Maurice Sendak: 50 Years, 50 Works is a comprehensive memorial exhibition of 50 select artworks by the late author, artist and illustrator Maurice Sendak celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak’s universally revered children’s book.

Presented by the Nevada Museum of Art Education Department, the exhibition is geared towards children and families and is accompanied by special family events for all ages, storytelling in the galleries, special classes, film screenings, and literacy and writing workshops.

The exhibition includes works in a variety of media and offers a survey of the highlights of Sendak’s career and the diverse art forms in which he was renowned. From children’s literature and Broadway to the opera, animated films and young adult textbooks, Sendak remained an iconic American illustrator and author, acclaimed around the world for his genius and influence on generations of readers and young adults.

This exhibition was organized by Opar, Inc. and AFA, New York. Special thanks to AFA, New York for their support.

Lead sponsors

Edna B. Benna and the Robert Z. Hawkins Foundation

Major sponsors

John H. O. LaGatta, Alexandra LaGatta and John LaGatta II

Sponsors

Leonard and Kristen Remington

Supporting sponsors

Chelsea and Jarrod Dean, Dr. Valerie M. Fridland and Craig S. Denney, Caroline and Jim Kaplan, Janet K. Mello, Fong and J.P. Menante, Susan and Brian Pansky, Paul Baker Prindle and Benjamin Karl, Mary Jayne Rader, Malena and Spencer Raymond, Robin and Steve Welch, and Emily and Joe Wieczorek

Media sponsor

KTVN

This feature exhibition celebrates the iconic landscape paintings of Phyllis Shafer, while also carefully examining her early artistic influences shaped by her time spent in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area. The title of the exhibition, “I only went out for a walk…” is inspired by a phrase written by nineteenth century naturalist and conservationist John Muir, and links to Shafer’s work as a plein air painter who frequently finds inspiration in the Sierra Nevada.

The largest presentation of her work to date, the exhibition will include nearly 100 paintings, gouaches, and drawings dating from the 1980s to present. In addition, visitors will encounter displays Shafer’s working tools such as brushes, paints, sketchbooks, notebooks and unfinished drawings.

A fully-illustrated book documenting Shafer’s work from the 1980s to the present accompanies the exhibition. Interview by Ann M. Wolfe, Senior Curator | Deputy Director, 112 pages, hard cover, $40 per copy. Copies available for purchase in the Museum Store or call 775.398.7206.

Major sponsor

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

Additional sponsors

Mimi Ellis Hogan, The Law Office of Tammy M. Riggs, P.L.L.C., Cheryl Sedestrom, and the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency

Lita Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis installation is the first large-scale artwork created in Antarctica. This milestone of contemporary land art, widely acknowledged to be both a stunning and ecologically sensitive intervention on the continent, has received international acclaim. Originally funded by the National Science Foundation, Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis was installed on the Ross Ice Shelf on December 22, 2006—concurrent with the summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. This exhibition features original objects and archive materials from the 2006 project. In conjunction with the exhibition, SKIRA Rizzoli, New York will publish the first major publication on Lita Albuquerque.

Andrea Zittel’s Wallsprawl #4 (Las Vegas, Next to Nellis Air Force Base), is based on an aerial photograph of the southern Nevada military installation known as Nellis Air Force Base. Zittel sourced the image online from an aerial image database (before Google Maps made such imagery easily accessible).

The original image—before Zittel repeated and replicated it—shows a large-scale military campus intersecting with the wide-open desert landscape, exposing the infrastructure of a site that is presumably off-limits to the general public.

By converting an image of an American military base into custom-designed wallpaper, Zittel metaphorically transforms a highly-charged landscape into pure aesthetic decoration and encourages a different way of viewing and thinking about the world.

Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, 

Museum purchase with funds provided by the Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund

Maya Lin is inevitably cast as an architectonic artist, but over the past decade she has engaged the vocabulary of a cartographer, making artworks that help viewers to visualize complex natural and cultural systems operating in the world. This exhibition unites sculptural objects alongside what Lin considers to be her final memorial project, What is Missing? An interactive mapping website, What is Missing? relies upon triaxial dimensions of space, as well as those of time—past, present, and future—to engage us with species and habitats that have disappeared or may soon vanish. Utilizing both memory and projection, objective numbers and subjective narrative, What is Missing? asks us to reconsider our relationship to nature at time when it is critical to do so.

Paruku is the region in Australia’s Western Desert that surrounds the inland body of water known to settlers as Lake Gregory. Named after the English-born explorer Sir August Gregory, this terminal desert lake has long been a resource for the Walmajarri-speaking Aboriginal people. The ancient shoreline of Lake Gregory contains what may be the oldest sites of continuous human cultural production in the world, with artifacts excavated there estimated to be as old as 50,000 years.

The local Aboriginal people—approximately 150 men and women who are referred to as the “Traditional Owners” of Paruku—live in the nearby settlement of Mulan. The unique cultural and environmental values of Paruku led the Australian government to declare it an Indigenous Protected Area, or IPA, in 2001.

The Paruku Project was a two-year effort consisting of teams of scientists, artists, and writers working in this Aboriginal desert community, one of the poorest and most remote in Australia. The first task of the teams was to assess current conditions. They found an environment severely stressed by invasive species and a culture slowly losing its identity. The second task was to design and implement cross-cultural and transformational responses to these conditions, many of which involved artmaking.

Australian artist Mandy Martin and conservationist Guy Fitzhardinge, along with writer and artist Kim Mahood, worked with Walmajari people to revitalize the art center in Mulan, which in turn helped attract attention and funding from policy makers to address challenges facing the region.

Support

The John Ben Snow Memorial Trust

The Williston Basin is a 300,000-square-mile depression that includes parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Two miles beneath the surface of the basin lies a shale deposit called the Bakken Formation, where hydraulic fracturing has unlocked vast amounts of petroleum. Fracturing, also known as “fracking,” pumps water, sand, and chemicals underground at high pressure to crack buried strata and force oil and gas to wells. The process is controversial because the long-term effects of the process on groundwater, ground stability, and other environmental conditions are unknown.

Photographer Terry Evans and journalist/writer Elizabeth Farnsworth took cameras, geology books, laptops, and notebooks to North Dakota for 18 months to explore the effects of the oil boom on prairie and people. The project generated aerial and ground-based photographs, and extensive interviews with people on all sides of the boom. From those rejoicing in new wealth to those mourning the lost prairie, the work by Evans and Farnsworth reveals the complicated environmental, economic, and social consequences brought about by the boom.

Support

The John Ben Snow Memorial Trust

In 2012, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, two of the Internet’s most critically acclaimed bloggers, embarked on a multi-state tour of the United States “to document often overlooked yet fascinating sites through the eyes of the innovators, trendsetters, entrepreneurs, and designers at the forefront of ideas today.” Their 16 month long journey, inspired by nineteenth-century survey expeditions, was known as VENUE. Manaugh and Twilley took along a variety of analog and digital instruments and a custom, hand-built toolbox containing recording equipment that they used as a pop-up studio—a temporary “venue”—to record audio and video.

Manaugh and Twilley visited sites as diverse as New Mexico’s radio astronomy observatory known as the Very Large Array, to the world’s largest living organism in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, to the stilt houses of Florida’s Biscayne Bay. They interviewed experts ranging from a speleo-biologist, a golf-course designer, the keeper of the U.S. national atomic clock, and a car crash reconstructionist, to environmental lawyers, concept artists, archivists, and photographers. Throughout their travels they posted reports of their exploits, assembling a completely new cross-section of the country for the 21st century.

Sponsor

Western States Arts Federation

German artist Helga Griffiths is interested in the physiology and psychology of perception, and her body and sense organs are often the point of departure for her work. Brainscape is a video taking viewers on an animated journey of the artist’s own brain, based on computer tomographic images created at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. The dream-like flight simulation takes viewers through folds and canyons that resemble an abstracted landscape. Brainscape features a sound composition by Dr. Johannes Sistermanns.

Doris Duke’s Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art will be the first comprehensive traveling exhibition of objects from Duke’s remarkable Hawaiian home, Shangri La. Situated amidst five acres of interlocking terraced gardens and pools overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Honolulu’s Diamond Head, Shangri La powerfully reflects Duke’s life-long aesthetic passions. This exhibition brings together furnishings and objects, contemporary works by eight of Shangri La’s artists in residence, vintage photographs and films, documentation of the estate’s construction, architectural drawings, and ephemera exploring the history and experience of this remarkable place. A 216-page catalogue published by Skira Rizzoli accompanies the exhibition.

Lead Sponsor

Nancy and Martin Cohen

Major Sponsor

Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art

Supporting Sponsor

Bally Technologies

Sponsors

Jeanne and Alan Blach, Denise and Tim Cashman, and Enid A. Oliver, Ameriprise Financial Services, Inc.

Additional Sponsor

Northern Nevada International Center

This exhibition was organized by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.