UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
Las Vegas, Nevada
We believe everyone deserves access to art that challenges our understanding of the present and inspires us to create a future that makes space for us all.
MessageModern Desert Markings: An Homage to Las Vegas Area Land Art
- March 14, 2023 - July 08, 2023
- Exhibition
- /
- Artwork
- /
- Artists
nicholas b jacobsen (they/them)
"Pioneering Terra Nulliparous", 2023
Stone from De Maria’s "Las Vegas Piece" site (Nuwu land), stone from just outside of the border of Desert National Wildlife Refuge (Nuwu land), replica adobe brick from Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort State Historic Park (Nuwu land), stone from the St. George Mormon temple quarry (Nuwu land), souvenir ceramic brick from Mormon Nauvoo temple, cotton stripes from U.S. flag, plastic white roses, barbed wire, white doily, Latter-day Designs’ toy figures, Salt Lake Mormon temple decoration, toy bulldozers, toy tank, covered wagon table centerpiece, nativity scene decoration, white bust of Apollo Belvedere, desert tortoise toy, toy cows, desert bighorn sheep toy, toy sheep, army guys, pages from the Book of Mormon, frames, mirror, and plastic turf rug
Courtesy of the artist
Artist statement:
Isolation is the essence of Land Art.
The isolation that called Land Artists & the U.S. Military to the so-called American West also called my ancestors–as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons–to settle here. But this sense of isolation is not endemic to these deserts. It was, like the Land Art works that depend on it, created through colonization.
This invisible is real.
One of my ancestors helped make one of the first Modern Desert Markings in so-called Las Vegas–a military fort. On July 4th, 1855, he helped raise the first U.S. flag over these Nuwu lands. Ninety-six years later the U.S. began dropping nuclear bombs onto these same lands which killed my grandma and hundreds of thousands of others in the U.S.
The land is not the setting for the work but a part of the work.
Nuwu were interred onto Reservations by 1873. Ninety-six years later Walter De Maria had taken a bulldozer out to these stolen lands below the so-called Mormon Mountains and created his own Modern Desert Markings. This desert is an Area of Critical Concern for the endangered Desert Tortoise. Like Nuwu, Desert Tortoise has lived in these lands since time immemorial. But through our Modern Desert Markings, 90% of Desert Tortoises populations were destroyed.
Despite all of the anti-coloniality and emphasis on the invisible embedded in the ethos of De Maria’s work, he still perpetuated the colonial erasure of Indigenous Peoples in his Land Art. I am working to reckon with this history.
Read more about this piece in Las Vegas Piece: Pioneering Terra Nulliparous. a creative historical essay on Modern Desert Markings in Nuwu lands occupied by Nevada, by nicholas b jacobsen, 2023.
- Created: 2023