The Mojave Project

The Mojave Project by Kim Stringfellow
Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, University of Nevada Las Vegas

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is proud to present The Mojave Project, an experimental transmedia curatorial project exploring the physical, geological, and cultural landscape of the Mojave Desert.

Created by the Joshua Tree-based artist Kim Stringfellow, this exhibition immerses the viewer in a unique and complex landscape, discovering surprising connections between seemingly unrelated sites, themes, and subjects. By weaving interviews and reportage together with her own personal reflections, Stringfellow and her project contributors share stories that illuminate the diversity of people inhabiting the Mojave desert region.

The Mojave Project makes the artist’s research tangible through a multitude of curated objects and ephemera including books, archival documents, mineral specimens, and symbolic artifacts. The incredible multiplicity of the desert landscape is investigated through more than 80 photographs organized around The Mojave Project’s themes: Desert as Wasteland, Geological Time vs. Human Time, Sacrifice and Exploitation, Danger and Consequence, Space and Perception, Mobility and Movement, Desert as Staging Ground, and Transformation and Reinvention.

A comfortable reading space invites the viewer to page through four collections of field dispatches in the printed Mojave Project Readers, Volumes I – IV. The voices of Mojave residents who were interviewed for the Readers can be heard in twenty-five audio tracks available for personal streaming throughout the exhibition.

The Mojave Project includes a number of free public programs, including a series of themed online panel discussions funded by a 2022 California Humanities for All Quick Grant. The size and depth of this exhibition represents Stringfellow’s ongoing research-based practice of chronicling land use in California and the Southwest through immersive works such as There It Is—Take It!, a self-guided audio tour that leads the audience through the controversial history of the Los Angeles Aqueduct system, and Jackrabbit Homestead, an outdoor installation that offers insights into the Small Land Tract Act of 1938. Jackrabbit Homestead was featured in the 2021 edition of the prestigious biennial exhibition, Desert X. With The Mojave Project, this groundbreaking artist is striving to create a comprehensive repository of knowledge celebrating the contemporary Mojave Desert in all its complexity. Visit mojaveproject.org to learn more.

The Mojave Project runs from Feb 25 - July 23, 2022. Entry to the museum is free. Details of the panels and guided tour will be posted on the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art website.

Support for The Mojave Project is provided by California Humanities, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, San Diego State University, and a gift from Ed Ruscha. Additional project support was provided through a Guggenheim Fellowship awarded to Kim Stringfellow in 2015. The Mojave Project is a project of the Fulcrum Arts EMERGE Program. Project partners include KCET Artbound, UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, Nevada Museum of Art, LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), MOAH (Museum of Art & History) and The Mojave Desert Heritage & Cultural Association.

About Kim Stringfellow
Kim Stringfellow is an artist, educator, writer and independent curator based in Joshua Tree, CA. Her work bridges cultural geography, public practice and experimental documentary into creative, socially engaged transmedia experiences. She is a 2016 Andy Warhol for the Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow and a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Claremont Graduate University in 2018. Stringfellow is a Professor at San Diego State University’s School of Art + Design.

Learn more about The Mojave Project in its entirety by visiting their interactive website.

Article on "The Mojave Project" by Jason Scavone for UNLV News Center