UNLV PERFORMING ARTS CENTER’S

46th Season

MNOZIL BRASS: GOLD

Friday, March 3, 2023 · 7:30 p.m.

$50 - $40 - $30 - $20

With sell-out performances around the globe, Mnozil Brass, performs a wide-ranging repertoire with fearlessness, immense technical skill, and typical Viennese “schmäh” (loosely translated: a kind of sarcastic charm!).

Bokyung Byun

Friday, March 24, 2023 · 7:30 p.m.

$30

The UNLV Performing Arts Center welcomes the 2021 winner of the Guitar Foundation of America’s International Concert Artist Competition, Bokyung Byun, who was praised by Classical Guitar Magazine as “confident and quite extraordinary.”

EMANUEL AX

Thursday, April 20, 2023 · 7:30 p.m.

$50 - $40 - $30 - $20

Few, if any, can match the piano artistry of GRAMMY® Awardwinning Emanuel Ax The Seattle Times extolled, “Ax...has a way of seeming to enfold every listener in a metaphorical embrace.”

This concert is dedicated to the memory of Bernice Fischer.

Meng Su

Friday, May 5, 2023 · 7:30 p.m.

$30

Multifaceted guitarist Meng Su is captivating audiences around the world with her stunning virtuosity and refined artistry. New York Concert Review writes her performance is “... seemingly effortless and stunningly polished.”

TWO BY SIX: SEXTETS OF BRAHMS & DVOŘÁK

Thursday, February 2, 2023 • 7:30 p.m.• $25

A FRENCH TOAST: MUSIC OF DEBUSSY, RAVEL, AND CHAUSSON

Thursday, March 23, 2023 • 7:30 p.m.• $25

THE MIRÓ QUARTET

Tuesday, April 18, 2023 • 7:30 p.m.• $30 especially interested in the most everyday objects. Her most viewed post last year was a miniature ice tray.

Ruiz is not sure why miniatures are so popular. “It is a pop phenomenon on social media,” she says. “It is so popular that a lot of toy companies are even making miniatures for adults to buy.” Other companies have caught on, too. Ruiz was recently commissioned to make a laundry room scene for Clorox. Ruiz doesn’t make her own objects to create her worlds, but sources them from Etsy and eBay in 1:6 scale, or Barbie scale. “I am not a crafter, I am a collector,” she says.

Typical miniature shows only allow vendors working in 1:12 and 1:24 scale, the typical scales of dollhouses. “But the artisans that we want to start inviting aren’t making miniatures for dollhouses. That’s the difference,” Renfroe says. “There’s a lot of really cool stuff out there that is just considered art, and that’s what we want to focus on.”

A couple of years ago, Jordan Affonso, another of this year’s minfluencers, had an idea for a project called The Tiny Art Experiment. He invited miniatures artists from around the world to contribute a piece to a larger diorama. “So, I’m going to be bringing not only my own stuff, but also the results of that experiment, to Las Vegas to put on display. It’s about 14 miniature buildings that are Star Wars themed, with detail and accessories and vehicles and little action figures and characters and aliens that were all made by different artists from around the world,” Affonso says.

The line between art and toy, display piece and interactive object, is becoming trickier to distinguish in the world of miniatures, which people reach from seemingly every possible angle.

Las Vegas-born artist Mary Sabo, like many, began working in miniature during quarantine. She says, “I think people feel like they have so little agency and control over the world around them, but if you have this little tiny world of your own, it’s comforting, maybe.” Her work, which is sometimes displayed with a magnifying glass next to it to encourage a closer look, focuses on the landscape and the interior. “It all has a surrealist kind of twinge to it. Stuff that maybe I wish existed, fantasy worlds,” Sabo says.

This contradiction between the real and surreal may be one of the reasons why people are so enamored of miniature objects. Affonso says, “There’s a surrealistic quality, but at the same time, you know the object in front of you is real, so it’s almost like, How is this real? It’s so small but it’s the real thing, but it isn’t, but it is. It’s sort of a layering of surprise and an endearing quality.”

There’s also an element of nostalgia. Jes- sica Oreck, who runs the Office of Collecting and Design at The Historic Commercial Center District, enjoys watching peoples’ reactions to the objects in her museum. “It is devoted to the diminutive and the discarded,” Oreck says. “It is essentially an elaborate expression of leftover fragments from our collective memories.”

Visitors are encouraged to interact with Oreck’s miniatures. “It isn’t about the monetary value of an object; it’s about the value of an object as a token of memory for each visitor. And that feels too personal and too delicate to put behind glass. It has to be something you hold in the palm of your hand,” Oreck says. “Each of these pieces of trash/treasure hold what I call a ‘residue of attention.’ All the things they’ve witnessed, the love and use they’ve been afforded, people get to run their fingers through that when they visit. To me, it feels a little like magic.”

That magic is magnetic — so much so that even the miniatures we see in little squares through the windows of our devices encourage us to lean in and try, at least, to touch. ✦

The International Market of Miniature Artisans is scheduled Feb. 22-26 at the Gold Coast Hotel & Casino. It is open to the public, and tickets cost $12 for adults and $6 for kids. For more information, visit imomalv.com when young Douglas LaVan Martineau returned late at night on August 6, 1950, from a Boy Scouts camping trip.

Like his mother who’d died eight years earlier at the age of 32, his father (also named Douglas) was an alcoholic. He had been drinking in the living room and left a lit cigarette on the couch before retiring. That night the local fire department was having a convention in town, so no one responded to the blazing house in Cedar City, Utah.

As Martineau wrote in the preface to his masterpiece on rock writing, The Rocks Begin to Speak, there is not a Paiute word for ‘orphanage.’ Following the funeral, a one-armed Paiute man named Edrick Bushhead told him, “Come stay with me and be my son.” Other Paiutes quickly volunteered as additional foster parents — Maimie Merrycats and James and Mabel Yellowjacket from the Cedar Band, and Wendel John from the Shivwits Band. One of his daughters, Shanandoah (Shanan) Anderson, says his new extended family taught him sign language, dances, beading, how to make bows and arrows, and how to tan hides, all while he was finishing Cedar City High School. Although he was white, he thought of himself as a Paiute, a “reverse apple — white on the outside and red on the inside,” Anderson recalls.

When Martineau turned 19, he and his Paiute friends decided to enlist in the Air Force rather than be drafted into the Army or Navy. “What are your skills?” the recruiter asked. “I can herd cattle,” he replied. “If you can do that, you can herd airplanes.” Dispatched to Korea in 1951 to serve as an air traffic controller, he shared a Quonset hut with the cryptography department, where seven of his tent-mates worked as codebreakers. It wasn’t long before he realized that he could use many of the same principles and methods to help decipher the ancient petroglyphs (engravings or etchings) and pictographs (paintings or drawings) he’d grown up seeing on rock faces in the desert Southwest.

After he left the Air Force in 1959, Martineau decided to devote the rest of his life to cataloging and interpreting this “rock art,” the popular name for images left by people who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Paiutes and other tribes prefer that it be called “rock writing” for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it was not intended to be decorative but to tell a story using universally comprehensible symbols.

But that same rock writing, sacred to Indigenous Peoples and critical to understanding ancient cultures, is being slowly destroyed. As urban development and outdoor activities such as off-roading and tourism affect natural areas throughout the Southwest, graffiti and trampling are becoming more commonplace at cultural sites. Panels that Martineau catalogued so meticulously and archaeologists have studied for so long have been damaged. Will they still be here in a thousand more years, for others to learn from and connect with?

IN 2018, NEVADA Highway Patrol Troopers pulled over two 28-year-old Elko men who were covered in blue paint and had 100 spray-paint cans in their car. A news release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the

District of Nevada described how the pair had painted graffiti at several locations at White River Narrows in the Basin and Range National Monument in Lincoln County, including over a rock face with petroglyphs sacred to the Paiute and Shoshone tribes. A witness to the crime called the police. One of the men was sentenced to six months for misdemeanor conspiracy and a year-and-aday imprisonment for felony violation of the Archaeological Resources Protection Act. The other was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment for misdemeanor conspiracy followed by eight months of home confinement. U.S. Attorney Jason M. Frierson for the District of Nevada said, “This ruling demonstrates that such crimes will not be met with a slap on the wrist. Our office will continue to work to ensure that anyone who desecrates sacred tribal lands and artifacts are (sic) held accountable.”

Part of the problem with calling rock writings “art” is that doing so implicitly encourages such defacement, says Daniel Bulletts, the Kaibab Band of Southern Paiutes’ cultural resource director. Vandals might think to themselves, “Maybe I could put my art up there next to (theirs) to see how many millions of years it lasts,” he says.

Archaeologist Kevin Rafferty, a College of Southern Nevada professor emeritus, has studied rock writing for more than 30 years. He estimates there are 1,700 sites in Nevada, seen by more and more individuals and families all the time. News outlets widely reported on the skyrocketing outdoor recreation during the pandemic, as people looked for activities they could do while socially distanced. Younger generations continue to show increasing interest in the outdoors. Terri Janison, Friends of Red Rock Canyon’s executive director, regrets that the 13-mile Scenic Drive there had to be closed a few times in 2022, but says Red Rock is being “loved to death” by close to 4 million visitors annually, as many as Zion National Park in Utah receives. Of course, among these crowds are some criminals, who etch their initials or spray-paint words over petroglyphs and pictographs. Or worse …

Eddie Hawk Jim of the Pahrump Band of Southern Paiutes says the petroglyphs around Mt. Charleston, located in the Paiutes’ revered ancestral lands known in English as the Spring Mountains, have been destroyed by off-roading and spray-painting. In 2008, a 58-year-old man removed a 300-pound boulder with a petroglyph showing seven sheep and placed it in the front yard of his Pahrump home. An April 2011 news story in the Pahrump Valley Times reported that the vandal was sentenced to six months in federal prison and one year of supervised release.

Rock writings in the highly visited Red Rock are also suffering. Last year, graffiti was discovered along two hiking trails, the first at Lost Creek and the second at Calico II. From pottery artifacts discovered there, it’s believed that the area was occupied by Ancestral Puebloans and then Paiutes at least 1,000 years ago, and possibly by PaleoIndians as early as 11,000 B.C.

In May 2011, the Red Rock Canyon

Interpretive Association and Bureau of Land Management asked Stratum Unlimited, led by archaeologist Johannes (Jannie) Loubser, to mitigate graffiti on 17 rock panels at Lost Creek. In one instance, graffiti had been left directly on top of a pictograph. Loubser returned to lead a graffiti removal workshop at Lost Creek and Calico II in 2014. In all, he has removed graffiti from three sites at Red Rock, four sites at White River Narrows, one site near Alamo, and one site near Reno/ Sparks, and he has assessed nine other sites.

Too often, Loubser says, well-meaning but untrained conservationists whom he calls “graffiti vigilantes” damage rock writings even more. “Less is more” best describes his method of remediation: using the least invasive techniques for removal first to prevent further damage. Several mechanical and chemical techniques must be pretested on similar rock surfaces elsewhere and in a certain order depending on the particular surface. If graffiti can’t be safely removed, it can be camouflaged, he says.

But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of remediation, camouflage, or prosecution. Madeline Ware Van der Voort, the BLM’s state archaeologist and preservation office deputy, echoes many in the preservation community when she says that education is key. In this, too, Martineau was a pioneer. He spent more than 40 years studying and interpreting the symbols etched and painted on rocks so that other people might better understand the stories written there and thereby respect and preserve them.