THIS FALL, the Nevada Museum of Art presents Unsettled, a new narrative for traditional notions of western art, giving insight to cultural legacy in a region named the Greater West.
“People have always moved west to find a larger sense of personal liberty and room to reinvent themselves, a freedom that also extends to arts and culture,” says JoAnne Northrup, the museum’s curatorial director and curator of contemporary art. “In the Greater West, unorthodox approaches set the tone, iconoclasts create unexpected pathways, and experimentation is in our DNA. All these characteristics are reflected in the art that is made here.”
Northrup collaborated with seminal pop artist Ed Ruscha to gather the 200 works represented in Unsettled. Ruscha himself, an Oklahoma native, took the artistic pilgrimage west to Los Angeles, where he lives and works today. Unsettled features works by eighty artists who have shaped (and were shaped by) a region defined as the Greater West, including Ansel Adams, John Baldessari, Georgia O’Keeffe, Mark Bradford, and Ana Teresa Fernández.
Unsettled’s five thematic categories—Shifting Ground, Colliding Cultures, Colonizing Resources, The Sublime Open, and Experimental Diversity—identify characteristics to this region, which stretches from Alaska to Columbia. Ruscha’s work can be found in each category—a testament to his informative perspective on western art. Together, each theme connects 2,000 years of art and artifacts, from our contemporary creatives to unknown artists, including those from Anasazi, Mayan, and Western Shoshone cultures.
“Artists reflect back to society what they observe about these places,” Northrup says. “[They] help us to better understand the super-region’s unique characteristics, and thereby, our place in the world.”
Unsettled will subsequently travel this Greater West arch, appearing at the Anchorage Museum in April 2018 and the Palm Springs Art Museum in October 2018. These two partner institutions have contributed works from their permanent collections to the exhibit, adding diversity in representation and scope.
Unsettled is on view at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno through January 21, 2018. For more information visit nevadaart.org.