Meaning is always here

Curated by Marjorie Barrick staff and organized by the Nevada Arts Council, "Meaning is always here" is part of the Nevada Touring Initiative - Traveling Exhibition Program. It was funded by the National Endowment for the Arts and the state of Nevada.

"The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is pleased to loan this artwork from our permanent collection to the Nevada Arts Council. Our goal is to help broaden the museum's message that 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."

Curator’s essay
by D.K. Sole

I started this curation by looking at Marjorie Barrick Collection artists from Southern Nevada and trying to imagine a persona the Museum might show you if you lived far away and couldn’t reach us. We think we know what we are to ourselves. What can we be to other people? Artists face that problem every time they present their work to the public. Mikayla Whitmore, standing in the desert outside Las Vegas, dons a reflective blanket to illustrate an idea that has circulated through their practice for years: the tension between wanting to be known and the desire to maintain your interiority, your privacy. How do you control what people see of you? Chase R. McCurdy – another local artist – conveys his ideas through a meticulous arrangement of objects, his careful symbolic vocabulary distinguishing him from other Black artists in our collection. Like Whitmore, he concentrates indirectness.

Do we draw attention to details that change us? Marshall Scheuttle looked at a motel in Reno and saw how the architectural grid was altered by the casual existences of people. Tomoko Daido, a New Yorker, visited the Hoover Dam and saw something weird in the familiar, monumental concrete, a vision hovering around the shape of a ladder.

History could provide a focus. Krystal Ramirez, whose family has benefitted from the work of Las Vegas’ Culinary Union, chose a photograph from UNLV’s Special Collections archive documenting the Culinary protests that took place on the Las Vegas Strip in the 1990s. Candice Lin remakes a different kind of history with her strange body-object, a conflation of a medical diagram and a talisman, an imaginary relic. Mary Cady Johnson‘s prints are records of a day in the early 1970s when UNLV hosted a dance event on campus. I imagine sunshine, leaping bodies, lost to time except for this. Johnson was an artist, an arts educator, and a foundational member of local arts organizations. Like Daido, she records a public vision that was open to everyone, but available in this way only to her.

The works by Stephan Antonakos and Lucio Pozzi are here because it seemed important to include something from the Vogel 50 x 50. The Vogel collection is based at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., but the Vogels decided to share it with the nation by sending fifty works to every state. We’re the caretakers of Nevada’s portion. (You can see the rest in our online collection archive.) Antonakos' decision to use a stamp as the centerpiece of his collage directs me onwards to Kim Rugg’s altered envelopes. Rugg, like Alexander Calder, realized that the U.S. flag (sliced vertically in her Magic Eye) is a design that can’t be made purely indirect or even historical: a meaning is always here, now.

Establishing ourselves in the present, we move forwards. I hope our collection grows larger in the right directions. I hope we can share it with you again when it does.

Henderson City Hall
City of Henderson
February 19 - April 12, 2024

Humboldt County Library
Winnemucca
April 22 - June 14, 2024

Virgin Valley Artist Association
Mesquite
June 24 - August 16, 2024

AVAILABLE
August 26 - October 18, 2024

Nevada State University
Henderson
October 28 - December 20, 2024