Spirit of the Land: Essays by Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art

SPIRIT OF THE LAND

Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art University of Nevada, Las Vegas Box 4012 4505 S. Maryland Pkwy. Las Vegas, NV 89154

Catalog designed by Chloe J. Bernardo

NOVEMBER LIGHT

by Aaron Mayes

November Light

AARON MAYES CURATOR FOR VISUAL MATERIALS, UNLV LIBRARIES SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Last light filters through the arms of a namesake tree in the Wee Thump Joshua Tree Wilderness, its presence steering my gaze upward. The clouds above await a final splash of color before fading into the night sky. Coming to rest on the southwestern face of Avi Kwa Ame, this November day fills the slopes with golden hues playing against a pale azure sky with wisps of soft pink cirri. It is as if the entire landscape was created to frame the mountain and define the Spirit of the Land.

Life is abundant in this forest nestled between the McCullough and Highland ranges. The Joshua tree I am standing next to shares this land with the creosote bush, banana yucca, and buckhorn cholla — guardians of the grounds. Bighorn sheep pass through, and hungry coyotes chase desert cottontail and black-tailed jackrabbits. Desert tortoises forage while snakes and lizards keep a wary eye out for an occasional red-tailed hawk circling above. Insects and birds compose the distinctive soundtrack of desert life, punctuated by the occasional percussive notes of a ladder-backed woodpecker.

It is easy to idealize this place. Easy to sit along this embankment and forget that I drove here on roads cut through the very forest I love. Easy to look adoringly towards Avi Kwa Ame, ignoring the massive power lines silhouetted against its sunset-saturated beauty. Man’s presence, my presence, is everywhere. I will my mind to leave those intrusions unseen. I do not want the buzz of electricity flowing through lines above to overpower the sounds of everything that calls this place home. But for me, Wee Thump is where wants and reality, past and future, collide.

In 1920, Clark County had fewer than 5,000 residents, and the entire state of Nevada only had a little more than 77,000, second fewest in the States and just slightly more than Alaska. Political power in the West was clearly California’s to wield, and by 1922 it had solidified its control over lower river water rights. Next up was controlling the river itself, and by 1931 Hoover Dam was a man-made wonder under construction. Its mandates to provide water for agriculture, create power, and control flooding were soon entrenched in policy and law, leaving Mojave Desert

concerns secondary to the project’s progress. And forget the idea that Indigenous people’s needs should be taken into consideration.

Lines were drawn on maps connecting the dam with L.A. and then, later, Phoenix. Symmetrical steel towers rose from the desert floor as lines drooped between. First bringing power to the dam construction site and then making it flow in the opposite direction, these transmission lines spread their heavy footprints through the desert with little thought to their impact. The success of the massive government project was measured in costs, kilowatts, and how many Depression-era people could be employed.

Land conservation was a brand-new and eagerly-embraced national idea, but the desert was widely considered a wasteland. Lake Mead wasn’t set aside as the first national recreation area until 1954, and though President Franklin Delano Roosevelt established Joshua Tree as a national monument in 1936, it wouldn’t achieve national park status until 1994.

Today, green energy is the new game and the Mojave is a major arena. Commercial interests the world over are looking at the Mojave as home to their next venture. Solar and wind farms are popping up all over and proposals are being floated through cities, counties, states, and the Federal Government. Utility-scale green energy projects need two major components: cheap land and unfettered access to markets. Nearly 88 percent of Nevada is owned by the Federal Government and managed by one department or another. The Bureau of Land Management alone controls some 63 percent of the state’s land. And all those power lines already crisscrossing the Mojave provide access to the largest markets in the Southwest. All of this makes the Mojave extremely attractive to new energy developers.

Projects are not just coming, they are already here. Over the past few decades, the Eldorado Valley near Boulder City has been transformed by utility-scale solar projects. In 1995, Clark County transferred control of some 87,000 acres of the valley to the city to create the Boulder City Conservation Easement. Its stated goal is “creating a protected habitat for desert tortoise and other species impacted by private-land development in other parts of Clark County.” But the city was allowed to carve out a 3,064-acre area and designate it for energy development. This area is adjacent to the power transmission lines that cut the valley. Other utility-scale projects are slowly covering the dry lakebed, which

is part of Boulder City. MGM Resorts International just completed a project straddling US 95 and the new I-11 corridor in an area managed by the U.S. Department of Energy. These efforts are, of course, meant to battle climate change by replacing power plants that burn fossil fuels.

Across the Colorado River in Arizona is BP Wind Energy North America Inc.’s White Hills wind farm, also known as the Mohave County Wind Farm. It covers 38,000 acres of federal land managed by BLM and the Bureau of Reclamation. That project sits adjacent to MeadPhoenix Transmission Project, a 256 mile, 500 kV alternating current transmission line that became operational in 1996. Separately, in 2012, the Obama administration identified solar energy zones in six western states, setting up a priority approval process for projects within the zones. There are five of those in Nevada, each aligned with major power transmission corridors that can easily be expanded. This represents approximately 94,000 acres of designated land just in Nevada. It is described by the BLM as “undeveloped scrubland.”

Much like the desert itself, art often lies in the unexpected moments. Months removed from the scene in Wee Thump, I find myself walking through the Spirit of the Land exhibition, connecting with pieces here and there. The work is telling, and, at times, surprising and thought-provoking. One piece catches my eye. Quindo Miller’s “A Wind in the Stillness” is a small wooden box with a forward-facing window through which viewers can see into a desert scene. At the smallest of scales, Miller’s wall-mounted piece captures the desert’s tones and textures, potentials and pitfalls. Miller smartly connects humanity’s presence to its propensity to want to control nature’s very flow. Inside the box, a fan turns a “tumbleweed” around and around. It stops, giving respite to the scene as if to say, “don’t worry, everything is safe.” But the man-made fan kicks in, adding chaos to the scene once more. Over and over the scene comes alive and then rests.

Ultimately, the fate of the Mojave Desert lies in all of us. Those who love the spaces and those who see other uses for them. As in Miller’s box, pressures will be exerted on the Mojave, over and over. Previous generations have passed us a legacy of infrastructure that will determine future development in the desert. But that legacy does not have to include indifference to the needs of the Mojave or its people.

FOR RAIN SHADOWS AND DARK SKIES

by Aya Louisa McDonald

For Rain Shadows and Dark Skies

AYA LOUISA MCDONALD PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY

The desert surrounds the Neon Metropolis of Las Vegas where we can live, and work, and play if the tourists keep coming. Despite the ever-creeping spread of development and uncontrolled growth, the desert dwarfs and swallows all — residents, tourists, casinos and neighborhoods in its vast immensity. Desert have always gotten a bad rap as the Collins Dictionary demonstrates: “wasteland, dust bowl, barren, dry, waste, wild, empty, bare, lonely, solitary, desolate, arid, unproductive, infertile, uninhabited, uncultivated, and unfruitful.” Not a single positive word or image; even the verb forms are negative: “to vacate, forsake, abandon, or betray.”1

The deserts of the American Southwest, the Sonoran, Great Basin and Chihuahuan, and our Mojave Desert, born in the rain shadow of high mountains, belong to a celebrated “world class” of global deserts including the frigid Katpana Desert in northern Pakistan and the Atacama in the shadow of the Peruvian Andes. Nevertheless, our North American deserts have been shaped by Hollywood as places of violent encounter between cowboys and Indians, or as wastelands of unbearable heat and thirst littered with sunbleached bones, shimmering mirages, and imminent death. Bob Nolan’s (1908-1980) Cool Water (1936), a plaintive ballad about a man and his mule, immortalized by cowboy actor and singer Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers, sealed the image forever:2

All

Old Dan and I with throats burned dry And souls that cry for water

Cool, clear water

1 https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english-thesaurus/desert Accessed August 5, 2022. Roy Rogers (1911-1998), who was born in Ohio, claimed Choctaw Indian blood on his mother’s side. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/07/arts/roy-rogers-singing-cowboy-dies-at-86.html Accessed August 5, 2022.

2 https://whentcowboysings.com/bob-nolan-cool-water/ Accessed August 5, 2022/

day I’ve faced a barren waste

Without the taste of water, cool water

American myths about the deserts of the Southwest, built on romantic distortion of historical truths and the blatant and racist erasures of Indigenous peoples, have obscured an important power long recognized the world over by mystics, poets, shaman, and artists, that the desert land holds within its vastness a timeless spirit of energy and life, and a beauty both fragile and resilient. The land remembers; it wears the traces of trauma and bears the scars of the past into the present. It sings of the cycle of life as it makes a home for the gopher snake, the tortoise, and the tiny pocket mouse, and weeps for the fallen cactus wren and the black-tailed jackrabbit, the feral burro or the child of man. A force divine, if not indestructible, then infinitely renewable.1

The history of art is filled with examples of artists who were deeply moved by the awesome spiritual powers of nature that live in the mountains.2 The unspoiled wilderness, the vast grandeur and stunning immensity of the purple mountain majesty of North America evoked awe in the eyes and hearts of 19th-century painters like the Englishborn Thomas Cole (1801-1848) of the Hudson River School, the Germanborn Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), and photographers like Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916), who immortalized, not without a touch of romantic nostalgia, the Yosemite Valley, the Rocky Mountains, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.3 Already in Cole’s time there was a fear among early

1 For example, the British Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), a Catholic Jesuit priest whose poetry was only posthumously discovered, wrote: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed… Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; and all is seared with trade…and wears man’s smudge… the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things; and though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs – because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur Accessed August 4, 2022.

2 One immediately calls to mind the sublime, mystical landscapes of the German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), particularly Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, 1818) Oil on canvas, 94.8 x74.8 cm. in Hamburger Kunsthalle. https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog Accessed. August 5, 2022. The deeply spiritual Daoist and Neo-Confucian content of Chinese monochrome ink landscape painting has been well documented since the late 10th Century in China. The Chinese, like Native Americans, believed mountains and water were dynamically alive with the creative power of the universe expressed as yin and yang. One of the best surviving examples is the large silk hanging scroll by the revered master, Fan Kuan (c.950-1032), entitled Travelers in Mountains and Streams, c. 1000, Ink and light colors on silk, 206.3 x 103.3 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. https://www.comuseum.com/ painting/masters/fan-kuan/travelers-among-mountains-and-streams/ Accessed August 4, 2022.

3 Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (aka View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm), 1836. Oil on Canvas, 51.5 x 76 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/10497 Accessed August 4, 2022.

And, Albert Bierstadt, In the Sierras, 1868. Oil on Canvas, 12.9 x 15.9 in., Harvard University Art Museums (Fogg Art Museum), Cambridge, MA. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_ Bierstadt_001.jpg Accessed August 4, 2022.

environmentalists that these national treasures, if unprotected, would succumb to the destruction of human encroachment. Cole wrote:

“I cannot but express my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes are (sic) quickly passing away. The ravages of the axe are daily increasing. The most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation.” 1

Cole was an activist artist, possibly the first, but he did not act alone. He and other mid-19th-century American artists and photographers paved the way for the United States to declare Yellowstone a national park in 1872. The idea of nature conservation was born, and since President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Organic Act in 1916, millions of acres of ecologically rich natural beauty, flora, fauna and habitats have been brought under the protection of the Federal Government.2 No logging, no mining, no fracking, no drilling, no hunting, no dumping, no wind farms, no fields of solar panels, no commercial activity, and development only as necessary for public education. But also, unbelievably, no Indigenous peoples, no Native Americans. In the creation of national parks, hundreds of thousands of native peoples were forcibly removed and prevented from returning to the land.3

“Viewed from the perspective of history, Yellowstone is a crime scene.” 4 As contemporary Americans continue to grapple with, or ignore, our dark history of colonialism, racism, genocide, and associated crimes, an argument has recently been made — partially in response

1 Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” The American Monthly Magazine, vol. 7, January 1836, p. 12. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101015921271&view=1up&seq=15 Accessed August 4, 2022.

2 https://www.nps.gov/articles/quick-nps-history.htm Accessed August 5, 2022; See also Tyler Green, ‘How Thomas Cole’s Landscapes Opened the Path to National Parks,” March 12, 2018, Modern Art Notes https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2018/thomas-cole-national-parks Accessed August 5, 2022.

3 For the full story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism, see: Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock, Beacon Press, 2019.

4 This statement was made by David Treuer, a Leech Lake Ojibwe novelist and historian the author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (Penguin/ Random House, 2019) a finalist for the National Book Award, in an article for The Atlantic Monthly: “Who Owns America’s Wilderness? Return the National Parks to the Tribes,” The Atlantic, May 2021 Issue; Photographs by Katy Grannan. Published online April 12, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/ magazine/archive/2021/05/return-the-national-parks-to-the-tribes/618395/ Accessed August 7, 2022. An interview with David Treuer can be found on National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/15/987787685/national-parks-should-be-controlled-by-indigenoustribes-one-writer-argues Accessed August 8, 2022.

to unparalleled wildfires, drought, and flood crises tied to climate change, and partially tied to an idea of restorative justice — that the national parks, “the jewels of America’s landscapes,” should be placed under the management of an Indigenous peoples’ tribal council.1

Spirit of the Land argues in equally eloquent tones conveyed through the skill and passion of artists working in word, image, and artefact for the sacredness of the magnificent, hauntingly beautiful Spirit Mountain and surrounding landscape. In more secular terms, Nevada Representative, Dina Titus, who introduced the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument Establishment Act of 2022 to the House of Representatives wrote:

“It is the purpose of the monument to conserve, protect, and enhance for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations the cultural, ecological, scenic, wildlife, recreational, dark sky, historical, natural, education, and scientific resources of the monument.” 2

However, in Section 4 (c) Management, part (3) of the bill, Native American Access and Use is specifically guaranteed.

In Spirit of the Land and its local satellite exhibitions in Searchlight and Laughlin, curators Kim Garrison, Checko Salgado, and Mikayla Whitmore, artists too numerous to name here, participating and advising tribal members, beginning with artist and poet Paul Jackson, Fort Mojave Tribal Elder,3 Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art leadership and staff, and members of the larger community, have formed a uniquely subtle, but unapologetically powerful activist collective around the principles of non-discrimination and inclusion, not only to illustrate the unique features of Avi Kwa Ame, but to honor and celebrate the direct, unmediated, individual human responses to this irreplaceable, endangered landscape right in our own backyard. Let it be.

Note: I wish to acknowledge and especially thank Kim Garrison, of United Catalysts, UNLV MFA 2006, for the invitation to write about Spirit of the Land, and Deanne Sole, Publications Editor, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, for her kind and tireless assistance.

1 Treuer, op.cit.

2 H.R.6751 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6751 Accessed August 8, 2022.

3 Also known as Pipa Aha Macav, People by the River. https://www.fortmojaveindiantribe.com/ Accessed August 8, 2022.

BEHIND THE SPIRIT OF THE LAND

by Kim Garrison Means

Behind the Spirit of the Land

KIM GARRISON MEANS SPIRIT OF THE LAND, CO-CURATOR

The Spirit of the Land exhibition has received attention for its role in bringing awareness to the issues surrounding the Avi Kwa Ame landscape at the southern tip of Nevada and the need for further protections to ensure that this environment survives for future generations. The dialogue provided by this exhibition takes the form of visual stories that local and visiting artists have chosen to investigate, and is the result of substantial collaborations between neighbors, communities, scientists, educators, and the public.

Throughout 2021, myself and co-curators Checko Salgado and Mikayla Whitmore gathered artists in small groups to tour the Avi Kwa Ame region, learn about its treasures and its struggles, and meet other people who were invested in its protection. From the beginning, the practice of sharing stories and pooling knowledge about this place has been a source of strength that has enabled the works in this exhibition to collectively give a deep reading of the landscape. A major asset and home base to this endeavor has been the Searchlight Mystery Ranch, an art and science research station located in the heart of Avi Kwa Ame, outside of the town of Searchlight. Artists were invited to take advantage of the ranch as a place to stay while exploring the area and developing their ideas, and a number of more extended projects have come out of their experiences.

These artists are storytellers and themes emerged as we explored the space together. Starting with a celebration of the area’s beautiful, vibrant ecosystem, Avi Kwa Ame revealed itself as a place of many connections, some of them conflicting — such as its role as a sacred native landscape versus a potential industrial project site, or as a rural ranching and mining community versus a crucial environmental habitat or focal point for outdoor tourism. Spirit of the Land’s artists have treated these subjects with care and sensitivity, and their diverse backgrounds have served to provide context and a multitude of perspectives.

First and foremost, this exhibition is a love letter to the unique Avi Kwa Ame environment. Fred Bell’s sound recording, “Wee Thump

at Dawn,” invites us to bear witness to the raucous celebration of birds in spring, while Alan O’Neill illuminates a collection of the area’s cut stones, quartz crystals, and historic glass fragments in a Tiffany-style lamp. The paintings of Nancy Good and Bertha Gutierrez depict the color bursts of thousand-year-old lichens and fleeting wildflowers, and Sharon Schafer’s hyper-realistic depictions of animals and birds are portrayed with the rigor of a trained scientific illustrator. Plein air artists Kyle Larson and Sofie Restrepo give us the textures and rhythms of the terrain, as does the photographer Mike Hill. “Mojave Fugue,” by Leland Means, and “Desert Glow,” by Sierra Slentz are also inspired by rhythm. Both use repeating textures and patterns from the landscape in their abstracted sculptural forms.

Artists describe their time in Avi Kwa Ame’s wild expanses and isolated nooks as inspiring, hopeful, and healing. Adriana Chavez chose to create a series of digital collages depicting symbolic plants, animals, and scenes reminiscent of tarot cards. Salgado was inspired by taking musicians to the area, and recorded videos of them performing original compositions with the desert as backdrop.

René West, a photographer from Lubbock, Texas, stayed at the Mystery Ranch for a couple of weeks in 2019 and spent the rest of the year creating desert-inspired mandalas, while Jym Davis’ extended stay in 2021 resulted in an investigation of the trickster story of the coyote through photography, collage, and mask-making. Natalie Delgado’s hopeful image, “Sacred Repose,” a drawing realized in graphite and desert soil, is an idealized portrayal of coexistence between humanity and the ecosystem.

Photographers Naida Osline and Sam Davis chose radically different approaches to depict the power of the vast Nevada sky. Osline’s “What Is Above Is Below” documents a rapidly-changing cloudscape over the McCullough and Highland ranges throughout a single day, using colored filters and then layering them in a final image that creates a transitory vision of the illusion of time. Davis gives us a glimpse of a desert mystery: a mythical skyspace of spaceships and distant travelers longing for faraway homes, offering to be seen if we would just look a little longer or a little closer.

The role of Avi Kwa Ame as a sacred space is represented by Mojave elder Paul Jackson, whose paintings convey parts of the tribe’s creation story, when the Earth and first peoples were formed at Spirit Mountain and the Colorado River. The First Times are also represented

by works from a dozen artists of the Pipa Aha Macav Culture Society, including traditional beaded jewelry, ceramics, rattles, weapons, and ribbon dresses that are rarely displayed in public. Of special note are two ceramic figures related to the Mojave origin story: one depicts Mastamho, the son of the Creator, whose home is Avi Kwa Ame, and the other his sister, Frog, who brought about Mastamho’s death and carried fire back to the people to light his funeral pyre.

These items tie contemporary Mojave culture to thousands of years of tradition grounded in their mission to reside in and protect this landscape. Much sharing and listening had to be done as the Mojave artists worked together with the curators and the Barrick Museum staff in order to display these items respectfully. Historically, Mojave artwork has often been removed from their homeland by outsiders without permission, to be stored in faraway museum vaults or sold to the highest bidder. During the early reservation period of the mid1800s to early 1900s, tribal members were deprived of access to their hunting and gathering lands and forced to sell beadwork to tourists passing through the railroad station in Needles, California. Most tribal members today prefer not to make artwork to sell because of this.

Fawn Douglas’ “Gifts from the Land” is a mixed media piece that honors the landscape of her grandfather, a Moapa Paiute tribal member. Douglas (a member of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe with roots in the Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Creek nations) sewed turquoise-blue satin ribbons into the edges of thick copper-toned paper and let them cascade into rivulets on the floor, evoking the colors of the Colorado river cutting through the granite mountains. The ribbons, used to decorate traditional dresses in tribal communities throughout the region, are also a trade item from the colonial period. Like many historical materials they impart a fierce pride in the tribal members who use them and serve as a cautionary reference to cultural oppression.

Other contemporary perceptions of the environment are provided by artists whose use of materials largely conveys their messages. Sculptor Christopher Reitmaier presents a found object assemblage representing land use of the recent past — from relics of the mining era to the discards of public recreation. Justin Favela subverts the tradition of landscape painting as a tool for colonial ownership by using the surprising material of piñata paper, a symbol of his Latinx heritage, while Lance L. Smith’s “Turtle Dove (Àjàpá)” honors the desert tortoise of the Mojave by relating it to the tortoise stories of the Sahara Desert and the African diaspora.

Douglas McCulloh’s offering explores what the digital world thinks it knows about Avi Kwa Ame. In his photo collage, taken from a collection of Google image searches, he bombards us with publicly-shared images of sites, people, and activities. As the campaign to have Avi Kwa Ame declared a National Monument gains momentum, it is interesting to think about people far away from Southern Nevada looking to their technology for a description of the land and its assets, or, as McCulloh puts it, “supplicants anywhere, anytime, can summon visions of Avi Kwa Ame into flickering existence at the altar of our screens.”

Other artists chose to illustrate the potential for ecosystem disruption if a proposed industrial wind farm is built on part of the Avi Kwa Ame site. Maria Volborth paints a forced perspective panorama of the East/West mountain ranges to show the connectivity that would be interrupted, with Spirit Mountain on the left facing Crescent Peak and the proposed wind farm location on the right — a culturallysacred site facing a potential industrial site in the same landscape.

By contrast, Chelsea Mosher zooms in to show a close-up of a single threatened Joshua tree from the same area vibrating as if the ground were shaking. Her gelatin silver print, “Industrial Frequency,” warns against placing turbines and service roads near the eastern edge of the densest Joshua tree forest in the world. Mosher’s piece visually connects with the work of another photographer in the exhibition, Julian Kilker, whose “Actors of Avi Kwa Ame” depicts a shadowy human figure holding up a lightbox to illuminate parts of specific Joshua trees in the adjacent protected area of the Wee Thump Wilderness. (“Wee thump” means Ancient Ones in the Paiute language.)

Joshua trees are not the only life forms that would be affected by an industrial project in their midst. Raptors, songbirds, bats, tortoises, and bighorn sheep are just some of the animals that would be imperiled, and the connective artery between the California Mojave and the Colorado River would be severed. Quindo Miller’s kinetic sculptural diorama, “A Wild in the Stillness,” uses a fan and a timer to periodically disturb a tiny tumbleweed trapped within a glass, spinning it wildly out of control and representing the harm that wind turbines would do to the entire Mojave ecosystem.

Industry threatens the harmony and continuity within this extensive sacred landscape, but some of the most powerful work in the exhibition tackles a disconnect within a recent cultural tradition centered at the

heart of Spirit Mountain itself in an area known as Christmas Tree Pass. The area got its name during the mining era of the early 1900s when it was the place to go for timber, but in more recent decades the festive epithet has prompted groups of holiday visitors to decorate the juniper trees with tinsel, ornaments, and garlands. This tradition grew beyond the holiday season and has resulted in foreign objects being left in the environment throughout the year. Drought-stricken animals and birds mistake them for food, often with deadly consequences.

Spirit of the Land artists tackled this story together over the course of a year. Whitmore photographed a single decorated tree shining in the sunset, then captured the cleaned-up version the next morning, displaying the images as large-scale prints one above the other, surrounded by a red garland collected from the tree itself. The flanking of this piece by two paintings of Avi Kwa Ame’s creation story by Jackson is a purposeful juxtaposition of two opposing cultural overlays. Jackson tells of Mojave tribal members being threatened by visitors while trying to remove holiday trash from one of their most sacred landscapes, or, as he says, “our Garden of Eden.”

Working throughout the year on tree clean-ups with tribal members, conservation groups, and OHV clubs, artists from Spirit of the Land used some of this festive detritus to create an installation: “Spirit Mountain Depicted in Holiday Trash.” This piece impresses viewers with its grand scale, but in fact only uses a small portion of the trash left in the environment each year. A work statement for “Holiday Trash” does not call for an end to the tradition, but rather urges visitors to practice the same “leave no trace” policy they would use anywhere else in nature.

Another issue is the Southwest megadrought, the worst in over 1, 200 years. Paula Jacoby-Garrett’s artwork, “55%,” references the decline of the screwbean mesquite tree, a useful food source for wildlife and culturally important to local tribes. Jacoby-Garrett presents six seedpods encased in resinous Petri dishes, noting the recent scientific efforts to understand what this plant species needs to thrive in a changing climate.

My own contribution (with Steve Radosevich as United Catalysts) is a series of short videos made from photographic stills collected with wildlife cameras. It documents the many animals who rely on the water from the Mystery Ranch wildlife pond, but who are rarely seen by visitors. “Proof of Existence” reflects the need to categorize and confirm the assets of the Avi Kwa Ame landscape as part of the political process to protect it.

In one way, the Spirit of the Land exhibition works much like the United Catalysts piece; it declares the existence of many wonders in a fragile and changing landscape. But, beyond this, the exhibition invites the communities within and surrounding this land to become more involved in its stewardship. A community call for postcard art and descriptions of what people love about Avi Kwa Ame was met with more than 200 entries. Mojave singers sang, dancers danced, workshops were held, and storytellers shared their stories over the course of the show while visitors sat together in the Museum and wrote postcards to the government representatives in charge of caring for the public lands that constitute Avi Kwa Ame.

The works from these artists and community members are beautiful in form, but they also represent acts of devotion and advocacy. The artists here are ambassadors, bringing a place outside the cityscape into the Museum, creatively representing an ecosystem that cannot speak for itself, and asking all of us to do the same. The sharing, dialogue, and actions that have taken place as a result of this exhibition are not just representing this special and sacred place. They are helping, along with many others, to shape its future.

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).

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Emmanuel Muñoz D.K. Sole

Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art

University of Nevada, Las Vegas Box 4012

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