Works from the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collections
EXCERPTS 1
Excerpts
Works from the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collections
Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art University of Nevada, Las Vegas Las Vegas, Nevada August 17, 2020 – December 18, 2020
Contents Welcome 04
Excerpts: Works from the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collections
About the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection
About the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection
About the Las Vegas Art Museum Collection
About the UNLV College of Fine Arts
Searching 11
Peter Fend, Katarina Jerinic, Matthew Couper, Robert Beckmann, Julieta Gil, Andreana Donahue
Disillusionment 25
Brent Holmes, Diane Bush and Steven Baskin, Andrew Schoultz, Krystal Ramirez, Marisol Escobar, Fritz Scholder, Lance L. Smith, Branden Koch
Consumption 37
Victoria Reynolds, William Wareham, Daniel Samaniego, Wendy Kveck, China Adams
Reflection 45
John Torreano, Claudia DeMonte, Gary Stephan, Kathleen Nathan, Candice Lin, Ramiro Gomez, Kyla Hansen
Memories 57
Facades 65
Daniel Habegger, Llyn Foulkes, Harry Roseman, Matthew Couper, James Hough, Lew Thomas
Parts 75
Eugenia Butler, Richard Tuttle
Acknowledgments Photography Credits Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
Excerpts
Lance L. Smith, Neil Jenney, Noelle Garcia, Javier Sanchez, Deborah Aschheim
3
4 Excerpts
Collections are the backbone of a museum. Objects of both inquiry and enjoyment, they measure our ongoing search for new ways to understand ourselves and our world. Excerpts brings together artworks from all the different collections held at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, including the internationally renowned Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and works originally collected by the Las Vegas Art Museum. This is the first time a single major exhibition has featured works from every area of the Barrick in dialogue with one another.
Excerpts hopes to be a glimpse into the profound potential of public art collections, a curation that aims to provide the city with a context for the art we are making today and the art we will make in the future.
DKS
Excerpts 5
These artists have mapped out independent insights around a range of ideas. Some of them are thinking regionally as they look for fresh ways to envision the city of Las Vegas or address the crisis of our local water supply. Others are considering personal and social questions of memory, identity, American patriotism, and self-awareness. The process of art itself becomes a focus of examination, with different artists probing the limits of minimalist markmaking, the uncanny possibilities of edges and corners, and the task of depicting ephemeral phenomena with the textured physicality of paint.
About the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection
6 Excerpts
The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection embraces diversity. It encompasses a growing range of contemporary art in various media including painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography, with a special emphasis on work that considers different aspects of life in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. We house a substantial collection of objects from Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, along with postcolonial masks, retablos, textiles, and examples of the visual arts from ongoing North and South American indigenous traditions. As the collection develops, we increase our ability to provide visitors and researchers with a deeper picture of the arts in our region and beyond.
7
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel began collecting art in the 1960s on a modest budget. Rigorous and discerning, they admired artists who were working in then — unfamiliar disciplines such as minimalism and conceptualism. Their collection eventually encompassed works by more than 170 artists, including luminaries such as Sol LeWitt, Lynda Benglis, and Richard Tuttle. When their small New York apartment was finally overwhelmed, they donated the collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and created Fifty Works for Fifty States, a project that bestowed a selection of the works on every state in the country. The pieces at the Barrick constitute Nevada’s portion of their bequest.
Excerpts
About the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection
About the Las Vegas Art Museum Collection
8 Excerpts
Originally founded in 1950 as the Las Vegas Art League, the Las Vegas Art Museum (LVAM) presented exhibitions of American and international artists until recession-led budget cuts led to its closure in 2009. The exhibitions included an important survey of Southern California Minimalists as well as a groundbreaking curation of local artists, Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland. The LVAM collection is currently in the Barrick Museum’s care. Containing paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs from the 1930s through to the 2000s, it features a significant representation of artists from Nevada and California, with smaller numbers of artists from Europe, New Mexico, and other parts of the United States.
About the UNLV College of Fine Arts
9
Excerpts
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.
10
Excerpts
11
Excerpts
Searching
With an urge to search seething in our brains, we pick up our tools. What are we going to use? Do we want maps, divining rods, or, if we’re from the Southern Hemisphere like the Tahitian in Matthew Couper’s lithograph, the Southern Cross? Are we really searching, or are we pointing the tools at something we’ve already found? The maps we’ve purchased were created by a committee of strangers. How do we make them personal? Peter Fend responds with a smear of blood. Katarina Jerinic reinvents the stars. Do we consider, like Julieta Gil, the impact that the digital world makes on our understanding of a place? Is everything flattened, fragmented, jammed into equalizing formats? So why search? Why bother? The Biblical Deluge answers that question for the stressed people in Robert Beckmann’s The Hundred Year Flood. “Don’t look for a place,” the Flood tells them. “Look for salvation! A new condition of being!” “I’m flattered,” whispers the Luxor, raising its beam on the horizon. “No one’s ever called me that before.”
12 Excerpts Peter Fend has created a unique place for himself in contemporary art. His body of works — drawings, writings, altered maps, documents, and installations — collectively argues that global civilization should be reorganized in sympathy with the geographical dictates of natural water catchment systems. “Could a post-war art and architecture change the world, so bringing it more into line with nature?” he asks. “If art is ‘that by which nature makes more nature’,
13
Excerpts
Peter Fend Ivanpah Maps, 2018 Graphite, colored pencil, and blood on reconstructed map 72.5 x 83 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Courtesy of the artist 2018.01.01
then why not have art reconcile our civilization with nature?� Pursuing his vision, he has collaborated with scientists, television stations, data collectors, and organizations around the globe, shaping new proposals for sites as far apart as Puerto Rico and the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. This map was created in a Las Vegas hotel room one evening to illustrate a talk he gave at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art on January 16th, 2018, after his work, Comparable Sites for Water-Cycle Restoration, had been on view in the museum’s 2017 exhibition, Preservation, curated by Aurora Tang. The talk focused on regional water basins and the Ivanpah Solar Power facility across the border from Primm, NV, in California. He said the solar panels were a danger to the local ecosystems, particularly birds. An accidental cut on his hand produced the crescent-shaped smear of blood at top right.
Katarina Jerinic Astronomy of the Asphalt Ecliptic, 2018 Archival Pigment Print 37.75 x 44 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2019.04
14 Excerpts Using the word “star” as a pivot, Katarina Jerinic brings two types of map into an unfamiliar correspondence — maps that make sense of the urban landmarks we pass every day, and the constellation maps we use to create patterns among the remote phenomena we will never visit. The original version of the Asphalt Ecliptic was a series of five temporary signs installed outside the Barrick in the Donald H. Baepler Xeric Garden. Visitors walked from sign to sign, finding new constellations as they moved. After that project ended, Jerinic combined the signs into a single map, making a new artwork that could be framed, stored, and shown in perpetuity.
15
Excerpts
Matthew Couper The Chief Mourner and the Last Drops, 2017 Two color lithograph 23.25 x 17.25 inches Edition of 40 Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2019.15
16 Excerpts A New Zealander who has lived in Las Vegas for almost a decade, Matthew Couper is interested in cultural incongruities. “Because I’m not from here I’m trying to put together things that don’t go together,” he explains. In The Last Drop he merges imagery from the southern hemisphere with an iconic North American eagle and more universally applicable images of coffins, ghosts, and a dowsing rod to chronicle the drying of Lake Mead. The figure is borrowed from drawings
Excerpts 17 of a Tahitian Chief Mourner made by Tupaia and Herman Diedrich Sporing, two men who accompanied the British navigator Captain Cook on his first voyage to New Zealand in 1769-70. The machine in front of the mourner is a water pump. The straw in the bottom right corner represents the uptake pipes that connect Las Vegas to ever-deeper water supplies. Couper notes that the third and final straw added to Lake Mead was referred to as the “The Last Straw� when it was being installed in 2015. The constellation in the sky over the Mourner is the Southern Cross, a common sight south of the equator. The dowsing rod is accompanied by Alpha and Omega symbols, signs that something has run its course. Couper, a painter, made this lithograph on an invitational residency with Idem, a fine art printing studio in Montparnasse, Paris, France.
18 Excerpts Robert Beckmann’s Vegas Vanitas series returns to the theme of the sublime that suffused his earlier (1993) paintings of atomic testing in the desert. The imagery still includes Nevada, but now the sublime has been opened to a different range of allegorical and art-historical interpretations. By incongruously introducing Las Vegas casinos into the landscapes of paintings by long-
19
Excerpts
Robert Beckmann The Hundred Year Flood, 2001 Oil on linen 48 x 66 inches Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Glen Schaeffer 2003.01
dead European artists such as J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Cole, and, here, the classical French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin (1594 – 1665), he has also opened the sublime up to comedy. A lifelong environmentalist, Beckmann drew a connection between Las Vegas and the biblical disaster in Poussin’s mid-seventeenth century painting L’hiver, or Winter (The Deluge), after a devastating flood struck the city in 1999, wiping out fauna and vegetation along the Las Vegas Wash. In Beckmann’s version the original image is horizontally reversed and Poussin’s cloudy Mount Ararat has been replaced with the Luxor.
20 Excerpts
Julieta Gil Fragments from Las Vegas (diptych), 2017 Archival pigment print on Moab Entrada Rag 40 x 20 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2019.07
In 2017, Julieta Gil came to the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art to scan 3D images of objects from the museum’s collection of Mesoamerican ceramics. In Fragments from Las Vegas she alters the scans and displays them next to pictures of casinos from the city where the Barrick is located. Both sets of images are associated with particular places and times. The casinos are immediately identifiable as contemporary tourist attractions, while the styles and materials of the Mesoamerican objects situate them in the distant past. By fitting them both
Codex-style Plate, Lowland Maya, Nakbe region, Guatemala, Late Classic period, 600-900 BCE Painted ceramic Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Michael C. and Mannetta Braunstein 1986.18
21
Excerpts
Turtle Effigy Vessel, Colima, West Mexico, 100 BCE - 250 CE Ceramic Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Michael C. and Mannetta Braunstein 2009.03
into the same series of shapes, the artist suggests the existence of a third place, a digital world, where everything exists in the same time and space. This intersection of real and digital existences is the crux of Gil’s practice.
“Digital life,” she writes, “is as real as any other kind.”
The ceramics on display are the same ones Gil used in her work. Fragments from Las Vegas was created for Unsettled, a group exhibition organized by the Nevada Museum of Art. Curated by JoAnn Northrup in consultation with Ed Ruscha, the exhibition traveled to the Anchorage Museum, Alaska, and the Palm Springs Art Museum, California.
Effigy Vessel, West Mexico, Shaft Tomb culture, 100 BCE - 250 CE Ceramic Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Michael C. and Mannetta Braunstein 2014.02 Ring Base Bowl and Lid, Lowland Maya, Guatemala, Early Classic, 200 - 600 CE Ceramic 5.25 x 12.625 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Michael C. and Mannetta Braunstein 1988.02 Zoomorphic Figurine, Nicoya Zone, Guanacaste, 800 - 1100 CE Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Michael C. and Mannetta Braunstein 2017.04
22 Excerpts
Dowsing Rod (Missing Person) is one of a series of works Andreana Donahue made in response to a historical event that took place in Nevada’s Humboldt County in 1875. Two settlers, J.W. Rover and F.J. McWorthy, promised to pay a local Paiute man (whose name was not recorded) with a horse and saddle if he led them to a sulfur deposit near the eastern edge of the Black Rock Desert. The claim they filed on the deposit is a matter of public record, but it’s rumored that their guide never received his payment. Donahue, whose works typically reflect on local traditions and materials in different sites around the world, reimagined the story through a set of objects that meditated on the experience of searching through a difficult landscape for an “elusive promise” that might never be realized. Even viewers who trust the promise of their eyes need to think again — there is no wood in this stick.
Excerpts 23
Andreana Donahue Dowsing Rod (Missing Person), 2014 Paper, sequins, cotton 22 x 12 x 1 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2017.33
24
Excerpts
25
Excerpts
Disillusionment
When Andrew Schoultz writes “Made in China” in the corner of an American flag and erases the colors with gold leaf he’s inviting us to see that something is wrong. But if we view him through the lens of disillusionment then the artwork is right and the red, white, and blue flag we think we know, is the illusion. The flag is a crushed shopping cart and a triangle of cat hair. Cats are incoherently distressed by their condition. Distress radiates to every corner. What illusion are they reacting to? Everything? Should we glance around in panic? Krystal Ramirez looks through the museum to find herself, but she isn’t there. Unlike the rest she has a solution: show me, me. If Lance L. Smith fills the entire canvas with aggression then what would the opposite of aggression look like? The artist doesn’t tell us so we’ll have to make it up ourselves. Is Smith asking us to find a third way beyond illusion and disillusionment? Can’t we just leave it up to Fritz Scholder’s Bicentennial Indian and his smudge stick? Dump it on his shoulders? Hand it over to Lucretia Mott and Mary Cady Stanton? They’ve had some practice at this, haven’t they?
26 Excerpts
Brent Holmes Superbia Civilis, 2016 Found object, spray paint, mixed media 58 x 48 x 24 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Dan and Lori Fischer 2017.05
Brent Holmes investigates the margins of our urban landscape for places where classical philosophy finds an echo in contemporary mores. Discovering this semi-crushed shopping trolley in a car park, he realized its flattened, undulating surface had offered him an opportunity to visually connect two different sets of ideas that occur contextually around commercialism and the American flag. Superbia Civilis originally appeared in Ignominious Refuse, Holmes’ 2016 solo exhibition at the WinchesterDondero Cultural Center in Winchester, NV. Throughout the exhibition he used language and imagery to draw comparisons between modern public life and manifestations of Ancient Rome.
27
Excerpts
28
Diane Bush and Steven Baskin Make a Merkin Great Again (Merkin #4), 2019 Crocheted hand-spun pussy-cat hair, patriotic ribbons, veteran flag frame, spray paint 12 x 17 x 3.5 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist In memory of the Chinese Cat God, Li Shou 2019.08
Excerpts
The Make a Merkin Great Again series continues Diane Bush’s long engagement with political satire. Her previous projects include Dishing it Out-2016, a curated sequence of exhibitions leading up to the 2016 presidential election, and Imbleachment, a set of works that criticized the federal government’s censorship of the Iraq War by altering photographs of politicians with bleach. Merkin points the viewer towards a more “What is a Merkin? complicated cluster of associations, As early as the 1400s sex setting up references to the United workers, and others would States flag and using woven cat shave their privates to prevent hair to hint at a connection to the colloquial term, “pussy.” The title of lice. To beautify themselves, the work, which was chosen by Bush’s merkins, or genital wigs, were husband Steven Baskin, combines an created. Today they are used allusion to a contemporary political in film and on stage to obtain a slogan with the word for a pubic wig.
desired ‘look’.”
The United States flag in Andrew Schoultz’s Made in China (Gold Flag) is genuine but the additions are crafted. The liquid that seems to dribble down the surface is a static application of gold leaf. Throughout his practice Schoultz has conveyed meaning through combinations of icons that are sometimes communally understood — the flag is one example — and at other times create resonance by hinting at a consistent private vocabulary. Gold, as a substance, comes freighted with centuries of symbolic weight, but the phrase at the bottom of the flag, “Made in China,” only acquired its current potency over the past few decades, as the People’s Republic of China became a major global exporter of factory-built goods. Schoultz loads the Stars and Stripes with an atmosphere of international commerce and leaves the viewers to make their own judgment. He notes that the flag he used as his canvas was, itself, made in China.
Excerpts 29
Andrew Schoultz Made In China (Gold Flag), 2018 Acrylic and gold leaf on American flag 20 x 52 x 2.25 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of anonymous donor 2018.09
30 Excerpts
Krystal Ramirez I Want To See, 2017 Bible paper, nylon thread, acrylic paint, acrylic medium 144 x 168 x 1 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2017.27
Krystal Ramirez uses process-based repetition in analog media to articulate intimate moments of absence, vulnerability, and desire. She created this work as an institutional critique of galleries and museums, highlighting the absence of a consistent Latinx presence in the contemporary art world. An earlier iteration of I Want to See was installed in the Clark County Government Center Rotunda from January - March, 2017. This version was created during the artist’s 2017-18 residency at Juhl Las Vegas.
31
Excerpts
Marisol Escobar Woman’s Equality, 1975 Lithograph on paper 41.5 x 29.5 inches Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Lorillard 1976.01.09
In 1848, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton launched the Women’s Rights Movement in the United States with a two-day convention in Seneca Falls, New York. When the Lorillard Tobacco Company approached Marisol Escobar (known mononymously as Marisol) with a request for a print to mark the 1975 U.S. Bicentennial, the artist responded by commemorating the partnership of the two women with a lithograph. Marisol’s other portraits were sometimes satirical, but this picture depicts Mott and Stanton without irony. As with many of the wooden sculptural figures for which the artist is best known, the faces are depicted in detail and there is an emphasis on the position of the hands.
32 Excerpts Created between 1967 and 1980, the paintings and prints in Fritz Scholder’s Indian series changed the art world’s understanding of what Native American art could be. Resisting the contemporary appetite for stylized figures immersed in traditional pastimes or mythologies, he depicted the incongruities that arose when a people tried to maintain old ways and simultaneously move into a modern, colonized world.
33
Excerpts
Fritz Scholder Bicentennial Indian, 1975 Lithograph on paper 22 x 30 inches Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Lorillard 1976.01.12
By the time the Lorillard Company commissioned him to make a print for their 1975 Kent Bicentennial Portfolio he had already produced at least one important set of Indian prints, the Indians Forever lithographs of 1970. The pairing of a Native man with a U.S. flag recurs throughout the Indian series, from Mad Indian no. 3 (1970), to American Portrait with Flag (1979). The feathered object in the figure’s hand is traditionally used to fan herbal smoke in cleansing ceremonies. An enrolled member of the Luiseño Mission Tribe, Scholder died in 2005.
“I want the Indian to know himself,” he wrote in 1973. “This is essential if he wishes to be free.”
34 Excerpts
Lance L. Smith Malevolent Waters (Abyss), 2018 Oil on canvas 20 x 20 x 1 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2019.11
Malevolent Waters is part of Lance Smith’s Moral Monsters series, a set of nine paintings depicting the mouths of snakes, dogs, and sharks with their teeth bared. Smith takes the title of the series from a statement made during a 1963 television interview by the African-American writer and activist James Baldwin. Baldwin says he is “terrified by the moral apathy” of white people who “really don’t think I’m human.” He continues: “I base this on their conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters.” Smith moves this idea of violent conduct into the figures of symbolic animals, placing each viewer, no matter who they are, in an immediate relationship with an irrational, hostile force.
35
Excerpts
Branden Koch Companions of Fear, 2018 Seven color silkscreen print on Strathmore 140# polar white paper Edition 15/30 28 x 22 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2020.01
Borrowing his title from an ominous 1942 oil painting by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, Branden Koch converts Magritte’s growth of owls into a bouquet of open-mouthed cats. He says he was inspired by “cultural symbolism such as the hand-knit pussy hat, vagina dentata folklore … and several current social political conditions on this planet we call home.” Much of the artist’s recent work has been created in response to American politics, from Drawing in a Time of Fear and Lies (2018) to Bald Ego (2017), a series that critic John Yau compared to the anti-Nixon cartooning of Philip Guston. This eight-screen silkscreen print was created from an original gouache painting.
36
Excerpts
Give us plaster! Give us graphite! Give us paint!
37
Excerpts
Consumption
William Wareham’s Bite opens its mouth upwards, ready to create a predatory relationship with anything. Victoria Reynolds gives us the other side of the equation, a wallto-wall vision of edible raw meat about the size of your face. Daniel Samaniego’s horror masks take on both roles, consumer and consumed, consuming themselves in the mirror (which has broken), imagining other people consuming them, and growing more cartoony while the figure in Wendy Kveck’s painting submits to its own distortion with a sneer. So people consume the face of this woman, her cake frosting makeup and her cake frosting drippy body falling off the felt tip cloud of its nervous system? Not a problem, she’s an equal participant, she’ll take a bite herself. China Adams responds to all these visions of infinite consumption (there’s always a possibility of food for Bite, always staring eyes ready to meet Samaniego’s faces) by taking her weekly accumulations, putting them in confinement, and having them notarized. There we go: at least this little part of the cycle is complete. Complete? Maybe silently, at night, in the dark of the gallery. Then morning arrives, the lights come on, we walk into the room with our art-goer consuming brains ready to go, and we start it all up again.
Victoria Reynolds Ruban Rouge, 2007 Oil on panel 15.25 x 12.25 x 1.75 inches Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Roger Thomas and Arthur Libera 2007.18.01
38 Excerpts
Victoria Reynolds creates opulent depictions of raw meat. Her work not only alludes to the Western art canon’s rich history of still life painting, with its abundance of food exposed to our gaze, it also invites comparison to another painting tradition — the human nude. Nudes, like her meat, are often arranged seductively. Usually we are expected to separate the two categories: one is food, one is not. Reynolds works to bring them together, underlining her intentions by using a canvas about the size of a human face and placing it inside a pretty frame as if it is a portrait. By putting comprehensible messages together in unfamiliar ways, she invites us to blur the distinctions we draw between different types of flesh.
William Wareham has been working with recycled steel since the 1960s. He is one of several twentieth-century American sculptors who began making abstract sculptures out of welded metal after widespread mass production created an abundance of scrap and industrial developments made welding technology widely accessible. Like so many other artists at the time, they were consciously reshaping art to suit the material aesthetics of the modern age. His purpose, he has said, is to bring “a great sense of visual delight to our lives” by creating objects with “dynamic relationships” between forms, “tension in the negative volumes” and “contrasting scale.”
Excerpts 39
William Wareham Bite, 1976 Steel 16 x 20 x 15 inches Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Patrick Duffy and Wally Goodman, Goodman Duffy Collection 2006.06.04
40 Excerpts
Daniel Samaniego Hydra III: Mimesis Nemesis, 2012 Graphite, conte, and ink on mounted paper 120 x 192 x 18 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2017.10
Daniel Samaniego combines fantastic and grotesque imagery to explore the interplay between private personas and public depictions of queer beauty. A work like Hydra III is a controlled deployment of camp sensibility, binding intensely-heightened emotional drama — jagged edges, tear-stained cheeks, and monstrous faces that look like horror movie masks—to the cool realism of his drawing style.
41
Excerpts
Daniel Samaniego Hydra III: Mimesis Nemesis (detail), 2012 Graphite, conte, and ink on mounted paper Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2017.10
Wendy Kveck Munch, 2014 Oil, paint pen, oil stick on canvas 48 x 36 x 1 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Thomas Wong 2018.06
42 Excerpts
Many of Wendy Kveck’s paintings are developed from photographs of her live performance pieces. Munch had its genesis in a 2014 performance that took place at VAST space projects, a now-closed gallery in Henderson, NV, during a pop-up manifestation of the interstate curatorial project, MAS Attack. The performance, Undone, was, in turn, inspired by images from the artist’s Hybrid Princess series, a suite of drawings derived from found digital photographs of drunk college-aged women at parties. (Vulnerability, consumption, women, and chaos, have been recurring themes throughout Kveck’s oeuvre.) Beginning with a blind contour drawing of the subject, she has created an energetic surface that highlights the dripping, smearing materiality of the paint and the contrasting scribble of the oil stick.
China Adams finds inspiration in the ambiguous distinctions we create between documentation and artwork. In the case of Winter Garbage Chunks her viewers are invited to develop a more complex idea of the piece after they have realized that it includes both the freestanding white ‘chunks’ and the framed form that hangs on the wall nearby. Typed, signed, and notarized, the document goes to a lot of trouble to formalize information that most artists allow to remain unstated: the fact that the artwork in front of us is a record of a specific period of time, and that it incorporates a series of actions and decisions on the part of the person who created it. The text also reveals a physical aspect of the sculptures that would otherwise remain hidden—the nature of the material that gives them their bulk.
43
Excerpts
China Adams Winter Garbage Chunks, 2008 Plaster, assorted garbage, notarized document 10.5 x 18 x 18 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2017.07
44
Excerpts
45
Excerpts
Reflection
Claudia DeMonte gazes towards her paper pulp television cube, and we gaze between the cathode ray TV-screen curves of John Torreano’s T.V. Bulge. Gary Stephan provides a diagram of the relationship between ourselves and Bulge – twin blobs staring at each other. A reflective artwork includes the distance between the object doing the reflecting and the object being represented by the reflection. What does distance look like? Ramiro Gomez’s calm gaze stands back and takes time to absorb the context that the two men in the painting don’t see. Living in the moment, their eyes (if they had eyes) must be filled with the horse’s mane in front of them and the dusty section of track waiting for the next couple of trots. But us? We see the track ahead and behind their bodies. We pause to describe the graffiti on the brick wall, and the sky overhead. We’re not there, after all. We can remove ourselves from the landscape by switching it to black and white. We send our thoughts the long way ‘round through the bows and lightbulbs of an artist from the ‘70s. Colonialism isn’t dead, but we picture it through its artifacts: certain antique styles of text and engraving. Is our friend alive and embodied? Let’s draw them “as [a] Corpse”. Distance! Now the present stands back, it stops assaulting us, and we can begin to consider a different view.
46 Excerpts
John Torreano T.V. Bulge, 1969 Acrylic on canvas 90.5 x 120 x 1.25 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Mary and Weston J. Naef In Memory of Frances Marie and William David McNabola 2019.02
After immersing herself in feminism in the 1970s, Claudia DeMonte wanted to make artworks “about things that weren’t often made ... the routine things women do.” The figures in her longrunning pulp paper doll series carry out everyday activities, like making the bed, washing dishes, or, here, watching television. In front of the figure we have hung John Torreano’s T.V. Bulge, a painting from the beginning of the artist’s exploration of dots. Torreano sees the dots as an additional facet in the illusion of space the painting represents. They remind us that not every viewer sees an artwork from the same position. We don’t all focus on the same spot. Like DeMonte, he is challenging the idea of hierarchy. Is there a ‘right’ place to view a painting? Are there ‘correct’ activities that sculptors should depict?
47
Excerpts
Claudia DeMonte Untitled (Claudia Watching TV), 1986 Papier-mache (celluclay), acrylic and glue 5.75 x 8 x 8 inches The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2008 Vogel 2009.01.13
Gary Stephan Untitled, 1988 Acrylic on linen 24 x 18 x 0.5 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Steven Shane In honor of mother, Sonia Shaenboen 2018.07
48 Excerpts
Untitled is haunted by the unstated presence of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774 - 1840). Gary Stephan’s blue, white, and black palette suggests Friedrich’s crepuscular landscapes. The human figures who contemplate the scenery in Friedrich’s pictures are, however, absent. Stephan wanted to explore the mood of the German artist’s work without perpetuating the notion of a heroic human figure and decided to instead use abstract shapes, traced from cardboard templates, to hint at the role of a protagonist without fulfilling it. The undulation that runs diagonally across the skylike background is one example of the templates he created. Solidly black it posits the existence of two worlds, one in which skies are possible, and another that exists two-dimensionally, as pure shape, affected by the pressure of the edges and corners that cut against it. The surreal atmosphere this creates is a frequent feature of his painting.
49
Most of the photographs in Kathleen Nathan’s Inside Brooklyn series are in color. By choosing black and white for Inside Brooklyn “Evening,” she emphasizes the shadowy contrasts of pattern and shape in the fore- and background of the scenery outside the window. Nathan, a New York state native who graduated from UNLV with a MFA in 1991, chose her window as a site for photography after moving to New York City in 2011. “I was really disoriented by my new surroundings,” she says. Watching the city from her apartment “helped me to get my bearings and my location.” The calm apartment enabled her to establish a distance between herself and the urgency of the streets. The series as a whole prioritizes moments of contemplation and solitude, sometimes literalising the idea of “focus” with the inclusion of glass prisms.
Excerpts
Kathleen Nathan Inside Brooklyn “Evening,” 2012 Archival inkjet print on fine art paper 12 x 18.5 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2017.20
50 Excerpts
Candice Lin Self portrait: a Brief and True Report, 2004 Etching with Xerox Transfer 18 x 14.625 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Marcus Civin 2020.02
Candice Lin Yoga Divinations, circa 2009-2010 Watercolor and ink on cut paper 20.625 x 13.875 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Marcus Civin 2020.02
Candice Lin is possibly best known for her large – sometimes room-sized – installations that illustrate overlooked aspects of worldwide colonial history through a radical array of materials including urine, silkworms, clocks, and dirt. Like most artists, she continues to be active even when she is not making work directly intended for museums or gallery shows. The works on display here were gifts for one of her collaborators, Marcus Civin. Although they are not part of her official oeuvre we can see
Excerpts 51
Candice Lin Portrait of MC as Corpse, circa 2009-2010 Watercolor and ink on paper 15.375 x 19.1875 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Marcus Civin 2020.02
parallel ideas running between the different bodies of work, from monstrous human figures similar to those in her formal drawings such as Preparation for a Re-Gendered Society (2009) and Sycorax’s Collections (Happiness) (2011), to invented ethnographies that suggests a sympathetic link to her large-scale reimaginings of indigenous histories. Just as Lin concerns herself with the parts of history that official records neglect, so objects like these can remind us that every artist’s life contains works that remain off the record.
Candice Lin Talisman, 2007 Board, paper, ink, pencil, thread Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Marcus Civin 2020.02 Candice Lin Reflexology Adornment, circa 2009-2010 Shrinky Dink, ink, chain, feather Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Marcus Civin 2020.02
52 Excerpts
53
Excerpts
54
Ramiro Gomez Los Jinetes (East Bonanza Rd & North Nellis Blvd), 2019 Acrylic on cardboard 48.875 x 83.25 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2019.12
Excerpts
Ramiro Gomez uses painting to draw attention to people whose jobs make them socially invisible. Living in Los Angeles, he often focuses on the migrant workers whose labor keeps the houses of the rich looking immaculate. The ephemerality of his cardboard surface corresponds to the potential transience of the people who constitute his subject matter — a transience he learned firsthand while he was working as a nanny. Gomez painted Los Jinetes while he was in Las Vegas for his two-person show with Nevada artist Justin Favela, Sorry for the Mess. Driving around town one morning, he noticed men riding horses in a vacant lot near the intersection in the title. The persistence of a rural occupation in this low-key urban setting moved him enough to film it. Once he arrived at the museum, he sat down and turned the scene into a painting.
The parallels and contrasts between her recently-pregnant sister’s physical transformation and the psychologically transformative events in her own life inspired Hansen to include a visual reference to a 2018 short story about the different metamorphoses of two women. Written by Amy Bonnaffons and titled Horse, the story is narrated by a woman who turns herself into a horse at the same time that her friend is trying to become a mother. Hansen says she was creating the work at a time when she had decided that it was important “to cultivate and trust one’s own instinct. … Not changing one’s nature but recognizing something that had always been there.”
55
Kyla Hansen’s title points us towards two people she was thinking about when she made this piece: her sister Bri, and Ree Morton, an artist who created an influential body of postminimalist feminist work between 1968 and her death in a car crash in 1977 at the age of forty. The forms in Hansen’s work make clear references to Morton’s Maternal Instincts, a 1974 wall-mounted sculpture that incorporates a hoop-shaped banner draped above the initials of Morton’s three children illuminated with light bulbs.
Excerpts
Kyla Hansen Maternal Instincts (for BRee), 2018 Ceramic stoneware, lights 24 x 22 x 6 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2019.14
56
Excerpts
57
Excerpts
Memories
These vanished people are too untidy. They keep leaving their things behind. Carrying on with our lives, we go stumbling across their earrings, their cigarettes, the discarded numbers four and three (which have become unusually heavy), and the hanging gesture they made with their arm as they looked at a painting on our studio wall. They were visiting us so we could make a formal portrait, but we liked the informal pose better, so we sketched that instead. The decision only took a moment; the pen was in our hands. There it is now, behind plexiglass. Is that a memory? Why are we all expected to look at the photograph that Deborah Aschheim chose to draw? The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was not a memory on the day it was taken. That state of affairs changed so soon afterwards that the photograph acquired significance through extreme proximity. Walking away from the famous event, we look back at the crowd of people who are still walking towards it. They belong to the camera. In our eyes, their pen-made world is full of gaps.
58
Lance L. Smith When I’m With You (Dayton), 2017 Oil on canvas 12 x 12 x 1 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist In memory of Angela C. Smith 2017.17
Excerpts
Attentive to the fluidity of memory and representation, Las Vegas artist Lance Smith uses drawing, painting, and performance to highlight the profound reality of marginalized experiences. When I’m with You (Dayton) is one of a series of paintings created in memory of the artist’s mother, Angela. Smith paints her from the perspective of a child being held against her shoulder, using a single material object — her earring — as a central reference point.
Neil Jenney drew this portrait of the collector Herbert Vogel while Vogel was in his New York studio looking at art on the wall. Working spontaneously after a previous attempt to draw the subject in a more formal pose, the artist used a sheet of the graph paper he typically uses to sketch out his paintings. The grid usually serves as a guide when Jenney wants to transfer his drawing to the canvas, but here it becomes an element of the finished work. The center of The Collector is occupied by a vertical line, creating a division between the figure and the object of his gaze that might remind viewers of Jenney’s earlier series of works, the so-called Bad Paintings (1968 – 70) whose titles pointed to a polarized relationship between two objects: Forest and Lumber (1969), Threat and Sanctuary (1969), Girl and Doll (1969). By the time he drew The Collector, he was making the kind of painting that Vogel is looking at, a coherent, horizontal composition surrounded by a heavy frame, often with a protruding ‘mantlepiece’ below the image.
Excerpts 59
Neil Jenney The Collector, 1999 Xerox (on paper) and graphite mounted on board 47.125 x 36.125 inches The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2008. 2009.01.18
60 Excerpts
Noelle Garcia Cigarettes, 2015 Glass beads and thread 2.857 x 0.25 x 0.125 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2017.22
Noelle Garcia uses a range of media to shape a personal response to the complexities of family relationships and indigenous identity. Her reimagined cigarettes bring Native American traditions of beadwork to bear on symbols of pervasive, commonplace cultural change. An enrolled member of the Klamath tribes, she has been a fellow of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian and the Nevada Arts Council.
61
Excerpts
Javier Sanchez Ayotzi, 2015 Neon, metal 30 x 20 x 5 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2015.14
62 Excerpts
Javier Sanchez’s mute number doesn’t tell us what he is counting, but his title gives us a clue. On September 26th, 2014, forty-three students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College (“Ayotzi” for short) were abducted on their way to a protest in the Mexican state of Guerrero. They have not been seen alive again. The inadequate response of the authorities – some of whom were in collaboration with the police and cartel members who allegedly carried out the abduction – sparked outraged protests across Mexico. Sanchez describes the disturbed posture of his numbers as a response to the incompleteness of the official inquiry into the murders. Like the investigation, his “43” will never be set right. The blue glow, he says, represents hope.
Deborah Aschheim’s works revolve around the formation and retrieval of memories. In many of her drawings, including this one, she focuses on politics as a site of communal memory, consulting archives to find source photographs connected to an event that every American who was alive at the time is expected to remember — the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963. The source photograph for November 21 was taken the day prior to the assassination, when the presidential couple attended the dedication of the new Aerospace Medical Health Center at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Mimicking the imperfect nature of memory, she produces a superficially photographic image that reflects the idiosyncrasies of the hand guiding the pen and leaves some areas ‘forgotten’ or blank. By choosing a traumatic memory, she invites us to speculate on the future of more contemporary communal traumas, such as the 9/11 attacks, or the October 1st shooting in Las Vegas. Aschheim was a UNLV Artist-in-Residence in 2015.
63
Excerpts
Deborah Aschheim November 21, 1963 (San Antonio), 2013 Ink on Duralar 39 x 35 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2019.10
64
Excerpts
65
Excerpts
Facades
Standing in front of Harry Roseman’s Three Doors, we know that no matter how suggestive those doors seem, there’s no way we could ever access the imaginary rooms this compressed relief is pretending to conceal, any more than we can get into the building behind Daniel Habegger’s square of sunstruck windows in Plaza Towers. Do we really want to go there? The rooms would be small and boring, not as nice as the facade, not as carefully considered, maybe even completely unrelated to the frontage. Lew Thomas took such painstaking care with this ruler; he must know it’s not here with us. Or maybe it is, and we’re too distracted by the photograph to notice it? Those rough, textured rocks have to be more interesting than the real thing, and those signs are so striking, so mythologically freighted, that they warn us not to visit the casinos and feel disappointed. The marks inside the curve of the ad-like template in Gratuitous Gesture deliberately imitate the sweeping gestures of abstract expressionism, pointing out, perhaps, that every painting is an advertisement for its own methodology.
66 Excerpts
Daniel Habegger Plaza Tower, 1997 Oil on canvas on wooden stretcher 27.75 x 29.75 x 0.75 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2015.12
Representing the visible effects of light has been an enduring challenge for painters. Plaza Tower can be distinguished from many of Daniel Habegger’s other light-inspired works by the visibility of the grid that anchors the image to the canvas. This difference stems from the real-world object that gave the light its shape. Where paintings such as Clearance (also in the Barrick collection) bury their structural cross-hatching inside a diffuse glow that represents sunshine passing through the haze of a natural landscape, Plaza Tower found its brisk clarity in the glitter of light hitting the rectangular windows of the North Tower of the Plaza Tower Hotel & Casino in downtown Las Vegas.
Excerpts 67
Llyn Foulkes Five Postcards, 2006 Mixed media on panel 35 x 40 x 1.5 inches Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of the Academy of the Arts and Sciences 2008.08.01
Most of Llyn Foulkes’ paintings of rocks were made in the late 1960s. He depicted rocks scratched, scarred, isolated in wooden frames, cropped, blurred, and set apart from their surroundings on postcards. The artist described them later as “a Southern California thing … Los Angeles used to be known for its rocks.” In the early 1970s he made a conscious decision to change his focus, but rocks, though less prominent in his work, continued to play a role in his satirical commentary on commercialism, selfhood, and the American landscape. When he talks about his work he emphasizes the contrast between flatness and depth, and the importance of progressive effort. “It all comes out through the process. Everything that I do comes out through the process. It’s like you draw and you erase, and you draw and you erase, and it vanishes and it comes in, and that’s the way my paintings operate.” Foulkes spoke about his work at the Barrick in 2013.
68 Excerpts The doors in Harry Roseman’s sculpture draw attention to the cropped flatness of the relief by teasing us with the possibility that there might be other rooms in the impossibly narrow area behind them. At the time this sculpture was made, Roseman’s work was focused on paradoxes of perception, the possibility that an artwork could be physically small and nonetheless appear to contain a vast space. Considering Three Doors, he talks about “compressing the space and relief in relationship to
69
Excerpts
Harry Roseman Three Doors, 1978-1982 Bronze and patina 10.5 x 16.25 x 2.25 inches Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Patrick Duffy and Wally Goodman, Goodman Duffy Collection 2008.14.04
what I actually saw. … Half of what we see is what we know and not what we’re seeing, and it’s not easy to jettison that information, because it’s so much a part of how we move through the world.” He suggests that his method of sculpting his perception might have been fueled by his childhood fascination with Egyptian art and the miniaturized worlds of train sets and dioramas. Based in New York City, he mentions his trips to Las Vegas to visit family, and points out that the façade of the New York-New York Hotel & Casino is another kind of flattened building scape.
70 Excerpts
Matthew Couper Horror Vacui! (Aladdin), 2013 Oil on linen 11 x 14 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of MCQ Fine Art, LLC 2019.03
These paintings were made at a time when Couper was drawing metaphorical comparisons between Las Vegas and vampires, particularly Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s 1929 film, Nosferatu. When Murnau’s attempts to procure the rights to Dracula were unsuccessful he made his own version of the story by changing the names of the characters in a bid to evade the author’s estate. Just as Nosferatu points towards Dracula, so casinos like Caesars Palace and Paris Las Vegas point towards the cities they imitate. In these Horror Vacui works, the artist hints at his interest in Murnau by giving each
painting the same vignette lighting as the movie — dark around the edges and brighter at the center. He suggests a parallel between the immortality of a vampire and the city’s habit of imploding its landmarks and resurrecting them. Ambiguously half-rising, half-lying in their coffins, the classic signs are accompanied by a mirror and a knotted rope, significant objects in vampire mythology. Couper explains that he builds his paintings by beginning with the object farthest back in space — in this case, the coffins — and layering other objects — in this case, the signs — successively on top of them. Every object is completely painted, even when another object partly covers it.
Excerpts 71
Matthew Couper Horror Vacui! (International), 2014 Oil on linen 11 x 14 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of the artist 2019.15
72
James Hough Gratuitous Gesture, 2005 Acrylic on canvas 88.25 x 68.25 x 1.5 inches Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection Gift of Sampsel Preston Photography 2019.09
James Hough Polymonochrome, 2005 Acrylic on canvas 88 x 68 x 1.6875 inches Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of the artist 2007.05.01
Excerpts
Polymonochrome and Gratuitous Gesture first appeared together at Patricia Faure Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, in 2005. Like James Hough’s other paintings in the TAF series they look like advertisements for an imaginary company with a shield-shaped logo. “At the time I loved glossy, full-page magazine ads, which probably inspired the paintings more than anything else,” he recalls. Blurring the line between advertising and fine art, he suggests a link between the two kinds of media, drawing connections to (in Gratuitous Gesture) abstract expressionist gesture-making, and (in Polymonochrome) the soakedin tones of color field painting. “The effect I was going for, in retrospect, was that sublime effect of a big Rothko,” he says. “Spiritual, beautiful yet ominous, too.”
“If there is a code to my photography,” wrote Lew Thomas in 1971, “it is clarity — work detached from the … influences of good taste and mystery.” The “clarity” of Ruler sets us up to work our way through a series of illusions, as the object that appears to be a life-sized ruler turns out to be a composite artwork made from five different photographs. A crucial figure in the Bay Area photography scene of the 1970s, Thomas created a body of work that used black and white imagery to draw attention to photography’s artificiality, testing its ability to carry or reject meaning, reference, and the movement of space and time. He was an active promoter of other photographers’ work, co-founding a publishing company devoted to experimental photography and curating the landmark group exhibition, Photography and Language, at San Francisco’s La Mamelle Art Center in 1976.
73
Excerpts
Lew Thomas Ruler, 1975 Black and white photographs 5.25 x 49.125 x 1.5 inches Goodman Duffy Collection Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Patrick Duffy and Wally Goodman 2006.06.39
74
Excerpts
75
Excerpts
Parts
The red margin goes at the top. The artists are answering questions about truth and lies. How many drawings? How many answers? As many as you like. Eugenia Butler and Richard Tuttle have built infinity machines. No matter how many parts – pages or artworks – you put into them, they still function. The titles come with subclauses, Volume I, and Box 11, Group 13, to drive home the message that these two collections of smaller parts are themselves parts within two even larger wholes. Dreaming, you imagine that one day, somewhere outside the scope of this exhibition, you will see a collage from Volume II or drawings from Box 12. Butler was planning to compile four volumes of the Book of Lies before her project was cut short at book three. Why four? Why not plan for five volumes, or fifteen, or fifty, or five hundred? Stop, stop, stop. What are you trying to do? Human beings have limits. Entropy happens. The artist’s attention has to move on eventually. (But in our imaginations these accumulative projects can keep growing forever.)
Eugenia Butler 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. 14.375 x 11.875 x 1 inches Las Vegas Art Museum Collection Gift of Patrick Duffy and Wally Goodman, Goodman Duffy Collection 2007.19.7
76 Excerpts
Eugenia P. Butler was a conceptual artist. From the 1960s onward she used text, drawing, and processes of live conversation to consider our perception of our interior and exterior selves. Her Book of Lies is a three-volume project created in collaboration with artists from around the world. The artists were invited to contemplate two questions: “What is the lie with which I am most complicit?” and “What is the truth that most feeds my life?” Butler described Lies in 2007 as “a dialogue” conducted through “the slippery world of the visual and the poetic. … The artworks are made by each individual artist using the materials and methods most organic to his or her working method. The portfolios are created in collaboration with an artist, a writer and myself.” Volume I, the one in front of you, is focused on lies in love. The two subsequent volumes considered the appearance of a lie, and the texture of a lie. Butler died in 2008.
77
Excerpts
78
Excerpts
79
Excerpts
80
Excerpts
81
Excerpts
82
Excerpts
83
Excerpts
84
Excerpts
85
Excerpts
86 Excerpts
Richard Tuttle Loose Leaf Notebook Drawings - Box 11, Group 13, 1980-82 Watercolor on notebook paper 8 x 10.5 inches The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, 2008 2009.01.45
Typical painting surfaces, like canvas or wood panel, are selected because they can withstand the application of paint without warping. Richard Tuttle has chosen a surface that does the opposite. His notepad paper buckles and takes on an independent shape when the wet paint soaks into its fibers. The movements of the artist’s hand have not only created colored shapes,
Excerpts 87 they have also made a set of specific low-relief sculptures. Tuttle, who has produced a large number of these pieces, is known for carefully-conceived artworks that give us the opportunity to pay attention to details that might not otherwise cross our minds—details as small as the crinkles in these papers, or the precise layout of the five holes that contribute to a feeling of continuity between one sheet and the next. In talking about his oeuvre he refers to notions of transcendence, suggesting that the importance of art lies in its ability to give us unexpected and inexpressible moments of freedom.
88
Excerpts
89
Excerpts
Acknowledgements
90 Excerpts
The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art would like to acknowledge everyone whose hard work made this exhibition possible. Thank you to our staff, who have persevered through the strange circumstances of 2020: Chloe Bernardo, Paige Bockman, Dan Hernandez, LeiAnn Huddleston, Emmanuel Muùoz, D.K. Sole, and the Barrick’s Executive Director, Alisha Kerlin. Thank you to our invaluable volunteers and interns: Stephanie Fuh, Trevor Ganske, Sophia Ho, Andrea Noonoo, Sean Patrick, Becca Schwartz, John Stoelting, and Belen Torres. Our signs and labels would not be the same without the help of RC Wonderly and everybody at the Makerspace. We are grateful for the support we receive from the UNLV College of Fine Arts and the College of Fine Arts Dean Nancy Usher; as well as UNLV Facilities Management, especially Jay Hayes, Robert McInerney, UNLV Grounds, and UNLV Custodial Services. Designed by Chloe J. Bernardo Written by D.K. Sole
All other photographs by Chloe J. Bernardo
91
Image provided by the artist: 14, 15 Image provided by the artist: 16 Photograph provided by the artist: 18 Photograph provided by Nevada Museum of Art: 20 Photograph by Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art staff: 21, 22 Photograph by Mikayla Whitmore: 26 Photograph by Lonnie Timmons III/UNLV Creative Services: 29 Photograph by Josh Hawkins/UNLV Photo Services: 30 Photograph provided by the artist: 35 Photograph by Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art staff: 38 Photograph by Mikayla Whitmore: 40, 41 Photograph provided by the donor: 42 Photograph by Checko Salgado: 46 Image provided by the artist: 49 Photograph provided by the artist: 55 Photograph by Mikayla Whitmore: 58 Photograph by Focalchrome, Checko Salgado: 59 Photograph by Mikayla Whitmore: 60, 61 Photograph by Justin Locust: 62 Photograph by Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art staff: 68 Photograph by Lonnie Timmons III/UNLV Creative Services: 86,87
Excerpts
Photography Credits
Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
92 Excerpts
Located on the campus of the most racially diverse university 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).
Alisha Kerlin Paige Bockman DK Sole LeiAnn Huddleston Chloe J. Bernardo Emmanuel MuĂąoz Dan Hernandez