What Futures Will We Build Together?
By Wendy Kveck
The impetus for curating New Monuments for a Future Las Vegas for the Nevada Humanities Exhibition Series, currently on view at the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery and online at nevadahumanities.org, was my experience teaching the inaugural Las Vegas Seminar in Visual Arts. Subtitled Finding America in Las Vegas, the course was introduced last spring in the Department of Art at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.*
In the class, students and I considered how the landscape and cultures of Southern Nevada have influenced artists’ work over the decades. We looked at Seven Magic Mountains and Michael Heizer alongside Justin Favela’s Seven Magic Tires (with Ramiro Gomez) and Family Fiesta: Double Negative. We talked about art and activism and the role Las Vegas artists played in creating awareness around Nevada’s National Monuments Gold Butte and Basin and Range. We looked at Las Vegas artist-run spaces and projects including the Contemporary Arts Center, the Goldwell Open Air Museum, and Left of Center Gallery.
The students inspired me. Some grew up in Las Vegas, others were recent transplants, still experiencing the city as tourists of sorts, trying to discover what makes a place home. At the beginning of the semester, it was exciting and enlightening to see the city through the eyes of newcomers and native Las Vegans as we visited the Neon Museum, the Strip, Fremont Street, and other destinations. We reflected on Las Vegas through these excursions, discussion, readings, writing, and art.
When the pandemic struck and the Las Vegas Strip shut down the third week of March, Spring Break was dominated by anxious conversations and decisions about infection rates, COVID safety guidelines, and shifting classes and exhibitions to virtual space.
On our first day returning to school via distance-learning, visitors Emily Budd and Mikayla Whitmore presented artist talks in the Las Vegas seminar through Google Meet. Emily Budd shared her poetic project and research Memorial for Queer Rhyolite, a temporary monument to dreams in the dust, and Mikayla Whitmore described her photography practice documenting Las Vegas, sharing ghostly images of the desolate Las Vegas Strip and her sublime views of the desert as an artist and photojournalist. The discussions of their work, in that moment, were prescient: about safety, preservation, resilience, community and home, monuments and memorials made by badass queer women artists with vital stories to tell . . .
We recognized our roles in memorializing this moment, too.
In the eight months that followed, we collectively bore witness to the devastation of the pandemic, the politicization of face masks, the brutal killing of George Floyd at the hands of police, Black Lives Matter protests demanding justice and meaningful change, and an intensely partisan presidential election. Through it all, artists made art, artists organized, artists protested, artists created space, artists cared for one another. Their art and words have brought joy and laughter, have taught and deeply moved me.
What is a monument? Is it an object, an artwork, a painting, a sculpture, a landscape, a billboard, a gesture, a poem, a podcast, an arts center, a community?
As artists, what histories are we writing now through the work we make and the way we move through the world? What futures do we want to dream and build together?
*Strip Cultures: Finding America in Las Vegas by The Project on Vegas published by Duke University Press in 2015 was an entry point for the seminar.
Nevada Humanities Exhibition Series credit: Photos/New Monuments for a Future Las Vegas.
Double Down Blogger image credit/Mikayla Whitmore.
Wendy Kveck is an artist, arts educator, curator, and community organizer based in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is the founder of Settlers + Nomads, a collaborative curatorial project highlighting contemporary art and artists with ties to Las Vegas, Nevada, and a co-founding member of Desert Arts Action Coalition, a grassroots organization of local artists and advocates.
New Monuments for a Future Las Vegas is on display online as part of the Nevada Humanities Exhibition Series. A virtual New Monument’s curator and artists talk will take place virtually on Thursday, January 7, 2021, at 7 pm on Zoom. Register here. The exhibition will be on continuous display on the Nevada Humanities website.
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