Double Scoop—Art in Nevada: Recent Episodes
Double Scoop
Years ago, when Shoshone-Paiute artist Micqaela Jones Crouch was a stay-ay-home mom with young children, she needed a creative outlet, so she picked up some acrylic paints at K Mart. She took to the medium quickly. Initially, she was reluctant to put her work out in the world, but step-by-step her career has blossomed.
Host: Noah Glick
The Lilley Museum at UNR has a new director—Stephanie Gibson. Growing up in Ottawa, she spent a lot of time in the National Museum of Canada and became fascinated with the ways communities and civilizations have expressed themselves through art.
Host: Charlotte Italiano
In an age of digital everything, it's rare to ever see our own names written out. That's why calligraphy can make things a little more special, said Lauren Iida.
She's helping to keep the tradition alive by offering professional calligraphic services and teaching the age-old art. "It's nice to bring something back from yesteryear that our grandparents did, that our great-great grandparents did," she said.
Host: Noah Glick
Eva Salyer remembers having experienced some major stress as a child. When things got tough, her mom would hand her some art supplies and advise her to draw how she felt. Now Eva is a full-time artist in South Lake Tahoe, where she does, among many other projects, live paintings at concerts—including the George Clinton show this past summer.
Host: Noah Glick
"I feel like a lot of museums and galleries talk about diversity, but when I go to these spaces, I don't really see that representation of someone like me," said Ruby Barrientos, a Salvadoran artist who lives in Reno. I wanted to bring art to the people, and what's a better way than to just bring it to them directly?"
Ruby is the lead organizer of the exhibition “Llegaron Los Guanacxs” featuring work by herself and fellow Salvadorans Leslie Chiguichon, Jon Gomez, and Jahi Mazariego.
Host: Noah Glick
Electrical engineer Joe Fitzpatrick is the lead artist on the Burning Man installation, "Last Bet Motel." The piece is an homage to the Best Bet Motel, one of the many weekly motels in Reno that have been demolished in the name of development. These motels are often last-resort housing for people without stable shelter arrangements, and each closure has loft more people homeless.
Noah Glick, this season's host, talked with Joe, his collaborator and spouse Elizabeth Fitzpatrick, and Emily Stewart about the genesis, design, and goals of the project.
Barry Crawford talks shop about the surprise details of his ambitious kinetic artworks. You can see one of them, "Rearing Horse," in downtown Reno, and his newest creation, "Ratchetfish," will debut this month at Burning Man.
Our host this season is Noah Glick.
Jessica Schimpf is a glassblower with a studio in downtown Reno. After years of establishing herself in a physically demanding, male dominated field, then losing several loved ones over a short span of time, she was feeling grief on top of burnout. She reassessed the way art worked in her life—both her professional life and her downtime. Then, she made some adjustments that really helped.
Five years ago, mixed media artist Sogand Tabatabaei packed everything she could fit into two bags and moved fro Tehran, Iran, to Reno to start in the University of Nevada, Reno's MFA program. The loneliness of her new life produced some crushing anxiety—which she channeled into her artwork.
This episode also features Miya Hannan, one of Sogand's art professors at UNR.
How do you keep all of those looming "what-if" anxieties at bay? For Reno's Rob Garrett—an Air Force veteran and sculptor—welding metal objects together helps quite a bit.
"Art and anxiety and mental health, they go hand in hand," said Las Vegas artist Lance L. Smith. "And whether your art is your cooking or your parenting or your gardening ... you have a right to allow those things to be a container for things that other folks can't hold."
In the first of 4 episode on Art + Mental Health, Lance talks with Holly Hutchings about how, at a young age, they realized that art was the avenue to help channel the feelings that didn't have anywhere else to go.
Elaine Parks is a ceramic sculptor who lives in Reno and Tuscarora, a northeast Nevada town with 10 residents. You can get an almost uninterrupted view of the natural world from there—a fact that's informed her sculptures for decades. Lately, she's been processing climate doom.
Meet the latest curators from The Holland Project's Curators Series, Annaiz Ramirez + Sal Barajas-Alvarez from Savior Studios. Annaiz is a recent UNR graduate with a degree in art history. Sal is a TMCC student. They both grew up in Mexican families in Reno, and they have very different stories about how art became part of their lives.
During the pandemic, Reno oil painter Zoe Bray took a detour into comic-style drawings of a happy-but-cooped-up family.
Tahoe artist Paula Chung has undertaken the laborious task of honoring every person in the United States who's died of COVID—803,000 and counting. For each person, she's sewing a mark onto a long roll of rice paper.
A few of these rolls are on view at the Bristlecone Gallery at Western Nevada College through Dec. 22.
When Nathaniel Benjamin was growing up, his mother was studying to become a nurse. Nathaniel was fascinated with her medical illustration books, especially by an encyclopedia of human abnormalities. You can still see the traces of this early influence in his murals, prints, and apparel designs.
Jessi talks about how growing up with literature influenced her large-scale Burning Man artwork, and she gives some updates on The Generator, the Sparks makerspace.
“The problem is that a lot of people don’t see themselves being represented in museums,” said Vivian Zavataro, Curator of the Lilley Museum of Art at UNR. She talked about how art institutions, including the Lilley, are trying to fix that.
Melissa Melero-Moose, co-founder of the Great Basin Native Artists, talks about the ongoing challenges Indigenous artists face in gaining visibility and recognition.