Picturing Mexico: Alfredo Ramos Martínez marks the first comprehensive examination of the artist’s work produced from 1929 to 1946. An artist of great significance, Ramos Martínez (1871–1946) developed his own distinctive contribution to modernism. This exhibition explores Ramos Martínez’s work through four sections—Many Women, Religious Piety, Los Angeles Stories, and Forever Mexico—and how he produced an individual response to Mexico from Los Angeles.

The study of Ramos Martínez’s work in Los Angeles provides a greater understanding of the myriad cultural contributions of artists living in the city during the first half of the twentieth century. While many scholars have studied the influence of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, this exhibition breaks new ground by further developing research on the presence of other influential Mexican artists in Los Angeles. This exhibition also offers visitors an opportunity to understand the constant cultural exchange between the United States and Mexico in new ways.

Nolan Preece, a photographer for over forty years, has devoted his work to understanding and mastering the challenging techniques of early photography and conceiving of new photo-based processes at the same time. In the late 1970s and early 80s, his fondness for experimental photography led him to originate a photographic abstraction process that employed chemical masking techniques and staining in conjunction with a printed image.

Preece called his resulting prints “chemograms,” but after recently engaging with a group of artists using similar processes—most notably Pierre Cordier of Brussels, Belgium—Preece has taken to using the term “chemigram” to describe his prints. This exhibition features Preece’s chemigrams produced over the past three decades.

Preece served as galleries curator and art professor at Truckee Meadows Community College for eleven years before retiring in 2010. He is also known for his landscape portfolios of the United States and the West, as well as his Great Basin wall series that are now documents of a changing environment. Preece’s photographs are in the collections of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah; the Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City; the Nevada Museum of Art; and most recently, the Southern Graphics Council Archives in Mississippi.

Reno-born artist Davey Hawkins lives and works in New York, and has taken a special interest in the physical evidence of human industrial interventions with the natural world. Through his installation made with materials derived from chemical by-products, Hawkins’ work demonstrates both an acceptance of environmental degradation in the 21st century, and a desire to transform physical detritus into visual poetry.

Hawkins is a candidate in the Master of Fine Arts graduate program at Columbia University in New York, and expects his MFA in 2014. This exhibition is part of the Nevada Museum of Art’s Emerging Artist Series.

Based in San Francisco, photographer and installation artist Stephen Galloway’s technique is directed towards vivid detail, giving every stick, rock, root or shrub a sense of presence. With this site-specific installation, he combines sculptural elements, composed of natural materials gleaned from the Sierra Nevada, with photographic images of the same materials. His work alludes to various aspects of nature, from the physical to the cosmological to the mythic.

Accomplished painter Patricia Chidlaw finds her inspiration in neon-era motels, junkyards, Laundromats, train stations, parking lots, movie palace marquees, empty coffee shops, and void spaces, where content sneaks in via side doors and implies dormant life forces.

Chidlaw is an American realist seeking, and finding, profundity in the realm of the commonplace. She takes aims at dignity and a durable beauty amidst the rubble, ruins and soon-to-be-obsolete side routes of America.

This exhibition features twenty paintings from the 1990s up to the present, representing her extraordinary skill in depicting urban landscapes with characteristic pictorial grace. A richly illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

Chicago photographer Judy Natal has been working in several sites around the world since 2006 to construct a future-based narrative about humans and the environment. Future Perfect, composed of photographs, writings, and sculptures created by Natal from found objects, begins in 2040 and moves backwards a decade at a time while utilizing imagery from three disparate locations.

The series takes us among the geo-engineered volcanic landscapes of Iceland, where people are shrouded in steam and nature is littered with inscrutable objects, and into the utopian science experiment of Biosphere 2, an experimental habitat constructed in Arizona from 1987 to 1991 by a group of engineers and artists. Meant to be inhabited as a sealed unit by a crew for a year at a time, “B2” led to a greater understanding of both natural and built ecologies. The third environment is the Las Vegas Springs Preserve, the site of the artesian well in the Las Vegas Valley that was first used by Native Americans, then Mormon farmers and the early railroads, and finally the city of Las Vegas. During the 1990s it was converted into a public theme park meant to educate visitors about the use and conservation of water in the desert.

Future Perfect is loosely a science fiction, but one based on science fact at each site, all of them engineered for studying and understanding the use of local ecologies for human purposes. Neither apocalyptic nor optimistic, the work allows the viewer to imagine different scenarios for the future.

Sponsor

John Ben Snow Memorial Trust

Lauren Bon and the Optics Division of her Metabolic Studio have set up residence in the old Pittsburgh Plate Glass plant at the edge of the Owens Dry Lake, where they are reclaiming the chemicals and silver necessary to make and process photographic film and paper. They then use the recaptured materials to make images of the lake in two camera obscuras, one built into a truck and another into one of the silos at the plant. Both are used to create panoramic images of the site. Paper negatives used are placed in large trays that are filled with water and left to evaporate over several months. This recreates the playa surface, allows for the silver to be re-recaptured—and creates the opportunity for making another print as a new iteration in the series.

All of this activity is part of a larger social practice that Bon is exercising in the Owens Valley, the goal of which is to establish new local businesses in a depressed region based around water issues. The exhibition will be drawn from the extensive project archives collected by the Center for Art + Environment, and will feature the walk-in, Vietnam-era, portable U.S. Army darkroom used to process the harvested chemicals.

Sponsor

John Ben Snow Memorial Trust

To read William L. Fox’s essay De-silvering the Mirror, click here (link)

Imagine Florence, Italy in the late sixteenth century. A city in love with art, Florence teemed with color, science, and awe-inspiring paintings. Italian Baroque: Paintings from the Haukohl Family Collection invites you to feel the period come alive as you immerse yourself in more than 20 breathtaking paintings. Intensified by deep, rich color and the brilliant use of shadows, each dramatic work is enveloped by a finely detailed golden frame. This historic exhibition continues at neighboring arte italia, where educational and sculptural components complete the Baroque experience. Made possible by Sir Mark Fehrs Haukohl, a patron of the arts who lives in Houston, Texas, the show is drawn from the largest private collection of Florentine Baroque painting in the United States and other countries outside of Italy.

Exclusive sponsor

E.L. Wiegand Foundation

ITALIAN BAROQUE PRESS RELEASE