressing themes such as identity politics, colonialism, emotional connections to homeland, and contemporary visual culture. Artworks created by living artists are contextualized with a concise selection of ancient Taίno stone carvings.

Voces y Visiones: Highlights from the Collection of El Museo del Barrio, New York, was jointly organized by the El Museo del Barrio and the Nevada Museum of Art.

Major sponsor

IGT

Media sponsor

Entravision

In 1948, William Goetz, the famed Hollywood producer, head of Universal Pictures, and legendary art collector, purchased a painting attributed to Vincent Van Gogh for $50,000. Although it was acquired from a reputable art dealer and deemed genuine by a prominent Van Gogh expert at the time, debate about the painting’s authenticity ignited an art world controversy that impacted U.S. foreign affairs.

For decades, only a handful of people knew the whereabouts of the painting, known as Study by Candlelight. Today, the Goetz family heirs hope to learn more about the provenance of the painting by drawing upon recent scientific developments in the study of artist materials and working methods.

In presenting this exhibition, the Nevada Museum of Art makes no attempt to determine the authenticity of the legendary painting. Rather, the exhibition re-visits its extraordinary story through archival documents, correspondence, photographs, and press materials that have never before been brought together in one place. The exhibition will look closely at the Goetz family’s Hollywood lifestyle and legendary art collection, assess what is known about the provenance of Study by Candlelight, consider the painting within the stylistic and historical context of Van Gogh’s body of work, and report on the art world controversies and international politics that have surrounded the painting.

This unique presentation invites viewers and scholars to draw their own conclusions and weigh in on this great Van Gogh debate.

Lead sponsors

I. Heidi Loeb Hegerich and the Bretzlaff Foundation

Major sponsors

Bally Technologies and Wells Fargo

Supporting sponsor

Gabelli Funds

Additional support

Jeanne and Alan Blach, John and Andrea Deane, John H.O. La Gatta, and Jennifer L. Patterson

In-kind support

Joseph Coli, DVM with Comstock Equine Hospital

A 2012 graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno’s MFA program, Amerique Powell’s lively acrylic paintings are explosions of color and pattern. Her works bears the influence of late 20th century art movements, particularly Feminist Art and Pattern and Decoration. In the tradition of these movements, Powell dares to paint using a traditionally domestic, “decorative” palette and populates her faceted, abstract environments with signature images of her playful felines.

According to the artist, “These works are expressions of my ideas about certain possible experiences they may have as small animals living in a bizarre, human world.”

This exhibition is part of the Nevada Museum of Art’s Emerging Artist Series.

This exhibition samples the Nevada Museum of Art’s diverse and growing contemporary art collection alongside a selection of artworks on loan from private collectors. The Museum recognizes Contemporary Art as a crucial area of investment, and curators seek out works for the permanent collection that reflect the institution’s ongoing commitment to artists’ creative interactions with natural, built, and virtual environments.

Recent additions to the collection include Anne Lindberg’s ethereal graphite and colored pencil piece Motion Drawing 25, Helen and Newton Harrison’s monumental mixed media drawing, 8 Yuba Mappings: A Disagreement in All Cases, as well as a studio-made photographic book by San Francisco-based artist and pilot Michael Light, who also photographed Roden Crater/Meteor Crater 07.07.11 and James Turrell’s Roden Crater Earth Work.

These artworks from the Museum’s collection are complemented by a concise selection of paintings by artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Joan Mitchell, Aboudia Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, and Takashi Murakami, on loan from leading West Coast art collectors.