I moved to Las Vegas in the fall of 1992 to become the Director of Development for what was then called the Lied Discovery Children’s Museum. Knowing literally no one in town, it was an excellent place from which to intersect with many levels of leaders and cultural workers throughout the community and state. The skills in my carpetbag included being whip-smart, funny, and one hell of a grant writer. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but one day I got a call from William L. Fox, the then-Director of the Nevada Arts Council, inviting me to become the Save Outdoor Sculpture! Project Coordinator for Southern Nevada.
Save Outdoor Sculpture! was a nationwide outdoor sculpture survey organized by the Smithsonian. This side hustle sent me all over the state below Highway 6 to locate, photograph, and survey practically anything that would qualify as “outdoor sculpture”—the Montyne statues on the Strip, Claes Oldenburg’s Flashlight at UNLV, the Blue Angel on Charleston, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative incision on Mormon Mesa, and of course, what later became the Goldwell Open Air Museum.
This was pretty much pre-internet, so for rural Nevada I would call ahead to chambers of commerce in small towns or a motel or bar asking, “Do you have any outdoor sculptures in your area?” In Beatty, I ended up talking with local historian Claudia Reidhead who said, “Well, we got the ghosts, the big naked woman made out of cinderblocks, the thing made out of car parts.” It sounded promising, so for the first time I drove up Highway 95 to Beatty, turning left at the intersection of State Route 374 (the road to Death Valley), driving four miles west before turning right up a dirt road towards the ghost town of Rhyolite. I had the spot to myself. I took photos of the seven huge sculptures there and poked around the outside of the little historic structure that had two faded newspaper articles taped to the windows as the site’s total ration of interpretive material.
Suzanne F. Hackett-Morgan earned a Master’s Degree in Art (Painting) at California State University Northridge in 2003 and a Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing from Western Washington University. She received recognition in 2007 from the Nevada Arts Council’s Artist Fellowship Program. HackettMorgan is a founding director of the Goldwell Open Air Museum and Artist Residency in Nevada and is its current Executive Director. A leader in the Nevada arts community, she is a consultant to other arts organizations through the Nevada Circuit Rider program. Her landscape paintings have been exhibited in Montana, Nevada, Wisconsin, and California, and she has completed several public art commissions in Clark County, Nevada. Her downtown mural, Here It Is, was featured in The Killers’ CD, Sam’s Town
This place was not unschooled like the folk art environments I loved and helped preserve in California. I was intrigued by what I was looking at. A little research with the clues I garnered from the newspaper clippings eventually led me to the artist’s business partner in the Amargosa Valley and a friendship that has spanned decades.
New in Vegas, and still learning about myself as an artist, I eventually discovered the Contemporary Arts Collective (CAC). They had a call for artists for several group shows. Some I got in, some I didn’t. But they could use my skill set, so I offered it. I was introduced to my future husband, Charles Morgan, and some of my best friends who in time got the Goldwell bug: Ginger Bruner, James Stanford, Lisa Stamanis, Kathleen Nathan, Fred Sigman, Andrew Kiraly, Scott Dickensheets—still great friends to this day.
Development people (aka fundraisers) are essentially highly paid itinerant workers. By 1994 I was on to the next gig in Los Angeles working on the capital campaign team for a museum I grew up with and loved. But Charles and Goldwell were never far from my mind. Charles eventually relocated to California to join me, and in 1999 we married. I recognized Goldwell as a special place—its quiet, its landscape, its light. It was a unique experience we hoped could be preserved for the enjoyment of all Nevadans and the state’s visitors. Like Albert, we wanted to share it with others…with everyone, really.
IN BEATTY, I ENDED UP TALKING WITH LOCAL HISTORIAN CLAUDIA REIDHEAD WHO SAID, “WELL, WE GOT THE GHOSTS, THE BIG NAKED WOMAN MADE OUT OF CINDERBLOCKS, THE THING MADE OUT OF CAR PARTS.”
The Goldwell Open Air Museum began as a project of Belgian artist Albert Szukalski in 1984 with the installation of his major sculpture, The Last Supper. He created Last Supper in cooperation with several Beatty residents who served as models, enduring more than fifteen minutes in the summer sun covered in plastic wrap and heavy plaster-soaked burlap. The positive influence of the Museum has been recognized by almost everyone in Beatty, whether they were personally involved with Albert or simply enriched by the experience of being near a high-quality, international art environment. In subsequent years, additional pieces were added to the site by three other Belgian artists (Fred Bervoets, Hugo Heyrman, and Dré Peeters) who, like Szukalski, were major figures in European art. A fifth artist, Beatty contractor David Spicer, contributed a sculpture in 1992.
In 1996 Charles and I produced an exhibition with Albert at the new CAC location in what would eventually become the Las Vegas Arts District. Years later came the call from Albert’s business partner about his impending death. I was able to talk with him from his hospital bed and he said to me, “Keep it going.” He died at the age of fifty-five in January 2000, and the Goldwell property and its artworks came into the sole ownership of the partner, who asked us to find a way to preserve the environment and continue Albert’s vision. We based our plans for Goldwell on what we could glean from what documentation he left behind, such as video shot during the construction of the Last Supper. His words and the way he loved Nevada and that particular piece of desert formed our mission, values, and vision.
We reached an agreement in March 2000 to establish a 501(c)3 organization, to which the partner would eventually donate the property and ownership of the artworks. The Goldwell Open Air Museum was incorporated in the State of Nevada in August 2000 as a non-profit corporation and received its advance ruling as a federal tax-exempt entity in April 2001.
The Museum is a fifteen-acre outdoor sculpture park in Nye County. We kept it as a free admission facility, open year-round, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The site is adjacent to Rhyolite, one of the most heavily visited ghost towns in Nevada, and has been seen by millions of visitors from around the world. My husband and I developed a business plan to give the organization a programmatic vision and a base of financial and community support. It provided a timeline and funding plan for stabilizing and improving the existing site and initiating an artist residency program for the creation of new works.
The Museum is not located “in the middle of nowhere,” but it feels like it. This has made the area a focal point for people seeking rejuvenation by way of traveling through this sparsely populated, harsh, and mysterious land. The environment is rich with content. Nye County is known for harboring the mining and the sex trade and for its proximity to intriguing and complex places such as Death Valley, Yucca Mountain, the Nevada Test Site, and Area 51.
American land artists, like Heizer, Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson, often approached the desert from the perspective of insiders—literally comfortable enough with the environment to burrow inside it to produce their forms. By contrast, many European artists approached the American West as visitors, or even conquerors, leaving a permanent or temporary mark on the landscape, ensuring the proper documentation, and then leaving. Albert, Fred, Dr. Hugo, and Dré were all classically trained and the pieces they erected are precise, for the most part self-referential. While Albert’s intention during the creation of his Last Supper may have initially been more along the lines of a career-advancing move (he hired a public relations firm, a film crew, and invited a bewildered representative from the Belgian consulate
in Los Angeles to the unveiling), his annual visits to Beatty from 1985 to 1996 changed his perspective dramatically. If home is where the heart is, Goldwell became it for Albert, and his desire to share the experience of the Nevada desert with his friends was as important, if not more, than the production of the art. This is not to say that Albert was an explorer of the landscape as much as he was an explorer of the culture produced by the landscape, including the lifestyle of a boomand-bust desert town. He had a gift for inclusivity and community.
In the early 1990s, the nascent arts community in Las Vegas was concerned about its own trajectory. Outside of a few mutual friends of ours, Goldwell was a tough sell locally. Plus, there were all the distractions that come with a mid-career out-of-state move, an unexpected pregnancy at forty, a late-in-life Master of Arts program, and just about anything else that would qualify for inclusion on a major life change list. Our business plan helped solidify a vision for what we could do out there to turn it into an internationally recognized art destination. We had some inherent values about preserving the quiet and contemplative solitude of the place and inviting the best artists we could attract to experience it for themselves as exhibitors and artists-in-residence. We approached the Barrick Gold Corporation, which was pulling out of its mining operations in Beatty, about gifting Goldwell a barn-shaped structure they were leaving behind. They agreed, and we set about raising close to $70,000 to renovate the abandoned building into a professional studio and exhibition/event space. Charles and I personally bought and upgraded a house in Beatty for the artists to live in while in residence, and posted a national call. That first call netted over sixty applicants, and they were all great. The way we did it back then was to have a board committee make the first cut, then we sent the submissions to the Museum’s advisory board to rank against a rubric focused on finding artists who connected with the place and showed promise of being successful out there.
In addition to the residencies, we produced several successful fundraising celebrations we called “Albert’s Tarantellas,” all of which were popular, bringing many folks up from Las Vegas and the surrounding Mojave Desert. We did other programming in Las Vegas in the Arts District (Open Air Printers, events at The Arts Factory), as well as in Tecopa, California near Death Valley (The Death Valley Luau).
For five years the residency program was going great guns, with five to seven residents a year who came out to Goldwell and the Red Barn. Unfortunately David, our Residency Manager, got sick and had to leave Nevada for treatment. I also got sick, which put a major crimp in the operation, eventually suspending the program. At that
point, the focus turned to the Museum itself and its maintenance, with Richard Stephens keeping the Visitor Center open to the stream of visitors that continue to visit Goldwell to this day.
Eventually, we were approached by a group of four who wanted to do what they called the Bullfrog Biennial, which consisted of a weekend event every two years. This direction did not work out, though, for various reasons, which resulted in a slowdown in the running of the overall organization.
I pack up a camper van and take in the Biennial as an observer. It’s rare for me, being here on the site anonymously. This is part of letting it develop into its 3.0 iteration.
From the sculpture park, I look down across the valley towards the barn, across the steppe to those mountains that border the eastern edge of Death Valley—that I never bothered to find the name of. No, it was that I never had time to look it up because there was always so much to be done out here. One resident, June, had the time, space, and solitude to paint them in strokes of color, as they are in this midmorning light, a Wyoming soft brown like a friendly dog. Earlier there would be golden triangular accents at their peaks, later today those shadows will go violet-blue. As the sun sets the browns will bleed red.
The 3.0 crew is in charge this weekend. There is going to be a lot of activity starting tonight, and tomorrow night. Four bands will take to the stage in front of the sign by the barn. That is a new thing. Goldwell was always at its most pleasurable when we did stuff with other people, our friends, new friends. 3.0 is the same thing with their friends, some of whom are also our friends, but a lot are people we missed coming up through the UNLV MFA program while I was getting sick, then sicker, but after this weekend they might be my friends too while I am getting healthier and stronger.
I spend most of the afternoon at the Red Barn waiting to see what happens. We have a stream of people beginning around 3 p.m. including a group of four-wheelers on quads, long beards, ball caps, a dog trained to sit in a box atop the handlebars. “She took a spill when I forgot to hook her in,” he says, “but she got right back in today.” His wife chats me up a bit. “We’re from Wallace.” Idaho, I ask. “Yes, but we love to come down here and see our friends for Beatty Days.” I say, I know Wallace. I wrote a poem about it. “Doesn’t Wallace give warning, the town that grabs the interstate by the ankle and bites through its thigh, yours too?” I say
Beatty is going to be the center of the universe with all that’s going on this weekend. “That’s what Wallace says it is, the center of the universe, we have a big round plaque saying it.” I tell her I will email the poem to her. How odd all of the collisions are out here. It is the very lack of density that makes it possible.
One time back in the day after we got keys to the Visitor Center and I cleaned it out, I came home with the tell-tale bullseye rash of a Lyme diseasecarrying tick. No one at the UMC Quick Care I went to had any idea what it was there on my thigh. I was honestly more worried about hantavirus from all the mouse turd dust I encountered. I think that was in 2002 or ‘03, and it was 2007 when I first exhibited the symptoms of numb nerve pain in my feet. I thought it was because of wearing the twenty-year-old suedefringed cowboy boots I’d loved and repaired so often one shoe repairman finally said, “I’m not going to work on these anymore.” One last guy in Vegas rebuilt the heels after the backs finally gave out. I still have them and I wear them when I need the magic lift they give my soul, but I can’t really walk in them well. I can’t walk well at all anyhow. If it had been Lyme disease, I could have been treated with antibiotics and healed. Instead, I went through a battery of tests to ensure it wasn’t syphilis. But it was multiple sclerosis and I am today a basic cripple, a SS disability case, unemployable, but surprisingly happy and free.
Perhaps the presence of absence is the magic elixir that inspires everyone to get busy making something. One morning we came out and someone had made a spiral rock labyrinth easily twentyfive feet in diameter.
Been a long time since I’ve sat the long hours at Goldwell Visitor Center. Beatty Days is one of our busier times with visitors popping by…some local (Vegas, Pahrump, etc.) and the usual international travelers. Sitting on the porch, the bridge of this sailing ship, looking down at the Red Barn, not forlornly like before we got it, when it was a dream in the making, but alive, with the warmth of the new energy, new people, fresh creativity and a desire to share it. That new sign/stage really adds something special, a far-off billboard inviting you to come see—it’s like taking a road trip without going anywhere physically, just in your imagination.
One thing we’re not hurting for here is rocks. I love hearing their crunching when people are walking around looking at stuff. It’s so quiet, you go all in on sound. Drink water continuously. Your lips will be chapped, you will tan. All kinds of people helped us out. Richard has really made the Visitor Center into something…the economic engine of the enterprise. He has sold eight hundred and fifty-eight bags of gravel mine tailings at $1-$5 a pop, t-shirts,
his carved wooden flutes and cheaper ones made out of PVC, and his own prints of his paintings and photos. A tall, strong man, a problem solver, funny to a fault, friendly and knowledgeable. You couldn’t find a more story-filled, affable guy. You hear everything in the silence here. Every fly buzzing near. Lizards on the ground. Every rustle of paper. Perhaps the presence of absence is the magic elixir that inspires everyone to get busy making something. One morning we came out and someone had made a spiral rock labyrinth easily twenty-five feet in diameter. Other people tacked up shoes on one of our entry poles, others more recently started tacking up back pockets from old jeans and stuffing them with business cards. It got out of hand so Richard took them all down and to the dump.
I remember The Beauty of Decay by Onny Huisink, five life-size puppets meant to disintegrate over time. At one point Onny asked Richard to send him the head of one of the figures, so he did. A day or so later someone had replaced it with a stuffed head of Topo Gigio. “Who would drive around with something like that?” he asked. Burners, I said. All of the puppets are gone now.
The wind, our nemesis and constant companion, kicks up overnight, adds complexity to the Saturday night aftermath. Trash bags are blown to bits, scattering beer cans, plastic, paper plates all to hell, snagging into the low shrubs. I feel bad I can’t help clean it up but I can’t walk, I really can’t, and this way they will learn you can’t leave anything outside overnight. It has to be done in the moment or punishment blows in.
Visitors brace themselves, walking stiff-legged, shoulders up around their necks and hoodies. Their faces express agony, terror, disbelief that it can be so sunny out and yet so bracing cold, the wind relentless, merciless. The environment reminds us we are only borrowing the temperate and gentle moments to play rockhound/desert artist/auteur.
I thank the board, their friends, their children for facing reality with the same energy they brought to their A for art game. Then I head home.
“I said goodbye to Goldwell long ago,” Charles said last night. “This weekend was for you. I couldn’t face driving that same road to that same experience. I want to go down roads with you we haven’t gone before.”
WAS AN ART FESTIVAL THAT TOOK PLACE IN GOLDWELL, BEATTY, AND THE SURROUNDING LANDSCAPE IN THE OCTOBERS OF 2019 AND 2021. CREATED AND MANAGED BY A TEAM OF VOLUNTEERS, IT FEATURED OVER 50 ARTISTS. HERE, SOME OF THEM REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS LIKE–
TEXTS BY
The Bullfrog Biennial in 2021 felt like the first real art event I got to take part in since moving to Vegas right before the pandemic. I didn’t know anything about it, so being asked to create something was surprising and exciting. I dropped off my work at someone’s house in Vegas a week before the show, so I didn’t really know what to expect at the venue. In Rhyolite and at the Barn I got to meet a lot of local artists, and the performances at the motel really made it an experience. It was super casual. I loved that it was spread indoors and out. It kinda felt like my first time getting to know the local art scene. TG
My participation in the first Bullfrog Biennial was a healing experience. My collaborator Steve Radosevich and I were reintroduced to the Las Vegas art community, which we had been hiding out from for about a decade, mainly because we didn't feel strongly connected to its former thematic epicenter of art about Vegas with a capital V. Being invited by Checko Salgado and the rest of the curatorial team to exhibit our work with the Iron Camera Project was a moving gesture that became a re-welcoming of our identities as Nevada artists.
Seeing the thought with which the other artists made work inspired by the landscape and its mining history was stimulating. They helped each other, worried, fussed, poked fun, listened, and shared. There was a buzz of energy and community vibrating collectively around everyone who was directing visitors, adjusting lights, making chili, setting up the stage, and trying to mitigate the effects of the enthusiastic Saturday night wind. It was a grassroots effort aimed at elevating the arts in Nevada—a serious undertaking lightened by the laughter of the artists' children running about and exploring. Creativity was in full force.
The photographic images we prepared for exhibition were very personal. They were of the entrances of two historic mines in the area, taken with our hand-built Iron Camera back when we were in grad school at UNLV in the early 2000s. We reprinted these images and hand-colored them with watercolor, pencils, and ink, like the hyper-real postcards of the early 1900s. A few months before the Biennial, as we were about to get started on this process, I found out I had cervical cancer and would need surgery soon to prevent it from spreading. Working on the image that looked deep into the cave formed by the mine was like looking into my body and soul, and working together with Steve in the studio, drawing on the two pieces, became a ritual of reworking them into a prayer for health, healing, and transformation into something new.
I had surgery one week before the Biennial weekend. Navigating the gallery, outdoor installations, and Beatty Days festival was a challenge, but I was supported while I walked by Steve and friend Jim Woody, and they brought a chair for me everywhere. We got to reconnect with some wonderful artists that I hadn't seen in forever, and meet new people that have become dear friends and collaborators on other desert projects. We couldn't stay for everything, but the memories I carry around that event are filled with people's kindness, tenderness, and care for each other. KGM
It was a meaningful and formative experience for the emergence and evolution of Juan Chico. I participated in 2019 and 2021. Both times I performed my work at the ever-so-welcoming El Portal Motel in Beatty. I felt free to play and experiment with my work during this Biennial. I hold this time close to my heart. So much good came out of it for me. AC N.b. Juan Chico is a performance character devised by AC
To build Memorial for Queer Rhyolite, a temporary monument to dreams in the dust, I had to do a lot of research. I spent hours in archives in Las Vegas and later San Francisco. Stonewall Park was rich with its own history, activism, intersectionality, all in archive boxes kept in the proverbial closet of history. I mined an archive compiled by a local hero of mine, Dennis McBride, and followed my partner to Beatty to collect dust samples. After experimenting with several of these, the clear standout was from an abandoned pile of mine tailings. Mine tailings are discarded material, material I would use to build a monument to a discarded history.
I made a mold of a form that resembled a monolith, and the shape of a house on the top to represent the home my ancestors sought in Rhyolite. This “monolith” wasn’t going to be a singular piece of stone, but many tiny moments of stone solidified into one, free to break away. I cast and inscribed onto a radically small metal memorial: Here lie dreams of Stonewall Park, 1986, “a safe and peaceful place.” Designed to be temporary, eventually the molded form will fall and bury the cast metal monument hidden inside, an artifact to be discovered in the future, carrying with it the dream of Stonewall Park.
Since the Goldwell Open Air Museum is right next to Rhyolite and the Red Barn is down the road from it, I thought I could make a piece to connect both places in some sense.
I created a permanent light sculpture made with small solar panels to light up after dark, thinking of the bright electric light that once lit up the mining town of Rhyolite, and the vibrant energy that the Goldwell Open Air Museum and the Red Barn now bring to the place with art.
I got invited to participate in 2021 by the Bullfrog Biennial co-creators and Las Vegas local artists Sierra Slentz and Brent Holmes. It was a unique experience, traveling to the space to meet up with other participant artists, to learn about the space, and to talk about planning to create individual art pieces in response to it.
A few weeks after the meeting I traveled back to Beatty to install my own piece. I transported all the materials for the artwork. I remember it was super hot and it took me all day to install in the middle of the desert. By then—I didn’t think about this, but now, looking back at the experience of installing my work, it was almost like being part of a performance piece with a culmination of seeing the solar panels light up at sundusk. I guess the energy put into the installation of the artwork continues performing on its own by gathering solar light during the day and lighting up after the sun goes down. It was a beautiful experience seeing, for the first time, the beautiful light coming from the installed solar panels in the middle of the desert at sundusk. JS
The strength of these discarded materials was a triumph of the underestimated. A hopeful queer story in itself. The monument will be five years old this October, five years since the inaugural Bullfrog Biennial. When I built it, I was open to it falling over the weekend. A violent wind storm came through on the last day of the Biennial, that Sunday. I watched the monument as we drove away and it held tight. Its temporary quality is what is allowing it to last. Five years of windstorms like that, but instead of falling it stands strong while it is carved and shaped by the wind. It resembles the abandoned ruins of Rhyolite. Five years later it stretches the present, or a presence, of queer place-making in Time. Eventually it will succumb, but the process is transformative. EB
We've attended the Biennial twice, and each visit was truly special. When we were creating our pieces for the event our focus was the landscape of the desert. We considered how our artwork would integrate into this environment while staying mindful of its ephemeral nature. Installing our work outdoors posed challenges. We hadn't fully anticipated the strong winds, so we improvised with whatever materials we had in the car to secure our installations. The Biennial has profoundly influenced how I think about my own work as landscape-esque while creating art that is more spatially aware and somewhat site-specific. QM
We thought about the absurdity of this thing called life and how to stay present through all its highs and lows. The desert landscape, which often seems endless, brought it all into sharp relief; we reflected upon how the sensory details become amplified in this context. I felt extraordinarily humbled. It was intimidating at first to work with the elements in such a direct way outside of a traditional studio/shop environment. We had to make quick, executive decisions around our project to make sure it worked with the weather conditions (aridity, high winds), all the while staying true to our vision. I was also extremely thankful to the Goldwell/Bullfrog/Las Vegas community. When you're trying to stage something like this, every bit of input counts!
It's a completely different experience to see your artwork commune with the outdoors and also embrace its temporality. Often in the studio, the work becomes too precious, but under these conditions, we had to practice a lot of acceptance and letting go of expectations. Our sculpture was ultimately felled by a dust devil; we repurposed a lot of the materials in later projects. TL
The theme for 2021 was “Diversity in The Desert.” Folded Fortunes was a direct response to that curatorial idea. I had just finished traveling across the county for an art residency in rural North Carolina in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Taking my time, I decided to travel slowly, visiting all the Japanese internment sites and friends (or their families) who were incarcerated. With a majority of the camps being in various Western regions and the Manzanar being just past Death Valley, I wanted to create a piece that commented on an often-overlooked piece of American history. My family friends, who met at a camp and later married, reflected about how, while they lost so much, the relationships and community connections lasted a lifetime. This was a similar story to others I interviewed, severe loss, but strength in community. Some of the stories were beautiful and provided a robust and deep insight into a larger context of internment experiences.
For me, it had been a challenging time personally. I had decided to move back to my home country and didn't know if or when I would return to the States, friends, and collaborators here like Tiffany. It felt meaningful to create a sculpture in the shape of a bus stop in the vast expanse of the desert and thereby reference a space for transitory people, like me, who might not know where life will take them next.
I remember being impressed by the variety of approaches (contemplative, well-researched, funny, playful...) in creating artwork for this ghost town desert landscape. We had to be super prepared and bring every single screw we planned on using, and cut all the wood in advance. That was a level of preparedness that was great to try out and learn. It was great to see an art practice that is usually flat and in a handy size live on this big scale, become dimensional, and provide shelter from the sun. I would love to create more outdoor art with Tiffany! SK
Folded Fortunes featured cast bronze paper cranes suspended in gold-leafed barbed wire. Each paper crane represented a different internment camp and had flora picked from each one (many of which were empty lots during my trip). I was really proud of the piece and felt it was impactful, reflecting on Japanese-American history in the landscape that is just miles away, across the desert heat, from Manzanar to Goldwell. RT
IT WAS INTIMIDATING AT FIRST TO WORK WITH THE ELEMENTS IN SUCH A DIRECT WAY OUTSIDE OF A TRADITIONAL STUDIO/SHOP ENVIRONMENT.
I was invited to go check out the location months before the festival in order to put together a proposal for art. I took a film camera and shot anything that interested me. Those 35mm film prints and the road signs leading to Goldwell inspired the sculpture I created in the end.
Installing the work was more difficult than I had anticipated, as the exact location I had chosen to put my sculptures ended up being nearly impossible to dig into. Also, Nevada saw extreme high winds days before the festival happened, and as a result we built makeshift bases for my art in order to ensure three days of winds didn't push them over, or onto art lovers, and those looked so awful. The sculptures have since shown in different galleries and they look much nicer without all that riff-raff at the bottom.
The Biennial was a most wonderful place surrounded by the most beautiful people. Once we left Goldwell and went back into the city of Beatty, however, the mood changed. As a non-Caucasian member of society, I did not feel safe in town or in any of the restaurants/shops the town has to offer. I remember the things an order taker said to us and to his chef in the back as we ordered a hamburger. Jokes about Checko and I as boyfriends attending the crazy art event, and that while they would take our money they did not appreciate our lifestyle. So, although my family had rented an overnight stay at a hotel in Beatty to enjoy two days of the festival, we checked out without using the bed and drove home the same day we arrived. SZ
The Biennial was amazing! It was so fun to take over the Red Barn and the multiple art installations were great. It was an outstanding way to showcase land art. The night of the event was a wonderful party and I was able to meet lots of new people. It was a wonderful way to feel connected to the art community, to do something so unique out in the desert. Everyone was respectful of the land, which was very important. I hope it can happen again. I would love to try some new ideas there. I also saw my first tarantula up close, which was really cool! HL
I was asked to be a part of the Bullfrog Biennial during its second run curated by Sierra Slentz and Brent Holmes. Artists were invited “to explore ideas of diversity and desert, whether it be cultural or biological” and told about microclimates and sky islands. This is Fine (named after the famous meme) was what I produced and has become one of my most iconic pieces of work.
The lead-up to the festival was pretty stressful because of my own schedule and the nature of what I was creating with my available resources. I stayed up around thirty-six hours in order to finish my piece and then install it all in one go. After a two-hour drive across the desert, I installed seven large flames in a site around the Goldwell Open Air Museum. The actual installation process was not difficult as I had planned out how to stake the pieces into the ground and how to avoid things like the high winds that we were warned about. Thankfully that didn’t affect the flames.
When creating the piece, I thought about how the "This is Fine" meme was used as a way to divert attention to our global climate crisis. Ultimately, my work still remained as a call to attention, but evolved to be about capitalism’s effect on environments and how it incentivizes people to create towns that are then ghosted after the land’s resources are extracted; a nod to the story of Rhyolite and other ghost towns in Nevada. After the exhibition and festival, I used my flames again as calls to attention towards sites that I thought of as problematic around Las Vegas. They remain a crucial part of my body of work and am thankful that I had the opportunity to show them at the Biennial.
Attending the Bullfrog Biennial was definitely an experience and featured a lot of great art! I like the idea of having these local festivals where we can just show art and have a good time. We were also encouraged to go into town and celebrate Beatty Days with the locals. The performances featured during the festival’s run were really funny and exciting. There were a lot of great artists that I’m glad I was able to show alongside.
I was very sad that it didn’t happen again in 2023. Hopefully, things get figured out and it continues. There’s also always the opportunity for more similar projects to spring up and live alongside each other for the good of the arts. I participated in Desert Biennial Project’s Stone Soup exhibition last year and that was a pretty interesting experience as well. It had similar energy to what I experienced at Bullfrog. I’m hoping we get more projects like this. I just hope people have more opportunities to share their work and be around each other. GU
I think the moment I fell in love with Albert Szukalski was the moment Suzanne Hackett-Morgan handed me the Verbeke Foundation’s retrospective biographical publication, Eenvoudig dus moeilijk (roughly, Simple, Therefore Difficult), a 289-page portal into a man’s early life and works; essentially everything that led up to what is known today as Goldwell Open Air Museum. From his conception in a WW2 labor camp to his studio practices after college, we follow his early exhibitions and accomplishments as well as failures and mistakes or temporary lulls throughout his career/life.
The final chapter is recounted by his soulmate/”sister,” Netty Vangheel. In her recalling of him, we learn that they were bonded by the death of her husband (a cartoonist named Joke Lagrillière) and the death of his small son. She describes him as “a strange fellow, a boy still growing up seeking security. He was a weird sculptor who made ghosts,” which signaled pure brutal honesty, to me. We learn things only a partner could know, including that he was born Charles Albert van Heeswijck, something that would create emotional trouble later in his life.
Netty speaks of his neglectful upbringing by a stepmother who did not favor him much. As a boy he loved movies —“as to feelings, he had only ever seen them expressed in the cinema which is why his were always theatrical.” Later he would attend Antwerp’s Academy of Fine Arts. At seventeen he began working in artists' studios as a sort of apprentice, giving him space to begin creating an interesting collection of sculptures with a very free and humorous sense to them. Works from the late ‘60s are my favorites, composed mostly of crude assemblages with clever titles, including a hooded mannequin head with sunglasses and a dildo in its mouth titled Shall Be from 1970. I enjoy it because it makes me wonder, “How the hell did this character get that way and why?”
Even though he was institutionally trained and even participated in one of the Venice Biennale festivals I still see Albert as an outsider artist. He always tried to catch people off guard, often making light of serious opportunities. That’s what made people love him, I believe. He was a fresh perspective, a vibrantly creative person with a great social skill set as well, which is arguably more than half of what it takes to do anything in the world of art. Especially if one gets the help of a sponsor/patron.
His drive to create was like that of a child who searches for ways to attain attention and validation from their mother until their tactics start to work on those around them instead. It is perhaps one of the underlying motivators of Szukalski; filling the void left from family history/trauma.
“It is part of Szukalski’s originality, to give the impression of being a friendly magician, a miracle worker, a poet who cannot have enough of his fantasies, and yet with each new act, to push through to the essence of all creativity: making the unnameable visible, also the dreadful in it, the irreparable. And to do this with the language of simplicity that comes close to the language of the child, often. The child who is our vulnerability. And who is creation and survival, despite everything.”— Ivo Michiels, “About the work of Szukalski” in A. Szukalski. Paintings, The Antwerp Gallery, 1977
In the early ‘70s, he began his relationship with De Zwarte Panter gallery, right after his exhibition Noses, in 1971. Noses consisted of twenty-six life-sized portraits of Antwerp’s artists, collectors, and dealers painted by Gerard Dauphin, Szukalski’s upstairs neighbor, and finished by Szukalski replacing their noses with 3D renditions made of plaster, marking the first time he would use the medium he’d become so known for. In the same year he made Noses he conceptualized L’entourage du vide, creating thirteen plaster ghosts to contrast with Jef Verheyen’s colored squares. In the autumn of 1971, this work was selected for the Second Bruges Triennial, then the most important art festival in Belgium.
Netty tells us his stepmother murdered his father, a jazz pianist named Gijsbert Karel van Heeswijck. After his father died, he started going by his middle name, Albert, and took on his mother’s last name, Szukalska/Szukalski. The lack of maternal attention and the misunderstanding of his identity/two names likely influenced his approach to art. Or rather he found art to be a channel for the confusion that was naturally born out of these experiences.
a still life, assemblage,
BRIAN GIBSON
Brian Christopher Gibson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Las Vegas, Nevada, currently serving as secretary for the nonprofit Goldwell Open Air Museum organization. Primarily an abstract expressionist painter, he also works with other mediums such as installation, video, music, and ambient sound. His work has been exhibited in local galleries and institutions such as Available Space Art Projects, The Cube, InsideStyle, The Arts Factory, and more.
I first felt a pang of familiarity when I discovered his Drapages series from 1984. In my world up until this point, I’d made enough crude abstract paintings to know that it wasn’t easy to nail something without a plan. Improvisation is, more often than not, a total disaster. But here was Szukalski, who impacted many lives by way of simply creating without an end in mind. His simplicity made me laugh, but discovering this part of his legacy turned a gear of validation in my head. I saw how important it is to document your experiences as an artist so later generations can find out about you and be inspired, as I was.
He had “dreamt aloud of leaving Antwerp,” a sentiment I share, though in reverse. The former Goldwell Open Air Museum board member Brent Holmes once told me, “That’s what you do when you make a name in your hometown, you leave.” Eventually, someone heard him. A mysterious patron nicknamed “Zorro” funded his whole Rhyolite, Nevada, USA endeavor. That’s where I felt my second pang of familiarity. Only a short while before I discovered him, I had also experienced patronage and its profound impact on a person.
It had happened earlier in the year. When 2022 started I didn’t even have a driver's license or bank account, which in turn meant I couldn’t receive the grant funding I’d been awarded by the Nevada Arts Council. After attending a local exhibition, I would meet my “Zorro.” Finally, I was able to get a bank account, passport, and the tools to create a body of work. I went to MOCA in Los Angeles and saw an incredible exhibition by Pipilotti Rist, which inspired me to create immersive video art the same way she had. It was incredible, I’d never seen a masterwork of art before; now here I was perusing room upon room stacked with information. I had considered my “agency” before in terms of my story, where I came from to where I am today, but I’d hardly considered the full weight of a life creating. Remembering someone in itself felt like an art. The Rist retrospective taught me that people can be celebrated through the artworks they leave behind in museums like imbued relics.
That May I embarked on my most unique residency experience yet, staying in Laguna, Calico Basin, and various hotels in Europe, to which I flew first class. In two weeks I had gone from applying to a minimum wage job to flying to the Venice Biennale in Italy, with no concept of what I was about to experience. Even when I returned I barely knew how to process everything. My head was spinning from the culture shock of visiting three different countries when I’d barely gone to California before all of this. Hell, it continues to spin, today.
After this is when I met Suzanne, who endearingly likened me to both Albert and a “guy she knew in college who did some artwork for Throbbing Gristle,” which I didn’t mind, I guess. I accepted when she invited me onto the board of Goldwell directors and gave me the publication about a man who seemed to skip all of the “agency” and still be celebrated all this time later. I was inspired. There are a lot of similarities between Suzanne and Albert. It might be their shared appreciation for the unpolished aesthetic of outsider artists that seems most important to me. The inclusivity and open-minded approach to both creation and curation has shown me firsthand how much stories like Goldwell’s can influence both a person, and a state’s culture. I was mostly happy to have unearthed all of these new oral histories about Albert, including the ones in the Death Valley Project DVD the organization created in 2004.
It was inspiring to see art that was intentionally humorous on full display. It left the viewer questioning whether they were the victim of a joke on the art world or themselves, inviting them to investigate further and discover joy in abandoning their guard. When I reached out via email to one of Goldwell’s original artists, Dr. Hugo Heyrman, about meeting Albert and why he came out to Rhyolite in the early ‘90s, he replied, “I showed Albert my small model of Lady Desert and he just smiled and said he loved it.” I love how freely Albert made decisions for such a historic landmark/sculpture park and how simple Hugo’s reply was when I asked him about the process of him getting his twenty-four-foot brick sculpture built.
After learning to apply for grants and gaining access to Goldwell and its Red Barn Arts Center, I made a proposal for a sound art piece called In Relative Obscurity where I would share some of what I had discovered. I would compile footage of my initial trip out to the Red Barn in May of ‘23 and my return on July 16th to play improvisational guitar over loops of cello I’d recorded at Calico Basin in the key of D, which is the key in which singing dunes resonate. Ambient sounds from shifting sands are incredible. One of many things I would have never known if it wasn’t for Albert turning Rhyolite into a “real-life ghost town” as he put it. I included a lot of scrolling text from Eenvoudig dus moeilijk, as it’d struck me
AMBIENT SOUNDS FROM SHIFTING SANDS ARE INCREDIBLE. ONE OF MANY THINGS I WOULD HAVE NEVER KNOWN IF IT WASN’T FOR ALBERT
that I am likely one of the first Las Vegas artists to put together a media work about this Belgian who died more than twenty years ago. It gave me the courage to reach out to the publisher and they gave me permission to use material from the book, which gave me quite the sense of validation.
In September of ‘23 I had an exhibition at ASAP gallery in New Orleans Square. I paid homage to Albert and my newfound appreciation for the desert and Rhyolite itself in the form of my own large-scale works in the fashion of Albert’s Drapages, using old pink drapes I owned that coincidentally matched some of the photos I’d seen of his. It was great to screen In Relative Obscurity and share the excitement I had found in his life and works, as well as make further videos that contained even more text from the book.
All of it feels vague and hard to string together at times, but at least I contributed what little I know about him. Previously, Google searches on Albert showed little to nothing new, and it's exciting to digitize his history, especially since I’d never considered such a task before!
The title of my video was a citation from the text for the Death Valley Project DVD. It describes how he came to work in a remote location for no real audience/any of the audience he had built back home. It inspired me to see someone leave like that and create something so significant so free of any inhibition/logic. I mean, it was a crazy idea. One that would have likely never happened if not for his “Zorro,” and this mirrored my opportunities too. I likely would have never gotten noticed by Suzanne if it wasn’t for my “Zorro,” and I’d have never made the works that made me ready to meet my “Zorro” if it wasn’t for the patronage of Core Contemporary gallerist Nancy Good, who exposed me to the opportunities available for emerging/ wanting-to-emerge artists, such as myself.
The idea of the landscape I only ever knew as “even farther than Pahrump” being viewed as a holy land by Albert was initially a bit much for me, but I see it repeated in references to the desert throughout all types of art. Since increasing my knowledge of art history, I’m learning just how vital the role of location
is for an artist, and I’m secretly ashamed at how long it took for me to have this revelation! Communities and their trademark characteristics, whatever they may be, gather like-minded people and sentiments that bleed into each other, making the ghost town of Rhyolite and its absence of people a perfect blank canvas in which Albert would say he often “felt trapped in his freedom.”
I was voted onto Goldwell Open Air Museum’s board of directors and began my role as Secretary in August of 2022. The former secretary was Nancy, who had hosted me as her first artist-in-residence at Core Contemporary gallery a year prior. During my residency I would meet the members of “Goldwell 3.0,” as Suzanne calls them, when they dropped off their artworks for the On Board exhibition. This 3.0 group consisted of some incredible local talent, including an architect/professor from UNLV and a writer from Desert Companion. Nancy had a contact list full of artists who had contributed to the Open Air Museum in various ways, endearingly called “Friends of Goldwell.”
It is currently two and a half months before Goldwell’s 40th Year Anniversary Celebration, four decades after Albert installed his Last Supper sculpture. My good friend Michelle Graves now serves as President on Goldwell’s Board of Directors. All the members from 3.0 quit quietly weeks before the third Bullfrog Biennial event in October 2023. There were a lot of factors that played into the slow disintegration of the former board, and out of the heavy confusion came the end of that era. It’s interesting to me that Michelle was to take part in the Bullfrog Biennial, and even received a project grant from the Nevada Arts Council for her time-based site-specific sculpture, Keep Going, which I would help her install in spite of the Biennial’s cancellation. She had already built her nine separate four-foot-tall letters from scratch using the grant funding, and if she didn’t install them her grant would be ineligible.
This served as a great “sign” for me, in both the literal form of the sculpture itself and how well it was received by Richard Stephens and Charles Morgan and Suzanne, even though it technically wasn’t supposed to happen. Michelle’s sculpture was the only work that was installed out of more than a dozen that were approved for the Biennial. In December of 2023, two months after she and I erected Keep Going, she was voted onto the board by the only members left; Richard, the organization’s founders Suzanne and Charles, and myself. It was a powerful time, and emotions were high, but a sort of pact was made to ensure a successful 40th Year Anniversary Celebration in October of 2024, so Suzanne could pass on the organization afterwards.
After our successful Pink Lady Painting Party in May, I look forward to honoring the work that took place in Rhyolite so long ago via Albert and his friends Dré Peeters, Fred Bervoets and Dr. Hugo Heyrman. Emphasizing the importance of preservation, legacy, and traditions this fall will be important for the future of our organization, and public/outdoor art and the artists that create it. Sharing the information I have learned about Albert is important. I hope my work can reflect that. I am honored to be a part of Goldwell Open Air Museum’s future and look forward to learning more about this organization’s past to better inform that future.