RICK PARSONS

“I see the university as the intellectual and cultural beacon of the lake…and the Holman is an incredible space in place for intellectual discourse,” he said.

Parsons has been teaching at what formerly was Sierra Nevada University - and is now UNR at Lake Tahoe - for 13 years, while working on his own art too.

“I’ve always been a teaching artist,” Parsons said.

Prior to coming to Incline Village, Parsons was a teaching assistant in ceramics/sculpture and then sculpture program coordinator at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado, where he oversaw summer workshops and winter residency programs. He received his BFA from Stephen F. Austin State University, an MFA in Sculptural Ceramics from the University of Dallas.

Parsons’ website (rickparsons.net) notes his own art “focuses on the effects of environmental pollutants on the body. He uses materials as metaphor to address the looming impact of a culture dependent on diminishing resources.”

Parsons said growing up in Texas’s Gulf Coast in the 1970s and 1980s shaped his art.

“You don’t realize where you’re from until you move away,” Parsons said.

On his website, Parsons notes that in that part of the country “industrial and post-industrial infrastructures alter the landscape in dramatic ways” and which he explores in media as varied as tar paper paintings and crystallized sculptures made of clay and salt.

In turn, living in the Lake Tahoe region “provides an incredible barometer. With a forest on the edge of a desert, geological time moves quickly. It’s evident here that things change quickly,” Parsons said.

Music also plays a role in Parson’s art. He says he always has something playing when he creates, and has eclectic tastes, from traditional country to old school rap and jazz. He also uses “automatic writing” as part of his process, creating work formed by penning a stream of consciousness.

The creative process is something Parsons intends to make the public and students aware of through his new role and what the arts and media center will have to offer.

“We’ll be showing how artists think, how ideation works,” Parsons said.

To that point, in mid-October, sculptor, conceptual and installation artist Roman de Salvo was setting up his work in the Holman building. Parsons said people will be able to view how de Salvo goes about his work for about a month, then get to view the result for a month, through mid-December.

Parsons is also working to bring art from the extensive collection at UNR to the Lake Tahoe campus.

“We’re building art and what the arts will look like at the lake,” Parsons said.

Learn more at www.unr.edu/lake-tahoe/summer-artsworkshops/course-and-housing-info

Note:

The Univerity of Nevada, at Lake Tahoe Summer Arts Workshop, the partnership with Classical Tahoe, and the Writers in the Woods programs will continue at the UNR @ Lake Tahoe campus, as well as the new Talks@ Tahoe series. The campus will also participate in the IVCBA Northern Lights Holiday celebration this year.