FALL 2023
ISSUE 003
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ISSUE 003
A VOLATILE PROPOSITION
OUS: THE EPHEMERAL -CAN-EAT BUFFET
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PUBLIC ART: A POSSIBILITY, NOT A PANACEA
EEN THIS YET?
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A TALE OF TWO ART CITIES
PUBLIC
ART
PUBLIC ART IN LAS VEGAS HAS BEEN ON MY MIND SINCE I BECAME A CITY OF LAS VEGAS ARTS
COMMISSIONER IN 2020. IN THAT ROLE, I HELP
RECOMMEND PUBLIC ART PROJECTS FOR APPROVAL BY THE CITY COUNCIL USING THE PERCENT FOR THE ARTS FUND, WHICH IS A CITY ORDINANCE THAT ALLOCATES 1% OF ALL CAPITAL PROJECTS TO SUPPORT THE
CREATION OF PUBLIC ART. BECAUSE OF THIS, I OFTEN
THINK ABOUT THE ROLE PUBLIC ART PLAYS IN OUR
LIVES AND HOW THE TERM IS DEFINED. HOW DO
PEOPLE KNOW WHEN THEY’VE ENCOUNTERED “PUBLIC
ART”? WHO DEFINES WHAT IS PUBLIC ART? AND HOW
DOES PUBLIC ART REFLECT A CITY’S IDENTITY?
ON SOME OF MY RECENT TRAVELS I BEGAN NOTICING
MONUMENTAL SCULPTURES AND MURALS, SMALL
TO FURTHER COMPLICATE THE THEME, LAS VEGAS AND OUR PENCHANT FOR THE DRAMATIC
MEANS THAT A SIMPLE
DRIVE LEADS YOU PAST
STUNNING ARRAYS OF NEON REPRESENTING
THE FAR EAST, MIDCENTURY MODERN
DESIGN ELEMENTS AND
MY PERSONAL FAVORITE,
HISTORIC MARKERS, AND ARTFUL GARDENS. I’D EVEN
A 60-FOOT CLOWN.
COULD IT BE CONSIDERED PUBLIC ART? BECAUSE OF
THE NEON MUSEUM.) IN
WHEN I SPOT A LARGE, SCULPTURAL OBJECT (LIKELY
WHERE “SHOWGIRLS”
SPOT A VIGNETTE IN PUBLIC THAT I FOUND SO MOVING; MY ACADEMIC BACKGROUND, I FEEL NEARLY CERTAIN
PULLING FROM THE BASEMENT OF MY ART HISTORY MEMORIES) THAT IT MUST BE ART, BUT HOW DOES THE PUBLIC SEE THE PIECE? IS IT RECOGNIZED AS
ART? AND HOW DO MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC FEEL ABOUT TAX DOLLARS BEING SPENT ON ART?
(DISCLAIMER: I WORK AT
A TOWN LIKE LAS VEGAS, WELCOME YOU TO
DOWNTOWN AND A PINK, BUG-EYED ELEPHANT
AWAITS YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE ON THE
SOUTHEND OF THE STRIP, HOW DO WE DEFINE
PUBLIC ART AND HOW
2 DRY HEAT FALL 2023
DOES PUBLIC ART DEFINE
US? THE ESSAYS HEREIN
JENNIFER KLEVEN GUEST EDITOR
Jennifer Kleven is a lifelong Las Vegan committed to expanding access to arts and culture for under-resourced local communities. Upon graduating from UNLV with a BFA in Art in 2009, she opened a gallery in the former Emergency Arts building on Fremont Street, and exhibited local, national, and international artists. Kleven joined The Neon Museum in 2010 and currently serves as Director of Advancement, responsible for achieving the Museum’s philanthropic goals. She is President of the Nevada Museums Association, chair of the City of Las Vegas Arts Commission, and a grant reviewer for the National Endowment for the Arts and other agencies. In her spare time, she enjoys curating exhibits and workshops as part of GULCH Collective, gardening, and creating ceramic art.
ADDRESS MY QUESTIONS FROM DIVERSE
PERSPECTIVES AND
OFFER NEW QUESTIONS.
AVOLATILE PROPOSITION
ISSUE 003
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SCOTT DICKENSHEETS
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It’s an afternoon in torrid July, officially 109.4 degrees— I checked—though it’s a thousand degrees hotter on the unshaded rockscape where I stand, training the most thoughtful gaze I can muster on this thing I’ve come to see. A sculpture. Specifically, Wayne Littlejohn’s Dream Machine. A 27-foot-high twist of painted aluminum that, according to its placard, “arises from the Earth like some mysterious love child of dust devils and drones.” It’s in Siegfried & Roy Park, close to the airport, and I’m risking this brain-melt as part of a four-decade conversation with myself about living here, in Southern Nevada— I want to know whether public art has anything useful to say about that. So while I’m looking at Littlejohn’s piece, I guess I’m looking for something else. Let’s see what you’ve got, Dream Machine.
Before it became a notorious fiasco, William Maxwell’s Ground Zero was a fine idea. This was back in 1989, and the City of Las Vegas’ recently formed Arts Commission had just finalized its first big project, selecting a piece of public art to adorn the blank, curving, 10-story face of the old city hall (now the Zappos building). Maxwell’s proposal: to etch into its marble surface a complex bas-relief of Indigenous, natural history, and anti-nuclear imagery; shadows thrown by the moving sun would keep it dynamic. It was the sort of piece, in other words, that you can envision a high-minded committee, seeking a comfortable overlap between acceptable artistic virtue and defensible public spending, totally going for. But, as it does, reality intervened. The city’s maintenance people vetoed the etching, saying the wall’s marble surface was too thin—a concern you’d think someone would’ve voiced earlier. A compromise was reached: elements of the design would be replicated using brightly colored plastic strips, and right there you can see its demise foretold: that cheesy execution distorted and trivialized the piece. After a decade in which it was mocked when it wasn’t ignored, the city took it down in 2001, and, a spokesman tells me, probably destroyed the components. It’s a cautionary tale we’ll come back to, but my real interest lies with a different finalist, one decidedly less calculated to appease a selection committee. Proposed by the late Vito Acconci, a trickster figure in modern art, it’s easy to picture but impossible to imagine happening: a 10-story mirrored cross, its arms pulling away from the curving white wall, leaving architectural “wounds” that would “bleed” water. In contrast to Maxwell’s broadly acceptable anti-nuke message, the politics of Acconci’s uneasy mix of religiosity and city hall were more pointed: he wanted to trouble what he believed to be America’s toocozy relationship between church and government with a work that might make people question the building’s true purpose. But then he confessed another, funkier inspiration: the 1972 TV movie The Night Stalker, a lurid vampire yarn set in Las Vegas. He was captivated by it, associated it with this city.
That’s an idiosyncratic mix of inspirations, to say the least. Indeed, I have a photo of the meeting in which the finalists unveiled their maquettes; Acconci, dressed like Brooklyn’s hippest undertaker, stands next to his model, and it’s clear his piece simply contained too much weird gristle to survive the good intentions of a municipal selection committee. Still, I’ve thought a lot about his proposal over the years. At the time I knew nothing about Acconci himself, a poet and performance artist who graduated to public projects. But I clearly responded to elements that marked much of his work: a spirit of provocation and sinister humor, for sure, but also its sense of critique, and a tension between a desire to draw people together and his suspicion of group conformity. He described another piece as his attempt to create “a kind of discussion place, argument place, start-a-revolution place,” and that’s most certainly the wavelength I picked up on over the years as I indulged in a bit of counterfactual speculation: what if the damn thing somehow had won and gone up on City Hall? I imagined it pranking the streamlined capitalism of the Fremont Street Experience, and exchanging energies with the crackpot aesthetics of the Stratosphere Tower. I’m no doubt in the minority in thinking that would’ve been terrific. “I like Acconci as an artist,” says UNLV art historian Hikmet Sidney Loe when I describe his proposal to her, “but it just sounds horrific.” Absolutely, but that’s not a deal-breaker for me. I’m okay having a pugilistic relationship with a piece of art—if it promises to pierce my brittle crust of daily complacence. I mean, love it or hate it, when we were downtown we’d surely have had to contend with it, right? How might that have charged our relationship to this place? That’s another way of asking, What do we want from public art? And because I’m not an art critic, social theorist, or urban planner, just a guy mired in ordinary life, I suppose what I’m really asking is, What do *I* want from public art? Over time, Acconci’s mad vision crystallized in my head as a kind of benchmark for seeking an answer.
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4 DRY HEAT FALL 2023 Wayne Littlejohn, Dream Machine, 2016. Siegfried & Roy Park, Las Vegas. Photo by Becca Schwartz. Opposite Jesse Smigel, Snowball in Vegas, 2014. 1st St. and Coolidge Ave., Las Vegas. Photo by Becca Schwartz.
Should public art (a) “promote pride in Las Vegas”; (d) “help build and reinforce the identity of the city of Las Vegas”; (g) “support tourism”; (l) “explore and provide information about facets of Las Vegas history”; (m) “draw attention to the natural environment and environmental issues facing Las Vegas”; (n) “open conversations about issues facing the community”; (p) “bring a sense of whimsy and delight to everyday spaces”? Those are some of the 16 suggested responses in a survey conducted this year on behalf of the City of Las Vegas as it goes about revising its Public Art Master Plan. You can deduce from their demeanor at least one of the process’s guiding assumptions: that in order to be publicly funded, art—one of humankind’s slippier pursuits—must go through a cost-benefit analysis just like any other public infrastructure, and that “benefit” will be construed to mean “useful in an explainable way.” Thus, a vocabulary of uplift, education, and community enhancement is simply as close as a process meant to evaluate roadwork and sewage projects can get to justifying something as ineffable as art. A city can’t just hand a bunch of cash to an artist and accept whatever comes. I get that. And, my Acconci-like qualms about group-think aside, civic vetting doesn’t always weaken an artist’s vision. It can still give us a real banger like Stephen Hendee’s Monument to the Simulacrum, in the courtyard of the Historic Fifth Street School. It’s a forceful treatise on the city’s interplay between the artificial and the real, even if you haven’t read Jean Baudrillard’s 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, to which it refers. Or Wayne Littlejohn’s tangle of desert and fission symbolism, Atomic Tumbleweed, on Third Street, with its reflected light and enigmatic shadows.
Or Jesse Smigel’s Snowball in Vegas, downtown’s whimsically-oversize cat head—big fan here. Still, pieces like those, and a few others—Rita Deanin Abbey’s Spirit Tower at the Summerlin Library comes to mind—stand out in a valley inventory of public art, public and corporate, that seems more likely to advertise the good intentions of its sponsors than risk trying to rejuvenate your—okay, my—relationship to this place we live. “I think (public art) should be challenging,” Littlejohn tells me. “I don’t think it should be too generic or over-the-top palatable.” Art on the public dime will always be a volatile proposition; see ARTnews in 1982 (“Does the Public Want Public Sculpture?”) or the art blog Hyperallergic a few months ago (“Are We Asking Too Much of Public Art?”). About the time Acconci was concocting his Vegas pitch, he was also embroiled in a controversial project in San Diego. You can see why, in that cultural flux, a public body might prefer a fine-screened filtration process. Even at its most anodyne, art can be difficult for a public servant to explain to an angry taxpayer. (It probably helps to have a master plan.) And yet: the paintbrushes. Maybe you’ve seen them: two large metal paintbrushes on Charleston Boulevard, designed by the late, prolific public artist Dennis Oppenheim. Intended to be a dazzling gateway to the Arts District, when lit they would call to one another in a melding of artistic vibrancy and Vegas showmanship. Instead, after what was, by most accounts, a convoluted selection process you can easily imagine being haunted by the ghost of William Maxwell’s Ground Zero, the result is mostly insipid. The two poles have almost no interplay, and fade into the street’s visual clutter—they’re the taxidermied remains of the process that created them: inert, with nothing to say or do. I could go on in this vein, but I’ll spare you.
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All of which, finally, is why I came to stand in this fricasseeing heat, regarding Dream Machine. Here’s the thing: I’ve been knocking around this valley for most of my life, five decades and counting, and the heavy press of those years has flattened my sense of place in a way that can’t be resolved by the hoopla of a new casino or the arrival of a sports team playing in a publicly funded stadium. (Those things work for some; not me.) Many days I experience this place as merely a blur of suburban strip-mall monotony. There are many remedies for this, of course, but, for me, art jabs the deepest. So here I am, seeing what Dream Machine has to say. Funded by Clark County, Dream Machine is, to my gimlet eye, one of those rare works to emerge from the thunderdome of group consensus-building with its magic largely intact. If it checks any boxes on a master-plan questionnaire, it’s not unctuous about it. I find the piece compelling on several fronts. Its organic lines simultaneously recall a mushroom, a dust devil, and the demonic technology behind an atomic cloud. There’s an unresolved tension between its long, slender stem and its top-heavy cap. Not to mention its directionality: is it rising from its mound, in a whorl of release? Or corkscrewing into the earth, gouging it? Poised between the red desert dirt at its base and the huge Nevada sky above, Dream Machine is as much a product of this place as I am, and, crucially, it does its thing out in the real world, where I live, rather than in the Tupperware seal of a gallery. Somehow the public context of that private exchange matters. As I collate these impressions, I find that Dream Machine’s layered effects offer an incipient sense of connection. Hard to pin down, as the best art is, but there’s definitely a pulse of something. So if the question is, can a work of public art somehow re-enchant my flagging sense of place, this is one of the few points in the valley where the answer starts to bend toward yes—for me. Then again, as the master plan might reply, feeling a little defensive at this point, Is that even a reasonable thing to ask public art to do? “It’s a really fascinating question,” says Loe, a land art expert who recently co-curated the exhibition Modern Desert Markings in UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. “Are people going to have epiphanies through public art? I would think that that could happen.” And I imagine that when it does, it’s mostly inadvertent and different for everyone— it’s hard to imagine “cathartic restoration of your bond with the valley” appearing on a list of goals. Still, before I get too full of myself, it’s worth noting that someone told Littlejohn that Dream Machine looks like “an upside-down bedpan,” so, really, what do I know? “If you’re coming up with an idea like that,” Littlejohn says with a laugh, “at least you’re looking at it.”
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If you walk around Dream Machine you’ll eventually see it against its other natural backdrop, the Strip, including the hallucinatory bulge of the Sphere. During my talk with Loe, she floated a spur-of-the-moment trial balloon: “Is the Sphere not only a work of architecture—is it a work of public art?” Whoa! Even though the idea cuts hard against everything I’ve just burbled about the primacy of individual artistic expression, I immediately felt a shiver of rising possibility. Let’s tease this out for a minute. I’m thinking of the structure’s huge blinking eye, 366 feet high and 516 feet around—freakish, authoritarian, and disquieting, but absolutely compelling. At once it literalizes the idea of surveillance, proposes a monstrously one-sided intimacy, alludes to the human soul, and weirds you out. “Batshit surrealism,” the poet Gregory Crosby called it on social media. “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all,” French poet and head surrealist André Breton declared, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find him quoted in the Sphere’s operating manual. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical of this thing, beginning with its unholy power use. And I’m sure it won’t be long before we see Jake from State Farm splashed across its many pixels. Capitalism’s gonna capitalism, after all. But as a feature of Las Vegas’ physical and mental landscape, with its eruptive visual capacity yoked to cutting-edge technology, scaled up to the size of our modern anxieties, and synced to 21st�century attention spans, it feels to me utterly alive to its time in a way I wonder if Acconci—who was deeply influenced by Robert Venturi, co-author of Learning from Las Vegas—might endorse. “Maybe that’s the best model of public art, something you can continually change,” Loe speculates. “The permutations are endless. They can do anything with it.” We’ll see. For now, I like to imagine the Sphere winking across the short distance to Dream Machine, game recognizing game, each representing a radically different path to a shared destination, where the antic ghost of Vito Acconci’s discarded cross is waiting.
SCOTT DICKENSHEETS Scott Dickensheets has been a journalist in Southern Nevada for 38 years, focusing on art and culture. He writes the daily Hey Las Vegas newsletter for City Cast Las Vegas. Before that he was features editor of the Las Vegas Review�Journal, deputy editor of Desert Companion, and editor-in-chief of Las Vegas CityLife and the Las Vegas Weekly. Dickensheets edited, co-edited, or contributed to eight volumes of the Las Vegas Writes book series; has contributed to publications as disparate as Playboy and The Nevada Historical Society Quarterly; and, in 2015, curated the Transient Landscapes exhibit for Nevada Humanities. He lives in Henderson.
GAUDYAND GORGEOUS
SARAH LOHMAN
THE EPHEMERAL ART OF THE ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT BUFFET
Public art is a long-overlooked aspect of the allyou-can eat Las Vegas casino buffet. The earliest mid-century buffets offered “garnishes” of swans carved from melons or gigantic ice sculptures. Today, decadent buffets like Bacchanal at Caesars Palace stage food displays that outdo the precision of any Dutch still life and desserts whose vibrant perfectionism evoke Wayne Thiebauld’s paintings. But is the traditional spectacle that accompanies the buffet merely a craft, or are the elaborate piles of crustaceans at Bacchanal as much a piece of public art as the Damien Hirst shark that glowers over the Unknown Bar at the Palms?
Art depicting food has been present in Southern Nevada likely as long as people have been living here; the local petroglyphs and pictographs depict herds of bighorn sheep, antelope, and important plants. Many of these drawings are 10,000 years old or more.
Left Postcard of the Chuck Wagon Buffet at the Flamingo Hotel, Las Vegas (Nev.), 1950s. Billie Mae Polson Photograph Collection. PH-00063. UNLV University Libraries Special Collections & Archives. Right Slide of the Chuckwagon buffet at the El Rancho Vegas, circa 1940s. L. F. Manis Photograph Collection. PH00100. UNLV University Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
Across the ocean and eight millennia later, still lifes, painted on the interior walls in homes of excavated Pompeii, date to 50 A.D. They depict delicate peaches, apples, lobsters, and game birds hanging to age. The Renaissance saw a shift from art depicting food to making art from food. A recipe from the first printed cookbook, De honesta voluptate et valetudine from 1475, explained how to serve a roast peacock, in its feathers, that breathed fire. Because of advancements in sugar refining and processing— largely in Persia and the Islamic Empire—sweet creations adorned the tables of the ultra-wealthy. According to Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500 �1800, a 2020 exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England, Renaissance tables featured “glittering displays of sweetmeats, preserves, ornamental marzipans, sugar sculptures, and culinary
jokes such as edible chess sets and playing cards.” In 18th- and 19th-century Europe, enormous sugar sculptures known as “subtleties” adorned banquet tables, shaped to evoke Roman ruins, romantic grottos, and other notable architecture from across the world. These historical subtleties were referenced by Kara Walker in her 2014 sculpture A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby installed in the slated-for-demolition Domino Sugar Refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In her piece, a 35-feet-tall and 75-feet-long sphinx with the face of a Black woman was encrusted in sugar; the piece was surrounded by melting “sugar baby” effigies of Black children. Walker reminded the viewer that the sugar both on Renaissance tables, and for most of the history of American sugar, was produced by the enslaved.
The multi-course banquets of the past were served à la française, meaning while there were multiple courses, each course contained both savory and sweet, everything from soup to confections, laid out symmetrically on the banquet tables on elaborate platters surrounded by subtleties. Perhaps the closest thing we have in modern America to this experience is the Las Vegas casino buffet. While “buffet” is a French term for a sideboard where food is placed before serving, the American idea of a buffet probably came from the Swedish smörgåsbord. The mode of dining began in the 16th century as a brännvinsbord, a table of finger foods that welcomed guests to a feast. In the early 1700s, it became a trendy meal on its own, a table spread with hot and cold dishes like herring, lox, cold cuts, and sweets, that required multiple trips to enjoy the many offerings. The smorgasbord first saw international attention at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, but hit America at the 1939 World’s
Bacchanal Buffet, Caesars Palace, Las Vegas. Photo by Becca Schwartz.
Fair in New York City. Many foods in American history have become national sensations after their appearance at a World’s Fair, and the Swedish Pavillion’s traditional smorgasbord was no exception. Buffets arrived in Las Vegas shortly after their World’s Fair debut. The first casino founded on the Strip also had the first buffet. The El Rancho opened its doors in 1941, and launched the “Buckaroo Buffet” in 1946 (the innovation has been attributed to employee Herb McDonald). The all�you�can�eat buffet cost $1. Early casino resorts, like the El Rancho and the Last Frontier, had a Wild West theme, and often called their buffets “chuck wagons,” after the mobile mess halls that followed cowboys on roundups. According to Gourmet’s Gamble, a 1962 guide to Las Vegas with accompanying recipes:
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“Since the hotels are open 24 hours a day, with gambling going on continuously, all have chuck wagons which serve a delectable spread at midnight. Many of them have buffet fare until the wee hours of the morning … The typical chuck wagon display consists of a waiter dressed in a chef's uniform with a high, white hat, serving from a vast choice of items including lobster in aspic, shrimp, remoulade, Danish ham, fine cheeses, salads, fried chicken, roast beef, curries, stews, all forms of vegetables, potatoes, and dessert. This abundant spread is conveniently located close to the casino, so you can eat and run back to your wagering.” The Flamingo, which opened in 1946, was the first casino to add “a new level of sophistication to the Las Vegas resort experience,” according to historian
Geoff Schumacher, author of Sun, Sin & Suburbia: An Essential History of Modern Las Vegas. The resort focused on attracting a glamorous clientele from Hollywood. In a 1950s postcard promoting the Flamingo’s “Fantastic ‘Chuck Wagon’ Midnight Buffet,” a tuxedo-wearing man gestures excitedly to the laden table, as if to say “look at all this food!” to his delighted wife. A chef in whites is ready to serve them. But on theme for the Flamingo, the spread consists of only pink and white foods, with garnishes of green: piles of marbled slices of ham, rolls of lunch meat, creamy seafood salads, peeled tomatoes, and crustaceans. In the center, a 2� to 3�foot�high cave made of molded, shaved ice cools piles of shrimp and creamy dip. The cavern is topped by a pink and white effigy of the casino’s namesake. Several contemporary artists have dabbled in monochromatic meal art: a 1998 photo series by Sophie Calle called The Chromatic Diet documented her daily eating ritual of same-shaded foods. Her pink Saturday meal included ham, strawberry ice cream, and rosé. Brooklyn artist Jen Monroe hosted monochromatic meals in 2015, including a meal of “briny shrimp mousse in Barbie�pink, beet�stained deviled eggs.”1 Either meal would have been at home at the Flamingo chuck wagon. In the 1960s, buffet displays got even more elaborate. The Sunday Brunch at the Sands invited guests to walk “the ‘Miracle Mile’ of gourmet goodies, hot and cold, endless varieties.” In an advertisement, chefs stand at attention behind a long table filled with silver platters and tureens, and one gigantic swan carved from ice. A buffet at the Desert Inn 1
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/t-magazine/food-as-art.html
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sports similarly enormous, if harder to identify, ice sculptures. One appears to be two cacti flanking a mesa, the other a smiling, disembodied head. A private party buffet at The Dunes had two�foot�high people made from melons and carved eggplant. In his 1966 novel The Muses of Ruin, William Pearson wrote of the Vegas buffet: ”We marvel at the Great Pyramids, but they were built over decades; the midnight buffet is built daily.” Pearson’s quote speaks to the ephemeral nature of buffets and the carved ice or produce adornments that accompanied them. Only intended to last for the few hours of an evening’s service, the sculptures will melt and wilt, as will the food. All are ultimately destined for the dump (or for a brief time, the pig farm) before being recreated again the next night. The same year Pearson commented on the ephemeral Vegas buffet, Yoko Ono placed an apple on a podium. Over time, the apple rotted. The apple could be replaced and the process begun again, but the original piece could not be kept or sold like traditional gallery art. Part of buffet presentation is about the constant recreation of the moment the apple hit the podium. You will never see rot at a buffet; the food whisked away and replaced before it can even look dry. The buffet�goer, as a participant, eats away at the presentation; the hotel pans slowly give up their contents. In the 1990s, artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres created deeply sad and resonant sculptures like “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), a 175-pound pile of wrapped hard candy that gallery visitors were encouraged to eat, one at a time, mimicking AIDS slowly eating away at the physical body of his partner. But buffet food never reaches the point of disappearance. Constantly replenished, we are assured of eternal abundance and immortality.
While food is often presented as a skill or a craft, it’s sometimes laughed at when it dares to cross into art, in large part because of the ephemeral quality that dares not to be commodified.
While food is often presented as a skill or a craft, it’s sometimes laughed at when it dares to cross into art, in large part because of the ephemeral quality that dares not to be commodified. French pastry chef and ice carver Gabriel Paillasson sought to elevate his art by publishing a collection of his work in 1991 under the title Art éphémère. Although Paillasson declared an ice sculpture revival, the elaborate buffet decorations have disappeared from displays in the last twenty years. Perhaps a more educated public is sensitive to waste. A buffet is always wasteful, but the obvious food waste in swans created from melon or a “kale waterfall” (as a friend once described a display at the Green Valley Ranch buffet) is too offensive. While it’s rare to spot an ice sculpture nowadays—although ice luges are making a comeback—today it’s the displays of food,
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“laid out with reverent artistry,” to borrow a phrase from Pearson’s 1966 novel, that aim to impress. When the Bacchanal restaurant first opened in the 1960s, diners were allegedly “fed grapes and given massages by beautiful servers,” according to Schumacher. A piece of over-the-top performance art, but the contemporary displays in the Bacchanal Buffet equally invoke indulgence and excess. The current Bacchanal Buffet opened in 2017, cost $17 million to build, and features over 250 food options including an Asian station with Korean and Filipino offerings, and a separate sushi bar. But it’s the display of seafood that is particularly extravagant, and strategically situated so that it transverses the threshold between the casino and inside of the buffet, visible to any passerby. The dining hall’s most desirable food invites you to cross over: whole lobsters, brilliantly red, slump over mountains of crushed ice, their enormous claws—bigger than a human hand—just touching the display glass. Whole fish are in the next case, their surfaces perfectly spotlighted to bring out their liquid silver scales. St. James’ scallops are arranged like jewelry next to a mosaic of conch, snails, and seaweed. Pamela Thomas-Graham’s analysis of Thiebaud’s bakery cases for Dandelion Chandelier gives the arrangement context: “the depiction of food and consumer goods behind shop windows or cases makes them both simultaneously omnipresent and completely out of reach. Tempting but ultimately unsatisfying, (the piece) juxtaposes the ideas of abundance and scarcity.” Part of the thrill of the buffet is spectating, whether you’re peering over a partition from the outside to catch alluring glimpses of the carving station, or peeking at your dining partner’s plate and judging their selections. Eat Art artist Daniel Spoerri once choreographed a dinner party in which the diners were separated “into two groups placed at opposite ends of a long banquet table,” according to Sleek magazine. “Throughout the evening, he had waiters serve tiny portions of haute cuisine to the first half of the table, while the second half had to help themselves to simple food such as bread and stew. Members of the first group deemed themselves lucky, but throughout the evening they grew increasingly unsatisfied with the small portions that left them hungry and began to long for their opposite's food that, although simple, turned out to be surprisingly delicious.” But at a buffet, the diner can have both the stew and as many tiny servings of haute cuisine as they like. As Chris Rauschnot wrote in the Huffington Post, the scale of Bacchanal allows a diner to “sin efficiently.” A new buffet hasn’t opened on the Strip since Bacchanal, and even it was a revamp of the space that formerly held Cafe Lago Buffet. The 2020 pandemic
expedited the permanent closure of many buffets, but it wasn't the cause of it. Like most massive cultural shifts in America, it’s Millennials that are driving the closure of the classic Vegas buffet. According to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, “Millennials— those born between 1981 and 1996—made up 48% of the visitors in 2022.” Since there are now many places to gamble legally across the country, Millennials come to Vegas to do a “fun thing” and drink while doing it. Vegas moguls that want to target a younger generation have shrunk their casino floors and focused on alcohol sales in places like night clubs and day clubs, shows and concerts, national sporting events, even in art spaces like Meow Wolf’s Omega Mart, an installation of a fictional supermarket that exits into a cocktail bar that serves whimsical smoking drinks. Buffets were always a financial loss to casinos, designed to keep gamblers on the floor, so many have been scrapped for food halls, with on-trend venues often recruited from foodie centers across the country—from Nashville’s Hattie B’s Hot Chicken to Portland’s Shalom Ya’ll’s vegan Mediterranean cuisine.
Photograph of a chef and hotel staff at the Desert Inn's first anniversary party, Las Vegas, Nevada, April 1951. Toni and Wilbur Clark Photographs. PH-00302. UNLV University Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
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But 10,000 years after those first artists scratched antelope into stone, Southern Nevada artists still depict food. Vegas-based artist Justin Favela often “camps the consumable” by creating massive food sculptures using colorful piñata paper. In 2013, Favela created Celebration, for the Las Vegas City Hall, “a McRib sandwich resting in a piñata manger.” Meow Wolf commissioned depictions of the Seven Deadly Sins in 2021; gluttony is foodlike, a sort of dripping hamburger ball or a glittering meatball shibaried in spaghetti. It’s like a post-perfect buffet, the careful presentation masticated and rolling around in our stomachs.
SARAH LOHMAN Sarah Lohman is a culinary historian and the author of the bestselling book Eight Flavors: The Untold Story of American Cuisine. She focuses on the history of food as a way to access the stories of diverse Americans. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and NPR. Her current book project, Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods will be released with W.W. Norton & Co. on October 24, 2023. Lohman is currently based out of Las Vegas, Nevada.
Favela’s work often showcases beloved but overlooked culinary contributions. As gaudy as it is gorgeous, Favela’s aesthetic feels grounded in what makes Vegas … Vegas. Las Vegas buffets are a beloved, overlooked, gaudy and gorgeous part of Southern Nevada’s public art scene. We can admire a monochromatic pink feast, or a mound of perfect lobster, for free from afar. But if we desire to participate, we must present our bought and paid for dining ticket for entry. Vegas can commodify anything.
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PUBLIC ART A POSSIBILITY, NOT A PANACEA
public
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1. of, relating to, or affecting a population or a community as a whole 2. done, made, acting, etc., for the community as a whole
CHASE MCCURDY
art
1. the quality, production, expression, or realm of things that conform to accepted aesthetic principles of beauty, show imagination and skill, and have more than ordinary meaning and importance [from dictionary.com]
Public art is appreciated. Public art is loved. Public art can be large, small, abstract, representational, words, objects, on the ground, in the sky, or on a building. The linking thread is the possibility, the potential for public art to do many things. While this is most definitely the case, we must also be aware that public art is not necessarily an end in and of itself. Having worked in and around public art for the better part of the last five years, I believe deeply in the possibilities. Yet I maintain a very critical eye toward the using of public art as a band-aid or some sort of pacifier of community. I believe it is important for those of us engaged in the creation of the arts to be lovingly critical of public art in its various uses. The personal art practice is sacred and ultimately the business of the artist up until the point of exhibition, if one chooses to exhibit. Public art by its very nature is the complete opposite. It is expressly intended for the general public and to serve such purpose from inception. This purpose can be considered minimalist and intimate, or aspirational and maximalist—it is often the second set of idealized purposes where we need to maintain a critical eye. Proponents of public art often believe that these works, from murals to sculptures, will in some way inspire and change communities. While this is a generous intention, we have to be careful not to romanticize this idea, as public art can easily do the opposite. It can alienate the community. It can serve as a sign of coming gentrification, or it can serve to agitate the very people it means to honor. We must do our very best to properly use those resources, whether public or private, that we are entrusted with to create artworks expressly meant for others.
I maintain a very critical eye toward the using of public art as a band-aid … I believe it is important for those of us engaged in the creation of the arts to be lovingly critical of public art in its various uses.
QUESTIONS TO ASK ONESELF AS A PUBLIC ARTIST How will the space around the intended artwork be used?
Does the artwork initiate/invite coming together? group discussion? ritual?
Are you using public funds or private funds?
“Private” property or public property?
Do you as the artist have a historical and cultural understanding of the community the public art is intended to serve?
Is the intent of the public art to inform/teach, entertain, capture attention, memorialize, etc? Large or small? Why/why not?
Is it about “art” or something deeper?
Have you considered the perspectives of the funder(s) and potential viewers?
Before public art there were monuments honored and revered by various peoples through various times. Long before humans felt the need to create the external idea of “art,” we encountered and documented in clay, rock, charcoal, etc., the natural phenomena on our earth and in the visible cosmos that have served to inspire, teach, excite and ground. Mountains and their personalities, water, fire, plant and animal life (extra large to minuscule), the stars in the sky all provide moments of awe, respect, and humility. Times have changed, but we remain the same. Natural marvels have been replaced by those manmade. We still marvel nonetheless. Our current epoch is one identified by a search for meaning, search for purpose, and a search for the real. The plastic and performative arts, in our modern society, are one of the last spaces that an overwhelmingly apathetic public come to for answers to these questions of meaning, purpose, and the real. Public art is where our nature-based notions of marvel and modern-informed ideas of questioning come together with the hope of affecting the general public in some positive fashion. From large-scale works that command big budgets to small-scale projects that require the minimum resources to execute, when a work of writing, sculpture, painting, drawing, performance, dance, audio/video, or photo is introduced to the public sphere for general and sometimes passive interaction, we have engaged in what we consider to be public art. Much like the artist in the studio, when one is acting of one’s own accord there are no rules to what one is choosing to create, outside of the laws of the state of course. Interactions with authorities
Chase R. McCurdy, Living Black Pillars, 2021. Historic Westside Legacy Park. Photo by Chase R. McCurdy.
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notwithstanding, the public artist using stickers, stencils, pens, spray paint, wheat paste, etc., has no rules and in many ways no responsibility to any sanctioning or commissioning body. These works can be as simple as an individual’s name, a group name, or a deep message leading to potentially controversial interactions—really such works are free to be anything the creator chooses, but whatever they are, public art works are designed to capture attention, if just for a moment. It is ultimately up to the artist what kind of message they choose to transmit. Conversely, the artist hired by an individual or an institution to create a work on their behalf is not able to create like the artist in the studio. Even in those few and fortunate situations where an artist is hired and also given complete creative freedom, they are still forced to consider the hiring institution and their values in their concept development. As quickly as something is given it can be just as quickly taken away. Public art is a responsibility.
Public art for the sanctioned and trusted artist is an honor and responsibility, it is also a relationship. There are countless individuals who would jump at a chance to create for a guaranteed audience and on a larger-than-life scale. To be the artist(s) selected for such opportunities is a gift of the highest regard, which signals that one is both seen and supported as an artist in their community. I find it imperative as the artist to do one’s absolute best to create thoughtful, sincere, and original work to enter into the public sphere of our shared society. The public artist has the ability to change perception, to suspend reality, and to speak directly to countless strangers. For this reason we must not be flippant with the works we submit, willingly and unwillingly, to our fellow human beings who just might interact with what we have done. For just as the Internet is full of various kinds of content with countless effects on the human psyche, from the hugely positive to the extremely negative, public art can be amazingly beneficial or overwhelmingly harmful.
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Additionally the public artist must be aware of, and sensitive to, the economic realities of our society, while maintaining a deep awareness and concern for our natural environment and the potential effects of public art. From the economic perspective, the artist must be very aware of who they are making artwork for and where they are creating it. Good intentions aside, there is always the possibility of being tasteless and insulting everyday people by not sufficiently consulting the communities intended for public artworks. Spending exorbitant amounts of money on large-scale public art in financially oppressed communities, especially public art that is not culturally relevant, would be a slap in the face, and any and all goodwill intended by the project would be for naught. Similarly, graffiti-style public artworks could be an affront to middle- and upper-middle-class suburbanites. We are currently living through real and felt change in our natural environment. To be environmentally conscious is not only to consider carbon emissions, water waste, and our meat-heavy diets, but it is to consider nature in EVERYTHING that we do. It is our job as artists, and especially as public artists, to consider the impacts of the projects we are working on, to not be wasteful in our application of resources. Every drop of paint, every brush used, every bit of metal, every can of spray paint and every scrap of wood is created by taking something precious from our earth. We must carry the recognition that we as humans are not forced to take from earth and create what we want/need, we must understand that there is always a choice, and in that understanding we must be the best and most caring stewards possible for that which we take so that we may create. I try not to speak at my fellow artists. I do my best to speak with you and from a space of understanding, for the preceding words are born from experience and deep personal consideration. I have gone from a self-taught artist with no concept of capital�A “Art,” to a mature practicing artist with five years of experience in and around public art. From my experience serving on the Clark County Art Committee, to being the creator of large-scale public artworks in the community I most care for (a community that needs much more than just public art), I have felt every emotion one can when it comes to public art. I only ask that you consider as much as possible when using natural resources to create works of art that exist far beyond any of our individual names (and egos). Public art is possibility. It is ultimately the responsibility of the artist to fulfill that possibility. To create something that affirms, that communicates, that startles, that inspires, that informs, that challenges, that speaks to our humanity. The responsibility is the fun part. As shared above, my experience as an artist working in the public sphere has been a seemingly contradictory one of immense joy and simultaneous heavy burden, and I could not ask for a greater gift.
Chase R. McCurdy, Living Black Pillars, 2021. Historic Westside Legacy Park. Photo by Luis Soto Jr.
CHASE MCCURDY Chase R. McCurdy is a multidisciplinary artist proudly born and raised in Las Vegas, NV. His practice utilizes various media including photography/filmmaking, painting, sculpture, and the written word. McCurdy has exhibited works in both private and public institutions in the United States and abroad, with notable Las Vegas solo exhibitions at the West Las Vegas Library, Left of Center Art Gallery and UNLV's Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. Additionally, he is the founder and operator of ThirtyThree Gallery (33.G) in the [Historic] Westside neighborhood of Las Vegas where he maintains an active studio practice.
HAVEYOUSEEN THISYET?
DR. LAURENS TAN
Risk-taking prevails in all walks of life and business. Calculated or intuited on likely outcomes—some decisions involve bigger stakes than others. Few real decisions manage not to involve a gamble. In business and in design, risk is a vital ingredient for progress. The action of not seizing an opportunity ends up equating to a loss, i.e. one takes a risk by not taking a risk.1 1
Public art is intended to communicate to the local community, or it may address a much larger audience. That essential function is not a simple one— does it aim to raise awareness, can it offend? Is it, or does it become, irrelevant? A contemporary Tan, Laurens, The Architecture of Risk, University of theme or idea may Technology Sydney, 2005 have a shelf life, or perhaps the idea may not be relevant until years later. Perhaps it is a marker of time. Like songs and movies, some works can become classics. A vision may be seen as timeless or ahead of its time—but by whom? I was first fascinated by Las Vegas back in 1995, when the late Felicia Campbell (Professor, Department of English, UNLV) invited me to experience the city after she heard my talk on souvenir design at a conference in Montreal presented by the University of Nevada, Reno.2 So, taken by the ubiquity of the Silver City, I soon changed my thesis to The Architecture of Risk (1997�2005), basing my research in Vegas.
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At that time I was beginning to focus on large public-facing artworks, so the image of Las Vegas and the idea of public art are close together in my mind. I’ve lived and worked as an artist and educator in Australia and the US as well as Beijing, where I lease a studio. My public works range from permanent sculptures such as Hellbent, which has been on display at the Burwood campus of Melbourne’s Deakin University since 2018, to temporary installations like my inflatable Three Wise Monkeys, designed for the City of Sydney’s Lunar New Year celebrations in 2016. After practicing successfully on three different continents, I think my views on public art are blessed with the benefit of a well-traveled hindsight and working experience.3 2 Tan, Laurens, The Mass-Customization of Cultural Identity, University of Technology Sydney, 1995
3 In 1995, I won a major public commission for the Capitol Theatre in Sydney: Octogene. Also in 1995 I was invited to construct a large video installation, …well, the image is one thing… which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in an exhibition curated by Wendy McDaris (University of Memphis). Hellbent (2005) was a finalist in Australia’s McClelland National Sculpture Award. As Weeks Go By, another work from the same year, was a finalist in the Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award.
One of the most successful public artworks I know is Sir Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate in Millennium Park, Chicago. It is a perfect example of how an artist’s vision and background can capably manage sculptural material in such a way as to create a universal and iconic voice. The work is based on liquid mercury. I can’t now imagine Chicago without Kapoor’s “Bean,” as it’s fondly called. Perhaps in a different way, I can’t picture New York without Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, or Paris without the Eiffel Tower, or (in architecture) Bilbao without Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, or Beijing without Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV Headquarters. (Which leads me to the point that architecture and larger public sculpture are very close cousins and both are indeed capable of spelling out a city’s iconography or making a significant stride towards it.) All of these works were put in place by cities that were able to commit money and time to the project. They were also able to hire the best people and thoughtfully consider the matter of where the sculpture should be placed. The Bean is a wonderful work of art in itself, but the placement, scale, and budget are important supports for such success. Decades of significant work by Kapoor led to Chicago awarding him this major public work, and at $28 million it’s considered to be money well spent. Their willingness to treat the commission seriously has been well rewarded. Of course there aren’t any comparably funded public sculptures in Las Vegas—the results reflect vast differences as, by comparison, projects here suffer from lackluster funding, downscaling, or awkward placement. The successes or failures of our sculptural artworks ultimately lead to bigger questions about the local art scene. Recent open calls for public sculpture indicate that Vegas is open to new work in parks and streetscapes, but the funding often makes for difficult economics. Apart from the key cost of design and fabrication, artists have to bear the cost of traffic management during installation, and other administration and liability insurance. By the end of the process they may (typically) discover In 2006, I was awarded an Australia-China Council residency in Beijing. Two other awards followed and before long I was convinced that living and working in Beijing had a real significance for my work. Since then I have moved my practice between China, Las Vegas, and Australia, while my large-scale installations and sculptures continue to flourish with curated exhibitions and commissioned works in major hotels and museums.
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that they have been working for nothing because most of their fee has gone to the fabricators.
in the round, illustrating that sculptures occasionally would benefit from a review of their location.
Compare this to the open calls for Sydney’s Chinese Lunar Festival, where the chosen artist is paid a designer’s fee and the search for fabrication contractors is handled separately by the City Council, whose staff is versed in cost and safety requirements.
• Miguel Rodriguez’s Jaguar (2016), McLeod Drive, opposite the Winchester Dondero Cultural Center. A folkloric figurative work which similarly suffers from a lack of viewing height and an underwhelming location.
I have listed the following recent public sculptures in Las Vegas as examples. • Luis Varela-Rico’s Radial Symmetry (2018), Main Street and Commerce Street, Downtown. Made of repeated steel forms, the geometric sculpture references two baskets by the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, the original inhabitants of the region. This visually striking work directs us to the relationship between mathematics and nature. Varela-Rico is a unique sculptor as he fabricates and designs his work using computer graphics linked to heavy mechanical engineering equipment.
Left Luis Valera-Rico, Radial Symmetry, 2018. Main St. and Commerce St., Las Vegas. Photo by Becca Schwartz. Right Wayne Littlejohn, Dream Machine, 2016. Siegfried & Roy Park, Las Vegas. Photo by Becca Schwartz.
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• Wayne Littlejohn’s Dream Machine (2016), Siegfried & Roy Park; described by the artist as “…some mysterious atomic love child of dust devils and drones.” It has an imposing presence as its bold design towers above its airport surroundings. The entire 26-foot sculpture was fabricated out of state. • Adolfo Gonzalez’s OctoSteam (2016) along the Pecos-McLeod Interconnect, is a complex work of fantasy concocting a historic sci-fi. In its current location it can’t be appreciated as traffic drives by too fast. This work needs to be relocated to a park or grounds where viewers can see it up-close and
• Jesse Carson Smigel’s Snowball in Vegas (2014), First Street and Coolidge Avenue, Downtown—its better location and scale makes for easy viewing and appreciation by pedestrians and slow-moving traffic alike.
Tourists want a different kind of authenticity—one that’s more dramatic and more animated. The tourist seeks an experience different and distant from home, and doesn’t mind if it’s constructed.4 Las Vegas has become a large metropolis and unlike other cities its existence is almost exclusively funded by tourism dollars, arguably a blessing in many ways. Its growth has been nothing short of astounding. But the true heart of “Vegas Art” has conversely suffered as it is left behind in the wake of the multibillion-dollar entertainment sector. This is exemplified by the Sphere, a newcomer in the arena. At $2.3 billion, we are able to experience animations projected at a great height and scale—a world first and a unique spectacle. 4 Dean MacCannell in “The Last Resort.” The Tourist, BBC, 1996, radio series.
Art has not had it easy in this city of almost three million, as witnessed by the offhanded closure of key museums—the Guggenheim designed by Koolhaas (2001� 08), and the Las Vegas Art Museum (1997�2009)—now part of the Sahara West Library. Many privately owned contemporary galleries have also closed—Dust (2003 � 08), Trifecta (2004 �10), and others. Michelle Quinn, a significant local art world figure who founded MCQ Fine Art, is currently an art advisor without a gallery. There are galleries operating now that are finding it difficult to be adventurous because the marketplace looks to New York and Los Angeles for serious art. We are constantly aware of the difference between public and private spending on art. The amount the casinos spend is vastly different to what we see elsewhere. The big money in local public art is still confined to the Strip—big projects and large sums of money are sprinkled through the casinos, signposted with famous names: Daniel Libeskind, Damien Hirst,
Miguel Rodriguez, Jaguar, 2016. 3130 McLeod Drive, Las Vegas. Photo by Becca Schwartz.
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Maya Lin, Nancy Rubins, Jeff Koons. Gamblers and tourists are surrounded by a symphony of images and merchandise in a staged fantasy environment, and art is part of this fantasy. As distinct consumer groups, their environments are designed to attract them, keep them there, or keep them coming back for more. The casinos see this expenditure as an investment— the artworks are marketing tools and often they are later sold at a profit. There is no need to reinvent what is already proven a success elsewhere. In conclusion, public sculpture can add considerably to the stature of Las Vegas. We can cultivate a contextual identity that would complement this city’s ubiquitous façade. I’m sure no one would disagree that our overriding aim should be to advance the role and quality of public sculpture in the wider Las Vegas community and to foster design development by local artists and infrastructure alike. It’s the way forward, achieved through strategic and supportive funding for future public sculpture projects.
DR. LAURENS TAN Laurens Tan is an Australian curator, educator, sculptor, and transdisciplinary artist. His work links sculpture, architectural and animated narrative space, graphics, industrial design, video and music. He has a Doctor of Creative Arts in Communications and Media from the University of Technology Sydney. Tan’s work has been exhibited at institutions around the world, including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Iberia Center of Contemporary Art, Today Art Museum, the National Gallery of Australia. He has been an artist-in-residence in China, Australia, Canada, and France.
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The presence of art is critically important to creating a livable community �Councilwoman Nancy Brune
ATALEOFTWO ARTCITIES The City of Henderson is currently in the final stage of approving its Arts and Culture Master Plan. At the same time, a Public Art Master Plan is starting to take shape within the City of Las Vegas. Southern Nevada is experiencing a policy renaissance in terms of its public art programming. What is being decided now will have a lasting impact on the region’s future, and not only in the arts.
So what is public art? What is a public art master plan? And how would this benefit residents? For some insight, I talked with Dr. Nancy Brune, Las Vegas Ward 6 Councilwoman, and Brian Kendall, Parks and Recreation Manager for the City of Henderson. INTERVIEW WITH NANCY BRUNE SC: For those readers who are not familiar with you and your platform, please share with us a little of your background, interests, and why you are a supporter of the arts. NB: Artistic expression is a critical component of overall well-being. Even though I have no talent, I welcome those (rare) opportunities to just throw up a blank canvas on a Friday night and spend a magical evening painting with my husband and tapping into my creative neurons. I grew up playing the piano and we have supported our kids’ musical journeys with several instruments. Just as artistic expression is important for one’s personal well-being, it is also important to a community’s health and well-being. Art is linked to increased neighborhood livability, community identity, and social well-being. The presence of art can help foster connection and inclusion. Arts participants are more than twice as likely to volunteer in their communities. I am committed to creating a community that residents want to work, play, recreate, and raise their families in. The presence of art is critically important to creating a livable community. SC: How do you define “public art”? NB: Public art is art produced by artists (who are, hopefully, local to the community) that reflects the reality of the community and its history, celebrates the community, and invites reaction, conversation, and even participation. It is also displayed in areas that are accessible to the public.
SAPIRA CHEUK
SC: What are your hopes and dreams for the Public Art Master Plan that is currently taking shape for the City of Las Vegas? NB: I am hopeful that the Public Art Master Plan will: (a) acknowledge and celebrate the distinct cultures and histories across the city (e.g., East Las Vegas is very distinct from Northwest Las Vegas) while simultaneously finding ways to curate pieces that bring us together and honor our shared humanity; (b) prioritize and support local artists; (c) include a wide range of mediums, including those that invite public participation; (d) think creatively about ways to bring public art to nontraditional spaces (like utility boxes); and (e) identify new and creative partnerships that can help introduce public art in nontraditional ways. SC: Is there any benefit for a city to adopt a Public Art Master Plan, rather than, for example, more arts funding? NB: A Public Art Master Plan creates a framework to justify and inform arts funding. A Public Art Master Plan can identify the “need” that advocates can reference to ask for more public arts funding. It creates the “why” behind the request for (additional) public arts funding. SC: What would you say to those who don't believe public dollars should be spent on the arts? NB: Again, the presence of the arts is critical to creating social well-being and neighborhood livability. Research has found that in neighborhoods with limited economic resources, engagement with arts and culture can create social capital that exerts a strong, positive effect on well-being. For example, one study found that “low-income neighborhoods with cultural resources have 14% fewer cases of child abuse and neglect, and 18% less serious crime than low-income neighborhoods without cultural resources” (Source: Culture and Social Wellbeing in New York City, 2017). And “concentrated cultural districts are associated with reduced poverty without neighborhood displacement, improved child welfare, and lower morbidity” (Source: CultureBlocks Philadelphia, 2013). In short, there are real economic benefits from investing in the arts!
Master plans can support our creative economy by securing lasting investments in artists SC: What role do you see your office playing in the larger process of creating a Public Art Master Plan? NB: As a supporter of the arts, I will encourage residents to participate in the Public Art Master Plan survey. I will also continue to advocate for arts funding. I am committed to exploring ways to bring additional arts programming space (e.g., gallery space, performance space, etc.) to the City so that we can implement the Public Art Master Plan. SC: How can residents get involved? NB: The City of Las Vegas is committed to ensuring residents can share their ideas and input. The City already held two public workshops in June. Residents can email input to: info@artbuildscommunity.com. And they can sign up for the e-newsletter to stay informed here: https://public.govdelivery.com/accounts/NVLASVEGAS/ subscriber/new?topic_id=NVLASVEGAS_146 INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN KENDALL SC: In a short paragraph, could you summarize the current iteration of the Henderson Arts and Culture Master Plan? BK: We envision this plan to be a roadmap that identifies our current arts strategies and efforts and what we need to bring to our residents. Over the past three years, we’ve spent a lot of time hearing from different groups, conducting resident surveys and holding stakeholder meetings to determine how to best implement this plan. At our core, we want to elevate arts and culture within our community. We are grateful that City leadership has recognized the need to do so as well.
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SC: How will the residents of Henderson (and beyond) benefit from having an Arts and Culture Master Plan? BK: The residents helped create this plan. Their input helped drive our decision-making, and we think putting public art into the community can only be a benefit for those living in it. Art for art’s sake can be its own reward, but we also believe promotion of the arts helps create a more well-rounded, diverse community. Our plan doesn’t mean anything if we don’t have a willing and eager community in which to implement it, and we’re grateful to all those who came out to give us their feedback. SC: Could you provide some highlights that are included in the current iteration? BK: We've added about 50 pieces of public art into our community throughout the last two and a half years. That includes murals, sculptures, you name it. We identified public art as an area we could really put our mark on, and I’m so proud of the work we’ve already done boosting the library of public art on display throughout the City. We’re bringing art to where people are. They can enjoy it at their local park, strolling down Water Street, etc. This works towards enhancing the quality of life for everyone in Henderson, which ultimately is the City's overall mission. SC: What are you personally most excited about in this plan? BK: Where do I even start? I am thrilled about the idea of embedding arts further into our community. Every pocket of the City can have more displays of art in whatever form that may take, and this plan details steps for how to make that happen. Arts celebrate culture, they celebrate our diversity, and this is a big step in making the arts as accessible and affordable as possible for everyone in Henderson.
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SC: What were some of the challenges or gaps with the arts and cultural programming at the City of Henderson that could be improved with the approval and implementation of this plan? Why is a Master Plan necessary, rather than, for example, more arts funding? BK: This community continues to develop, currently on its way to becoming Southern Nevada’s second-largest city. Some may see that as a challenge, but I view this as an opportunity. Now, we have more people to expose the arts to and additional public space to display different forms of arts and culture. As we continue to grow, it’s important to have this Master Plan as a sort of north star to guide our decisionmaking and to refer back to whenever we find gaps or areas primed for improvement. SC: If this plan is approved, what are some of the first projects or initiatives your office plans to implement? BK: I mentioned earlier about the work we’ve done in the sphere of public art displays, but arts and culture are about so much more than that. Everyone in the City should have easy access to a community gathering place so the performing arts have their time to shine. Same with community festivals. We want to help build a vibrant arts scene in what is truly a blossoming cultural hub in Nevada. This Master Plan will go a long way in achieving that goal.
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SC: Are there any additional stories, remarks, statistics, or information that you would like to share with the audience? BK: I’m just so excited to have this Master Plan approved and implemented. This has been years in the making with countless hours of hard work by too many people to name. Arts and culture are becoming the heart of who we are as a city, and now we’ll be able to put that on display for all to see.
A public art master plan can help municipalities to identify the needs and voices of the community and provide a roadmap for arts programming. But these plans also help secure funding for longer-term arts development in order to build sustainable public art infrastructure. With a thoughtful and supportive infrastructure in place, artists and community members can enjoy more than beautiful murals in their neighborhoods. Master plans can support our creative economy by securing lasting investments in artists, and improve the health and well-being of residents with free or low-cost art programs. Some would argue a new sports stadium can also provide similar economic value and entertainment for Southern Nevadans. This thinking may explain why so much recent investment and public interest has gone into planning for new sports arenas. Still, I wonder, with one of the major employers being arts and entertainment, shouldn’t planning for the future of our art also be a priority? These are the personal opinions of Sapira Cheuk and not the views of her employer.
SAPIRA CHEUK
Left The Oxide Studio, Magnesium Maggie, 2023. Proctor Judicial Park, Henderson. Photo by Becca Schwartz. Right Jesse Smigel, Snowball in Vegas, 2014. 1st St. and Coolidge Ave., Las Vegas. Photo by Becca Schwartz.
Sapira Cheuk is an ink painter and installation artist. Born in Hong Kong and based in Las Vegas, NV, she often utilizes a blend of sumi and india ink, symbolizing the mixture of her identities. Cheuk has exhibited in numerous institutions, including the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Masur Museum of Art, Neutra, The Center for Contemporary Arts (Abilene, TX), Yellowstone Art Museum, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Cheuk works for the Nevada Arts Council, serves as the Art Editor for the museum of americana, and teaches at the College of Southern Nevada. She received her BA at University of California, Riverside and MFA from California State University, San Bernardino.
Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 4505 S. Maryland Pkwy. Box 4012, Las Vegas, NV 89154 www.unlv.edu/barrickmuseum 702-895-3381 EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Alisha Kerlin EDITOR D.K. Sole GUEST EDITOR Jennifer Kleven COPY EDITOR Michael Freborg, Andrea Noonoo, and Summer Thompson CREATIVE DIRECTOR Chloe J. Bernardo PHOTOGRAPHER Becca Schwartz Published by www.PRINTNEWSPAPER.com, Paris, France. Copyright © 2023 Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Dry Heat. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact barrick.museum@unlv.edu.
The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art supports smart, passionate art writing from Southern Nevada and beyond. Dry Heat is a platform where we can share artist interviews, essays about art that matters, and more. You can find us on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
1 1 The Oxide Studio, Magnesium Maggie, 2023. Proctor Judicial Park, Henderson 2 Wayne Littlejohn, Dream Machine, 2016. Siegfried & Roy Park. 3 Miguel Rodriguez, Jaguar, 2016. 3130 McLeod Drive, Las Vegas. 4 Jesse Smigel, Snowball in Vegas (detail), 2014. 1st St. and Coolidge Ave., Las Vegas. 5 Luis Valera-Rico, Radial Symmetry, 2018. Main St. and Commerce St., Las Vegas. Photos by Becca Schwartz.
This publication was funded in part by Nancy J. Uscher, Dean of the College of Fine Arts. This program is funded in part with support from Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS
