We used to say the Nevada Museum of Art was pretty good for a small-town museum. Now we just say they’re knocking it out of the park, no qualification needed.
STORY & PHOTOS BY KriS vagner
This and 11 other glided bronze animal heads make up Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads: Gold, an installation by China’s Ai Weiwei.
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n May, the New York Times mentioned the Nevada Museum of Art as following in step with other small-city museums “trying to think outside the cookie-cutter approach to developing a program and a reputation at a time when art prices have made building a large, diverse collection almost a fool’s game.” One of those non-cookie-cutter approaches has been to help shepherd new works of land art into existence, the most notable being “Seven Magic Mountains,” a $3 million piece consisting of seven stacks of Day-Glo boulders just outside of Las Vegas, by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. Another approach to raising the bar has been mounting ever more adventurous gallery exhibits while still maintaining an approachable, friendly attitude. “Our curatorial approach is bifurcated,” said curator JoAnne Northrup. “On one hand, we aspire to present a variety of accessible exhibitions geared toward the general public—for example, our current American Impressionism exhibition—while also organizing exhibitions that appeal to a national and international audience.”
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Light the way One example of a piece with international appeal is an installation of projected light—a cone of light and a slowly rotating plane of light—made visible by fog in a dark room. The piece is titled “Swell,” and the NMA commissioned British-born New Yorker Anthony McCall to create it. McCall has been known since the 1970s for making “sculptures” out of projected light. They look like solid objects, and although viewers can tell immediately that they’re made of light, they have such a presence that it’s common to see people hesitate to “touch” them. Once they do, they’re often delighted by the improbability and the
momentary disorientation of having passed through an “object.” McCall’s works are a magical mix of formal austerity and sci-fi fun that have been experienced at the likes of the Tate in London, the Whitney in New York—and now the NMA.
Bridging the divide “Seven Magic Mountains” is not the only connection between the NMA and southern Nevada. “We are embracing the South since we are the only AAM [American Alliance of Museums] accredited art museum in the state of Nevada,” Northrup said. “And we love our Las Vegas art-world peeps,
