ENTRY POINT: BY ANN M. WOLFE, CURATOR OF EXHIBITIONS AND COLLECTIONS, NMA
"For almost 30 years, it has been a priority of the Nevada Museum of Art to develop exhibition programming and a permanent collection focused on historical and contemporary artworks that investigate the connections between humans and environments. Since the mid-1990s, the NMA has accelerated and expanded this focus to include the work of artists who engage natural, built, and virtual environments-from early forebears such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston to new media artists of the 21st century such as Jongsuk Lee and Jennifer Steinkamp.
In 2006, the Museum developed the Art + Environment Exhibition Series, a program that brings artists, scholars, and community together to explore the interaction between people and their environments. This initiative is in some ways a continuation of the longstanding exhibition focus of the Museum; however, the ongoing series encompasses a broader group of artists. More contemporary artists' work opens up possibilities for understanding and engaging the creative and destructive processes involved in human beings' interactions with environments. Concepts such as these were further examined in the Museum's 2008 Art + Environment Conference, which gathered creative practitioners from around the globe to explore this emerging field of study. . . "
. . .Ann M. Wolfe's introduction continues here>>>
EXPERIENCE THE ART + ENVIRONMENT CONFERENCE VIA THE LIVE BLOG ARCHIVE
Over 500 people attended our Art + Environment Conference live blog from the Nevada Museum of Art.
Sessions featured artists presenting their work, collaborations among artists and scientists, stories from the field, and diverse approaches to interpreting landscape, land use, and built environments. Visit the conference site.
Click "replay" to view the live blog archive.
smudge studio selected new ideas and perspectives generated at the Art + Environment Conference and took them on the road. We travelled to places where humans have “tested out” (often in extreme ways) their relationality with landscape and land use. We improvised "field tests" for the ideas that we carried away from the conference. Experience the results:
EXPERIENCE CAPSULE: SITE SANTA FE'S LUCKY NUMBER 7
>>> Link to experience capsule
"...the act most urgently needed and most challenging to create is the act of mustering and relaying a contemporaneous response."
EXPERIENCE CAPSULE: CREATIVE CONTAGION FLASHPOINT
>>> Link to experience capsule
This flashpoint diagrams vectors of creative contagion across art, science, environments and media. It tracks what each is catching from the other, with what effects. It surveys what actions people are taking to pass it on--often with the hope and conviction that this is one contagion the world really needs.
CAPSULE AT THE EDGE: TOURING THE NEVADA TEST SITE
"He said: "Eye witnesses tell of physical phenomena that go on ...The intensity of the photons (light) from the blast is 4,000 times brighter than the sun. The sheer magnitude, intensity of light has strange effects on clothes and skin. It vaporizes the moisture on your skin. It looks like your skin is steaming."
>>> Link to Experience capsule
CAPSULE AT THE EDGE:
VISITING THE SALTON SEA WITH SMUDGE AND KIM STRINGFELLOW
image courtesy Kim Stringfellow
"After spending a few short hours in Salton City, we are even more convinced about the power of media to relay local stories of a region's own environments beyond themselves and out to broader communities."
>>> Link to experience capsule
EXPERIENCE THE FIELD: LAND ARTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST WITH BILL GILBERT
During journeys that last up to 50 days and cover up to 4000 miles, students and instructors of the Land Arts of the American West experience direct physical engagement with sites and seamless time. They study and become community.
At the Art + Environment Conference, Bill Gilbert described what it's like to learn in the field (see the live blog archive: Saturday, Oct. 4, 10:06 a.m.).
Here, he takes us further:
"At its root, the Land Arts of the American West program is an experiment. Our goal is to develop a model for a creative laboratory in the arts that provides a context in which students are encouraged to go beyond the frames of individual disciplines to create new expressions. The design of our model is driven, in part, by the assumption that the ability to think and act creatively and communicate across the barriers of specific disciplines and cultural traditions are the skills contemporary students most need in the world beyond academia..."
INTERVIEW WITH GUEST: WILLIAM L. FOX
DIRECTOR OF THE NEVADA MUSEUM OF ART'S CENTER FOR ART + ENVIRONMENT
Bill standing in a crevasse at the snout of the Worhtington Glacier, Alaska, 2008. Photo Matt Coolidge.
William L. Fox, who is variously called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer, has published ten books on cognition and landscape, numerous essays in art monographs, magazines and journals, and fifteen collections of poetry. He is also an artist who has exhibited in group and solo shows in seven countries. Fox is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation, and has been a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, Clark Art Institute, and the Australian National University. He is currently the director of the newly established Center for Art + Envronment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.
Click here to experience the interview >>>
PROJECTS
SITE SANTA FE
Experience the Testing Ground field note from Site Santa Fe's Biennial Project entitled Lucky Number Seven. Watch the students' video portraits of the artists and their processes. Imagine yourself arriving in Santa Fe to collaborate with the artists in this biennial. Use what you see in the video portraits to imagine what YOUR portrait would be if you were the 26th artist in the Lucky Number Seven project. Create a storyboard for your portrait--one that describes the process that you might use to explore Santa Fe, and the way you might approach coming up with a site specific, artistic response to Santa Fe.
DESIGNS FOR DEEP TIME
An ongoing dilemma: nuclear waste storage sites will pose a danger to human life from now until over 10,000 years in the future. How do you design warning signs for people 10,000 years in the future? Designers including engineers and art students have proposed solutions. This project invites you to address this still unanswered question. Read more, listen to a Studio 360 story about the challenge, and view proposed designs here.
REGIONAL TO GLOBAL EXTENSION
Some artists make work about local environments. Sometimes, they then use media to relay their audience's minds and imaginations out from the local to the next geographic region, issue, or global force that actively shapes local, daily life. Experience the Testing Ground field note called: "Visiting the Salton Sea." Identify an artist in your local area who is making work about your own local environments (natural or built). Design a way that your chosen artist could use media to extend their audience's attention, imagination, and sensibilities out from the local to the global.
LAND/ART
Proposals for exhibitions and installations for LAND/ART are being sought by The Harwood Art Center and Richard Levy Gallery in New Mexico. Read more about the LAND/ART Call for proposals here.
CONNECT: BY COLIN ROBERTSON, CURATOR OF EDUCATION, NMA
AND THE ONLINE ART + ENVIRONMENT COMMUNITY NETWORK
For three days in early October, 2008, the Nevada Museum of Art became a site of creative and critical confluence—artists, writers, and thinkers from around the world, together with audiences within the Museum and beyond, gathered to participate in a discussion about the multivalent intersections of two extraordinarily complex subjects: art and environment. Intricate and multifaceted, at times even contentious, ideas about how art and environment might overlap and converge, how they might challenge and inform one another, have been conspicuously absent from discussions within public arenas of the art world and within communities focusing their attention on the environment. In hosting its inaugural conference on art and environment, the Nevada Museum of Art sought not to frame and limit the already extant but fledgling conversations taking place around the country and the globe, but to provide a venue at which interested artists and thinkers from these micro-communities could gather to share their work and thoughts with others—like-minded and not—and from which the dialogue could take root in a broader way. The results of the effort far exceeded the expectations of the staff of the Nevada Museum of Art, and all indications suggest that attendees’ expectations were exceeded as well.
Featuring visual artists (Lita Albuquerque, Chris Drury), sound and media artists (Kianga Ford, Dan Goods), architects (Vito Acconci, Will Bruder), writers (William L. Fox, Geoff Manaugh, Jeff Gordinier), a scientist (Lynn F. Fenstermaker), and curators (Ann M. Wolfe, JoAnne Northrup), among others, conference participants were selected for the diversity of their work and the prospect of catalyzing conversation. Through the buildup to the conference, the conference itself, and its effects, we came to see an extraordinarily rich and expansive field of possibility: artists in dialogue with scientists regarding climate change in Antarctica; architects conversing with critics regarding the perception of space and place in the built environment; and sound artists encouraging writers to explore the ways in which sound can convey a sense of place and history, culture and proximity.
Partly as a result of the conference’s success, and of several years’ efforts by the Museum to survey the emergence of this field of artistic and critical practice, the Nevada Museum of Art is about to announce the establishment of a Center for Art + Environment—an entirely new programmatic model for this museum. The purpose of this new Center will be to collect, archive, display, research, and interpret artworks and other materials exploring the intersections of art and environment and the interactions between people and their environments. We look forward to the possibilities. -
Colin Robertson
>>> Stay connected and join the Art + Environment Community Network
back to beginning
