Duet by Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art

Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas, Nevada John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art University of Nevada, Reno Reno, Nevada May 15, 2020–January 01, 2021

Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art

4 The Barrick Museum of Art and The Lilley Museum get to know each other through their collections. 6 Käthe Kollwitz, Self-portrait at a Table Claudia DeMonte, Untitled (Claudia Watching T.V.) 8 Krystal Ramirez, I Want To See Corita Kent, I wanna hold your hand 10 Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Frontispiece; with statue of Minerva Alexa Hoyer, Book 12 John Edmonds, Untitled (Hood #7) Edward Ruscha, America, Her Best Product 14 Elizabeth Catlett, Malcom X Speaks for us Lance L. Smith, Malevolent Waters (Abyss) 16 Deborah Aschheim, November 21, 1963 (San Antonio) Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Layard & Jonathan 18 Salvador Dali, The Divine Comedy Shigeru Izumi, Fragment Shen Wei, Camera

20 Marshall Scheuttle, Wonder Lodge

22 Matthew Couper, The Chief Mourner and the Last Drops Emily Arthur, Only Tree (with Nest) 24 Melissa Melero-Moose, Tuba Suube (pine nut, willow) I & II Andreana Donahue, rake 26 Victoria Reynolds, Ruban Rouge Bill Brandt, Lord Berners 28 Jean Stamsta, Untitled Danielle Kelly, Blanket 30 Anonymous, Village Nagual Mask Hans Meyer-Kassel, Lilacs 32 William Weege, Yes Virginia, There Really Was a Turkey Justin Favela, Estardas 34 Kyla Hansen, Maternal Instincts (for bRee) Cara Romero, Coyote Tales 36 Anonymous, Greek Gnathian Pottery Epichysis Anonymous, Seated Colima Dog

38 Fritz Scholder, Bicentennial Indian Frank Buffalo Hyde, Round Dance #3 40 Salvador Dalí, Lincoln in Dalivision Julie Oppermann, TH 1223 42 Alex Katz, Washington Alphonse Mucha, Sarah Berhardt as Hamlet 44 Mary Bowron, Silent Witness Eugenia Butler, The Book of Lies, Vol. 1. 46 Fay Ku, Harpy Joan Miró, Frontispiece 48 Wendy Red Star, Rez Car #15 Noelle Garcia, Cigarettes 50 Linda Alterwitz, Matters of the Brain #11 George Inness Jr., Untitled (Riverscape) 52 Lawrence Acadiz, Mountain Lion (Toho) Jaime Quezada, Untitled (Blackware Vessel) 54 Wendy Kveck, Sister Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Le Chapeau épinglé (La fille de Berthe Morisot et sa cousine) 56 Louis Siegriest, D. Street Virginia City Shawn Hummel, Lines of Frey Study #1 58 Javier Sanchez, Ayotzi James A. Merigot, The Pyramid of Caius Cestius 60 Utagawa Kunisada, Untitled (Pink Flowers) Mary Warner, Disco Garden Two 62 Candice Lin, Self Portrait: a Brief and True Report Ernst Barlach, Der Irrlicht 64 Abigail Goldman, Untitled Patricia Burns, UnBalanced 66 About the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art About the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art Acknowledgments Staff members

INT RO

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During Nevada’s COVID-19 shutdown in 2020, the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art in Reno and the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas decided to get to know one another through their permanent collections. Every Friday from May through to January 1st, 2021, the two university-based museums posted collaborative pairings of works from their respective collections on social media. Each set of images was accompanied by a piece of text discussing the ideas behind the curations. The museum directors wanted to introduce online audiences at opposite ends of the state to potentially-unfamiliar artworks from the safety of their screens, paving the way for more pan-Nevadan partnerships in the future.

“A collaboration between the state’s academic art museums is natural,” observes the Marjorie Barrick’s executive director Alisha Kerlin. “Art in Nevada will be stronger if we work together. We want to get to know The Lilley and bring awareness to both museums while having fun curating miniature exhibitions from our collections.”

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“Art creates community and can forge meaningful relationships. With that in mind, we wanted to initiate an ongoing dialogue between our two collections. Our intention is to establish a fruitful and glistening collaboration between these two sister museums,” says Vivian Zavataro, director of The Lilley. The pairings were curated by both directors in collaboration with the Marjorie Barrick’s publications editor D.K. Sole. The depth of the state’s university art collections enabled the curators to consider work by historically recognized figures like Salvador Dalí and Pierre-Auguste Renoir alongside paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and photography by contemporary artists such as Deborah Aschheim, Lynda Benglis, John Edmonds, Justin Favela, Wendy Red Star, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya. All of the texts and images are reproduced here in the order they were posted.

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Both artists are presenting text in unusual ways, prompting the viewer to slow down and pay attention as they read. (It might not be clear from this photograph, but Krystal Ramirez is forcing line breaks into the middles of her words by packing sentences inside a grid.) Both texts refer to bodies. “I want to see brown bodies,” writes Ramirez, while the small text on Corita Kent’s green rectangles links “smoo[th]” to the feel of a hand. Kent’s incorporation of a line in Spanish is also in sympathy with Ramirez’s wish for more “brown bodies” in the art world. But there are differences—one work is colorful, the other uses light to produce gradations of brown; one is made with a method that allows for repeated prints, the other is a one-off, sewn together by the artist. D.K. Sole

Krystal Ramirez

Corita Kent

I Want To See, 2017 Bible paper, nylon thread, acrylic paint, acrylic medium Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist Photo: Mikayla Whitmore

I wanna hold your hand, 1965, Serigraph

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Giovanni Battista Piranesi

Alexa Hoyer

Frontispiece; with statue of Minerva, circa 1748 Copper plate print Gift of University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections

Book, 2015 Archival pigmented print on Dibond Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

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Begun by 1747 and ending with the artist’s death in 1778, the etchings in Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Le Vedute di Roma (Views of Rome) portfolio were an argument for the sublime preeminence of the Roman history he loved. Popular with tourists, the prints spread his vision of the ancient city’s significance throughout Europe. Centuries later, Alexa Hoyer found ruins of her own in the handmade targets abandoned by shooters in the unregulated firing ranges of Southern Nevada. Here were ruins that would never attract tourists, ruins whose histories would never be studied. More than one visitor to Rome has written about the difference between Piranesi’s spectre and the physical city, but will we ever have a critic who can make the same informed comparison between Hoyer’s photos and those decaying assemblages in the desert? D.K. Sole

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John Edmonds

Edward Ruscha

Untitled (Hood #7), 2017 Archival Pigment Print Gift of Margo Piscevich, Peter and Turkey Stremmel, Debra A. Moddelmog, Office of the President of the University of Nevada, Reno, Franz and Janett Weber, Robyn Powers, Bruce and Hanna Porter and Christine Fey

America, Her Best Product, 1974 Lithograph on paper Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Lorillard

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At first glance the information in John Edmonds’ photograph is simple: a person is wearing a hoodie. But maybe we start to wonder. Who are they? What do they look like? How old are they? What’s their race, their gender, their name? With that information redacted, the viewer starts filling it in. “The hooded solitary figure becomes a mirror for the viewer to contemplate his or her own assumptions and bias,” Edmonds has written. The Black Lives Matter protests that were taking place when we posted these images in 2020 made it clear that, for human beings, “Made in USA”—the phrase in Ed Ruscha’s 1974 lithograph— doesn’t always mean “treated equally in USA.” How can we, as a society, change this paradigm? D.K. Sole

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Elizabeth Catlett

Lance L. Smith

Malcom X Speaks for us, 1969/2004 Relief print Museum purchase

Malevolent Waters (Abyss), 2018 Oil on canvas Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

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Deborah Aschheim

Paul Mpagi Sepuya

November 21, 1963 (San Antonio), 2013 Ink on Duralar Jacqueline Kennedy at Brooks Air Force Base from the series Kennedy Obsession Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the Artist

Layard & Jonathan, 2007 Archival Pigment Print

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Salvador Dalí

Shigeru Izumi

The Divine Comedy, 1970 Woodblock print Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Barry T. Bates and Janet S. Dufek

Fragment, 1961 Lithograph from a portfolio of four woodcuts (one with wood engraving), two etchings (one with aquatint), two engravings, one wood engraving, one screenprint, and one lithograph

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Both of these artists placed a horizontal line above the middle of the page. Why? In Salvador Dalí’s illustration for Canto I of Dante’s Inferno the line is striving towards something that doesn’t exist in reality: a pure and simple demarcation between the land and sky. Dalí could have put the horizon lower. He could have emphasized the tangled wood (“selva oscura”) that Dante writes about, rather than the desert. Instead, he chose a landscape that enabled him to use this line. His line announces that the sky begins precisely here. In Shigeru Izumi’s lithographic print the line is a stripe, thicker than Dalí’s mark. The stripe is a shape on its own, an independent color standing over the top of the gray. It’s more imposing than the thin, pale zig-zag scratches. The gray continues implacably. This time the sky doesn’t begin here. D.K. Sole

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Shen Wei

Marshall Scheuttle

Camera, 2004 Archival Pigment Print Gift of the artist

Wonder Lodge, 2015 Digital C-print Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

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When we put these two images together we were thinking about quarantine. Everyone here is in a room. Marshall Scheuttle sees his rooms from the outside, stacked in a grid. Two men lean out of a top window, looking naturally oblivious to the restrictive structure his framing has put around them. They‘ve been included not because the artist wants us to know them as people, but because they are a feature of this grid. The person below them hangs a pair of pants over the sill and escapes by refusing to be visible. Meanwhile, Shen Wei is proactively showing himself. The vertical architecture in the left half of the picture looks as if it could hide him easily. All he has to do is step sideways and this would be a shot of an empty room. Nude, protected, and obvious, he blocks out his face. He is controlling his nudity. What else is he doing? He is making the picture. He is finding us in his room. And yet, he is on his own. Looking in a mirror. D.K. Sole

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Matthew Couper

Emily Arthur

The Chief Mourner and the Last Drops, 2017 Two color lithograph Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

Only Tree (with Nest), 2018 Bronze, steel Gift of Loren G. Lipson, MD

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Melissa Melero-Moose

Andreana Donahue

Tuba Suube (pine nut, willow) I & II, 2015 Pine nuts, willow

rake, 2015 Paper, wild Alaskan blueberry residue Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist Photo: Mikayla Whitmore

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“Willows, tules, cattails, and pine nuts are all very important staples to the Paiute people,” writes the Numu (Northern Paiute) artist Melissa Melero-Moose. “I integrated … cultural organic materials into my artwork as my interpretation of landscapes and how I view the beauty of my culture as well as nature itself.” By attaching pine nuts to a rectangular canvas in Tuba Suube II, she shifts them from the particularities of the environment into the visual language of a globalized art world. The impracticality of Andreana Donahue’s rake identifies it as part of the art world too. She mimics the shape of a berry-harvesting tool, but this fragile paper object would fall apart if you tried to use it. The ink-like stains are the residue of native blueberries she collected during a residency in Alaska. Coming to Juneau from her home base in Las Vegas, she noticed that the dark northern winters made her piercingly aware of the sun when spring and summer arrived with their abundance of fruit. D.K. Sole

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Bill Brandt closes his subject inside a box of frames. There are framed portraits, framed mirrors, and framed books. The fireplace frames a shell and a flamelike decoration runs around the ceiling. His lordship, Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners, adopts the pose Brandt preferred in his portraits, an unsmiling away-looking gaze that locks the subject inside another kind of frame: their own interiority. But Lord Berners appreciated silliness, and in person he might have enjoyed the joke of Victoria Reynolds’ Ruban Rouge, a work that lures the viewer closer with its pretty frame until they realize they are looking at a painting of nothing other than raw meat. Meat, as Reynolds might point out, is a portrait of us all. D.K. Sole

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Jean Stamsta

Danielle Kelly

Untitled, circa 1980 Acrylic on canvas

Blanket, 2009-2011 Mixed media Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

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Patterns are part of everyday life but we don’t always notice them. Danielle Kelly and Jean Stamsta ask us to pay attention. Kelly is an egalitarian patterner, covering her fabric forms with all-over systems of motifs that treat every part of the object equally. Stamsta is a pattern-separatist, using regions of dots and stripes to excite her flat, traditional canvas rectangle. Those curved regions are another pattern—one that could suggest a bubble, a hill, or an eruption. Kelly counters the bright upwardness of the eruption with three 3D presences that dangle like ham hocks on hooks. Back and forth the artworks go, discussing the pros and cons of pattern application. Recurring pattern and changing form? Or steady form and changing pattern? Sogand Tabatabaei

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Village Nagual Mask, 1950 Mexico Wood, wire, paint Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Michael C. and Mannetta Braunstein Photo: Javier Sanchez

Hans Meyer-Kassel Lilacs, 1950 Oil on canvas

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For this duet we considered two artworks that have one thing in common—they were both made in 1950. Once we noticed that similarity we could begin to look at their differences. Someone who carves a mask is making a vision of it being worn. Someone who paints a painting is making a vision of it hanging on a wall, untouched. The mask is a Nagual mask so there is an additional detail: the imaginary future wearer is dancing at a festival in Mexico, reminding everyone of the supernatural animal/human connection that this kind of mask traditionally represents. Did the German-born American artist Hans Meyer-Kassel perceive a similar connection between people and lilacs? Probably not. Some unseen person arranged these flowers in a vase and vanished, leaving the plant to insist on its independence by invading the table with detritus. Is it too simple to frame this as a German interest in assertive Schopenhauerian “Will”, against a Nahua metaphysics of coherence and flow? Yes, it’s far too simple. Let’s not go there. But this is where trying to think about differences can lead us. Sogand Tabatabaei

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William Weege

Justin Favela

Yes Virginia, There Really Was a Turkey, 1976 Serigraph Museum Purchase

Estardas, 2010 Cardboard, paint, glue Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

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William Weege and Justin Favela both use commercial advertising to make a noncommercial point. Favela, a first generation Las Vegan, takes the Stardust casino sign and makes it pronounce its name like his immigrant grandmother—“Estardas.” Weege borrows clippings from magazines and commercial packaging and combines them so that they argue against the praiseworthy image the United States was projecting during its Bicentennial year, 1976, when the print was created. Little white children face a kneeling Native American, a flag-striped rectangle wants us to spend our money on absurdly patriotic grape jelly, and the voice asking for “800 dozen golf balls” is not getting what it wants. Somewhere outside Weege’s America, Virginia might be enjoying something more welcome than this “turkey.” Not here though. Sogand Tabatabaei

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Kyla Hansen

Cara Romero

Maternal Instincts (for bRee), 2018 Ceramic stoneware, lights Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

Coyote Tales, 2019 Archival Pigment Print

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These artworks refer to stories that blur the boundaries between animals and humans. Both of them feature colored lights, transformative machines that carry us between one state (darkness) and another (brightness). Kyla Hansen’s work is based on the short story Horse, by Amy Bonnaffons, in which one woman attempts to become a mother while another attempts to become a horse. The story resonated with Hansen, whose sister Bree was pregnant when the work was conceived. Cara Romero’s Coyote Tales No. 1 brings the Coyote character from Paiute folklore into a modern context. Romero creates contemporary depictions of Native Americans that acknowledge their complexities while also incorporating their traditions. Coyote is known as a mischievous trickster, and this scene alludes to that part of his nature. The photograph does not represent a particular story, but rather synthesizes what we know about Coyote’s character with other aspects of contemporary Native culture. Romero says that all of her photographs have autobiographical aspects. Marjorie Williams

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Greek Gnathian Pottery Epichysis, Circa 325 BCE Pottery

Zoomorphic vessel: Seated Colima Dog, 300 BCE-400 CE Colima Pottery Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Michael C. and Mannetta Braunstein Photo: Justin Locust

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We turn to one object and see a dog with a strangely human grin. What would we say about that clay xoloitzcuintli if we were making this post in West Mexico somewhere around two thousand years ago? Would we be able to refer to the artist by name? Would we recognize their style immediately? What would we think as we stretched out our hands to pick up the epichysis if we were in the city of Gnatia, circa 325 BCE? Would we, in our coastal Gnathian home, hear the sea outside? If we saw the same object later, would we remember the sound of the waves? Here in contemporary Nevada, we put it in a glass case and try to guess at the purpose of the motifs. Those blobs, are they purely decorative? We embark on a thesis. Later the Gnathian looks forward through time at us and reads our opinions with disbelief. They glance sideways at the Ancient West Mexican. “Do you see what they’re saying about our work?” asks the Gnathian. The Ancient West Mexican shrugs. Sogand Tabatabaei

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Fritz Scholder

Frank Buffalo Hyde

Bicentennial Indian, 1975 Lithograph on paper Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Lorillard

Round Dance #3, 2017 Acrylic on canvas Gift of Loren G. Lipson, MD

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In Bicentennial Indian, the Luiseño artist Fritz Scholder depicts a Native American posed like Betsy Ross with a smudge stick in his hand instead of a needle. By inserting a Native American man into one of the myths about the development of the United States, Scholder questions long-held beliefs about the country’s foundations. Round Dance #3, painted by the Onondaga and Nez Perce artist Frank Buffalo Hyde, also interweaves stereotypical Euro-American symbolism with the traditional practices of Native Americans. Buffalo Hyde created the Round Dance series in response to the inherent racism displayed by the name and logo of what was then the Washington Redskins Football Team. Writing about his 2017 solo exhibition I-Witness Culture, he said, “I thought that the football huddle resembled a round dance, and that it would be interesting to draw a parallel between the welcoming, celebratory nature of the round dance and the derogatory nature of the term ‘Redskin’ and the logo for a national football franchise.” Round Dance #3 became especially relevant in 2020 when the Washington team changed its name in response to sustained protests by Indigenous activists. By creating an awareness of tension between two coexisting cultures, these artists disrupt the mainstream narrative and question the fundamental truths of the United States. Marjorie Williams

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Salvador Dalí

Julie Oppermann

Lincoln in Dalivision, 1976 Print Gift of University of Nevada, Reno Foundation

TH 1223, 2012 Acrylic on canvas Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

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Both of these works are optically deceptive, appearing to change when viewed at different angles or distances. Dalí creates two images in one. Up close, we see his wife Gala gazing at the Mediterranean Sea under a bright sun which also serves as the head of the crucified Christ. Seen from farther away, the image becomes a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. Dalí intended the work to be a study of the subconscious mind and an allusion to the duality of life and death. Oppermann, who has a master’s degree in neuroscience, interrupts the brain’s ability to unite her colorful shapes in a single image by overlaying them with thin, black vertical lines. Unlike the Dalí print, her canvas has no distinct picture. She wants viewers to notice what they cannot see as opposed to what is actually there. Oppermann uses her art to investigate how people interface with the world around them and how they process that information into something meaningful. Like Dalí, she emphasizes the activity of the individual who is viewing her work over the independence of the work being viewed. Michael Freborg

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Alex Katz

Alphonse Mucha

Washington, 1975 Lithograph on paper Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Lorillard

Sarah Berhardt as Hamlet, 1899 Lithograph Gift of University of Nevada, Reno Foundation

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Both of these artists portray well-known figures and borrow graphic design elements from the commercial advertising of their day. Only one of them, however, clearly identifies a product. That’s Alphonse Mucha, who uses strong colors and intricate patterns in his Art Nouveau theatre poster depicting actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) as Hamlet. The image shows Bernhardt’s elongated form dressed in a flowing cape. An elaborate halo-like arch accentuates her face, and at the bottom decorative flowers cover a dead Ophelia, hinting at the play’s preoccupation with death. Unlike Mucha, Alex Katz uses minimal linework over a flat background to create—in his words—a “reductive” aesthetic. His side profile of George Washington is close up and drastically cropped. Inspired by the bluntness and grandiose size of billboards, his earliest portraits and landscapes were a statement against the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s and a precursor to Pop Art. What does it mean for an artist to “advertise” the first president of the United States? If this is Katz’s response to that question then his answer seems deliberately ambiguous. Michael Freborg

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Mary Bowron

Eugenia Butler

Silent Witness, 1980-2010 Wood-fired clay Gift of the Kohler Foundation and the artist

The Book of Lies, Vol. 1., 1996 Mixed media, including ashes of love letters, hand embroidery, and mechanically reproduced images and text on paper, safety pins, wooden stick, etc. Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Patrick Duffy and Wally Goodman, Goodman Duffy Collection 44

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Bowron’s ceramic head is about ten inches tall, intentionally unsettling, and like its counterparts it has no mouth. From 1980 to 2010, the artist made approximately one thousand of these heads using a variety of wood-fired clays and glazes. She imagined them as individual units in “a crowd of silence and fear.” They symbolize people who have seen or heard insults so horrible that they are too paralyzed to speak. Where Bowron used the idea of a series to embody the moral force of a united group of silent witnesses, Butler’s invitation to seventy-six other artists to contribute to her Book of Lies was part of a plan to create an articulate conversation between a diversity of voices. None of the other pages in the Book of Lies look like this rectangle of red text by the Italian artist and poet Mirella Bentivoglio, but all of them, in their different ways, are thinking about the question that Butler was proposing when the project began: “how [do] we use the lie to explore our relationship with the truth”? Like the heads, they collectively make up a complete work of art. Michael Freborg

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Fay Ku

Joan Miró

Harpy, 2013 Graphite, ink, watercolor and metallic color on paper Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

Frontispiece, 1956 Title page of Joan Miró, published by Maeght Editeur, lithograph

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“I want to assassinate painting,” said Joan Miró to the French art critic Maurice Raynal in 1927. By the time he made this lithograph, almost thirty years later, he had the symbols of his assassination plan worked out, birds and eggs and hairy whiskers rendered in an inimitable naïf style, all mingled together in alchemical references to his childhood until they pointed the meanings of his artworks back to him: his life, his experiences. This is the frontispiece to a book that acknowledges his success. He has created it at the invitation of the respected art dealer Aimé Maeght. He should be feeling relaxed and satisfied. But the bird-person poking its beak into the egg is tipping forward, and it tilts until it merges with the bird-woman of Fay Ku, who leaps up out of the fish-egg singing, “I want to assassinate …”—what is she going to attack? She strikes an aggressive pose and directs her attention to the right. There is only the edge of the page. This is not a childlike drawing, even though Ku’s work suggests fairytales. Is it adulthood instead? “I want to assassinate!” cries the harpy. “I want to assassinate!” D.K. Sole

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Wendy Red Star

Noelle Garcia

Rez Car #15, 2007 Archival Pigment Print

Cigarettes, 2016 Glass beads and thread Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

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Wendy Red Star and Noelle Garcia use nostalgic symbolism to celebrate their Indigenous heritage and explore change. Red Star’s cut-out photograph depicts one of the broken-down cars frequently found in the impoverished Crow Reservation in Montana where she grew up. The car is pulled out of its original context to draw attention to its shape and to emphasize the stark contrast with the color surrounding it. The color reflects the garish paints used inside the reservation homes—paint that the Apsáalooke people who live in the buildings did not get to choose. Her father speculated that the government used them because they were the cheapest colors available. Like Red Star, Garcia (who is an enrolled member of the Klamath Tribes) reflects cultural upheaval, using glass beads and thread to weave Native American artistry into her “reimagined” mainstream American household items. She draws a connection between her late father and the cigarettes, which are made to look like the Marlboros he used to smoke. “I think he preferred Marlboro because the branding used cowboys which depicted free men roaming the wild untamed western lands,” she says. This cylinder structure is also used for powwow earrings. Michael Freborg

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Linda Alterwitz

George Inness Jr.

Matters of the Brain #11 (from the project Once Ocean), 2017 Jacquard loom digitally woven cotton tapestry Limited edition 1 of 5 Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist Photo: Mikayla Whitmore

Untitled (Riverscape), circa 1921 Oil on canvas

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George Inness Jr., a Paris-born American who enjoyed a successful career as a painter of softly glowing countrysides until his death in 1926, shows us a man who has inserted himself comfortably into nature by way of a machine, a small boat. The presence of the boat lets us know that this figure is free to row away any time he likes. Human inventiveness lets him enjoy the scenery on his own terms. Linda Alterwitz repudiates this vision of control by mingling the jagged lines of an MRI brain scan with a gray-toned photo of the desert. Here, the human being blends with nature whether they want it or not. This interdependence is part of our biology. “[E]verything, from dust to dogs, is connected,” as Alterwitz once said about a different series of her works. D.K. Sole

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Lawrence Acadiz

Jaime Quezada

Mountain Lion (Toho), n.d. Cottonwood, paint

Untitled (Blackware Vessel), n.d. Ceramic Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Donated in honor of Randy Plumley

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Hopi artist Lawrence Acadiz and Mata Ortiz potter Jaime Quezada merge old traditions with contemporary art to suit the expectations of modern viewers and draw visitors to their exhibitions. Acadiz’s cottonwood-carved katsina is quite removed from the rough, flat dolls that used to hang on the walls of Hopi homes or were carried around by Hopi children to teach them responsibility and good behavior. His action figure-like doll, with its bright colors and elaborate clothing, is positioned to attract a contemporary audience that includes non-Hopis who aren’t aware of the figure’s cultural significance. Likewise, the ancient Mogollon pottery that inspired generations of Mata Ortiz potters may have been intended for utilitarian purposes at one time, but Quezada’s burnished pot is made for a gallery, a museum, or the hands of a pottery connoisseur. Although Quezada has his own unique style, like all Mata Ortiz potters, he retains a connection to the original source material. Like Acadiz, he points us back to the past. Michael Freborg

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Wendy Kveck

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Sister, 2014 Oil, paint pen on canvas over panel Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

Le Chapeau épinglé (La fille de Berthe Morisot et sa cousine), circa 1894 Etching, on wove paper

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Louis Siegriest

Shawn Hummel

D. Street Virginia City, 1951 Mixed media on panel

Lines of Frey Study #1, 2015 Prismacolor and acrylic paint on birch panel Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of MCQ Fine Art LLC

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Shawn Hummel’s painting centers the intellect of a creator, a Californian architect named Albert Frey (1903–1998) whose hand has sketched out, in a series of clean lines, ideas for a house that might eventually materialize. Was it ever built? Where? What did it look like? Like all plans, it points to the future. Louis Siegriest’s painting of a road in Virginia City pulls us into a different tense. The image is a little stylized, but we can guess that it was painted from observation. (It helps if we already know that Siegriest spent part of the 1940s visiting the Nevadan town to memorialize old buildings before they were demolished.) Did an architect design these structures? Another creator like Frey? The painting doesn’t care. The people implied by this work are anonymous, the windows they have deserted are dark, the edge of the road they walk down has slipped away. We are haunted by the present. D.K. Sole

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Both artists commemorate deceased people they did not know. One portrays a popular landmark with accurate details and has commercial success in mind, while the other uses symbolism to memorialize a tragic loss of life. James A. Merigot gives us the Pyramid of Cestius, a cenotaph built for a Roman magistrate in 18–12 BCE. It was one of the illustrations he created for his 1798 publication, A Select Collection of Views and Ruins in Rome and Italy. The book sells itself by offering the dead up for our pleasure: “the venerable relics of antiquity may not be disregarded as useless for the purposes of amusement.” Sanchez takes a more somber view of death. His neon numbers honor forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College who were abducted by police officers (in collusion with cartel members) in Guerrero, Mexico in 2014 and never seen again. The disorderly arrangement of the numbers echoes the incompleteness of the investigation by the corrupt authorities while the color blue represents hope. Although the truth may never be known, the students’ memories will live on in the minds of loved ones and in memorials like this. Michael Freborg

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Utagawa Kunisada

Mary Warner

Untitled (Pink Flowers), n.d. Woodblock

Disco Garden Two, 2013 Oil on canvas Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

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Utagawa Kunisada (1786–1865), a well-known ukiyo-e artist who flexibly adjusted his style to meet the consumer demands of his era, has made his flowers small and unobtrusive. His 15x10” depiction of soft-colored blossoms, almost too faint to see, turns the plants into delicate, ornamental presences. Mary Warner’s painting reveals the influence of ukiyo-e technique in the flattening of detail within her plant stalks, but her boldly-colored petals are aggressively large. By making her canvas six feet tall, she takes away the diminutive, decorative overtones of traditional Western flower paintings and converts the plants into unsettling beings that stand on equal footing with their viewers. Michael Freborg

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Candice Lin

Ernst Barlach

Self Portrait: a Brief and True Report, 2004 Etching with Xerox Transfer Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Marcus Civin

Der Irrlicht, 1923 Woodblock

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Ernst Barlach and Candice Lin arrange illustrations and text to create page-like artworks, one encouraging us to have faith in the text and the other emphasizing mistrust. Barlach’s piece is one of twenty woodcuts in a series titled Goethe Walpurgisnacht. The clear, evenly-spaced pairing of picture and text makes it easy for his fellow Germans to understand that this is an excerpt from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, one of their nation’s cultural touchstones. Barlach’s use of Expressionism, a contemporary visual language, assures them that the century-old play is still meaningful. By comparison, Lin’s packed composition of drawings, photos, and handwriting makes her words hard to read. Combining colonial-era narratives about Indigenous Americans with pictures of nonNative people and telling us this is a “self portrait,” she prompts us to regard historical texts as ambiguous documents, open to manipulation, criticism, and change. Michael Freborg

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Abigail Goldman

Patricia Burns

Untitled, 2013 Plastic miniature/mixed

UnBalanced, 2014 Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist

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For our final duet we wanted to keep things very simple, merely pointing out that Abigail Goldman and Patricia Burns must have spent a lot of time setting up these situations that ask us to respond with the immediacy of puzzled surprise. Why are those tiny women pole dancing in a garden inside a piece of spherical topiary? How did those lamps wrangle themselves into such unnatural and unbalanced clusters? We don’t know how these things happened and we don’t know how they will resolve themselves. We are caught perpetually in the moment of questioning. D.K. Sole

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About the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art believes everyone deserves access to art that challenges our understanding of the present and inspires us to create a future that holds space for us all. Located on the campus of one of the most racially diverse universities in the United States, we strive to create a nourishing environment for those who continue to be neglected by contemporary art museums, including BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ groups. As the only art museum in the city of Las Vegas, we commit ourselves to leveling barriers that limit access to the arts, especially for first-time visitors. To facilitate access for low-income guests we provide free entry to all our exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and community activities. Our collection of artworks offers an opportunity for researchers and scholars to develop a more extensive knowledge of contemporary art in Southern Nevada. The Barrick Museum is part of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). On Instagram at @unlvmuseum and Twitter at @unlvmuseum. On Facebook at facebook.com/unlvmuseum About the UNLV College of Fine Arts Located on the main campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, the UNLV College of Fine Arts offers graduate degrees in Art, Architecture, Film, Music, Dance, Theatre, and Entertainment Engineering and Design, a unique discipline that combines engineering with technical theatre training. The College’s facilities include theaters and contemporary art galleries as well as the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art.

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About the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art The John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art (The Lilley) supports campus, regional and global viewers in an exploration of today’s world through intellectual and creative inquiry. This mission is informed by values articulated by the department and The Lilley board of advisors who believe that our human community stands to gain from the development of cognitive, behavioral and affective arts learning that leads to informed and intentioned living. Committed to extend the excellence of the University of Nevada, Reno, The Lilley collects, conserves, exhibits and shares art research with the understanding that both our cultural heritage and our future belong to the publics we serve. On Instagram at @thelilleymuseum. On Facebook at facebook.com/thelilleymuseum About the UNR College of Liberal Arts The College of Liberal Arts is central to the intellectual and artistic life of the University of Nevada, Reno. We contribute to the University’s efforts to provide undergraduate students with general and specialized education that will prepare them for advanced study, careers, and citizenship in a diverse world. The college offers a wide range of undergraduate and graduate degrees and supports major scholarly research and creative activity in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. The quality and effectiveness of the college’s departments and programs contribute greatly to the learning, discovery, and engagement of our students across all disciplines. Duet

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Duet was produced with the assistance and support of staff, interns, and volunteers at The John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art and the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art: Chloe Bernardo, Paige Bockman, Michael Freborg, Dan Hernandez, LeiAnn Huddleston, Kelly Keefe, Alisha Kerlin, Justin Manfredi, Emmanuel Muñoz, D.K. Sole, Sogand Tabatabaei, Marjorie Williams, and Vivian Zavataro.

John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art Vivian Zavataro Kelly Keefe Justin Manfredi Sogand Tabataei Marjorie Williams Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Alisha Kerlin Chloe Bernardo Paige Bockman Michael Freborg Dan Hernandez LeiAnn Huddleston Emmanuel Muñoz D.K. Sole 68

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