What I Love about Nevada
By Bobbie Ann Howell
We hoped to get as many people as possible thinking about this question: What is it we love about Nevada, what is it that other people across the state love about Nevada? Does someone in Ely, or Elko, or Denio, or Cal-Nev-Ari love what I love?
Things I love about Nevada that maybe you love too.
I love the deep luminous neon blue that fills the sky at dusk.
I love that we have very dark places that are quiet and remote where you can smell the sage, or pine, or creosote in the wind, as well as places that are bright with lights, filled with visitors from across the globe who have found their way here.
I love that people move here, move away, and end up moving back.
I love that even though a Joshua Tree is spikey and pokey it always has its arms stretched out to welcome you to its special places between the desert floor and the mountains.
I love the colors that fill every vista, dawn to dusk, lush purples, delicate sage greens, reds, blues, deep yellows, and bright whites. Colors found in the mountain ranges, one after the other across wide slopped valleys filled with all kinds of rocks, plants, trees, lizards, horned toads, birds, hawks, eagles, and of course bugs. If only we could see it as they all do.
Oh how I love the desert crust and how enduring and yet delicate it is, how it took time and cataclysmic natural events to form it. How I hope the developers and miners and other explorers of our vast natural resources see its astounding beauty. The tiny flowers, cacti, and creatures that move among rocks that were blown from the depths of the earth by volcanoes whose hot springs let us know they are still alive.
I love the contours along the tops of the hills and mountains that are a record of the vast sea that once enveloped us and left its mark in the bands along the landscape as the water receded trapping the treasures now found in the fossil record. A record that is speaking to us now as the landscape tells us the story of water in this land on the east side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and downriver from the Rockies.
I love that it is a land that keeps its rivers flowing within the Great Basin, holding them close for safekeeping, capturing the snow from the mountains to move deep down into the ancient aquifers that have kept us alive.
I love the colors in an alluvial fan as it draws its designs across a valley from the rocks and minerals pulled from the mountains.
I love that we can see the geology and landscape stories right before us, that the oldest of bristlecone pines guard the high ridges and the pupfish guard the depths of natural springs.
I love the story of the desert bighorn sheep told across the rocks, in drawings that the people who have lived here since time immemorial have given us.
I love looking at all 1,045 postcards that are a part of the exhibition Nevada P.S. I Love You Postcard Project: Love Notes from Across the Silver State—now on display at the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery and online—and feeling the time and care that went into each one. I love making more postcards as often as I can with my friend and colleague Patty Dominguez who helped make this exhibition possible. Go ahead and make a postcard yourself, and mail it to someone you love today.
I love all the people who cherish this place as their home, who vow to care for it and each other.
Nevada Humanities asked Nevadans ages 5 to adult to create a handmade postcard and send it to us with a note about what they love about Nevada. This Nevada Humanities Exhibition is part of an ongoing project to connect people across the Silver State with a little art and a little love. Thankfully there was plenty of love and you can take a look at all postcards submitted for the exhibition and find out more things we all love about Nevada.
The Nevada P.S. I Love You Postcard Project: Love Notes from Across the Silver State exhibition is on display at the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery through November 24, 2021 and always viewable online.
The exhibition will travel in 2022:
December 15, 2021 – February 4, 2022
Great Basin College Gallery
1500 College Parkway, Elko
February 18 – March 10, 2022
Truckee Meadows Community College
7000 Dandini Blvd., Reno
Artwork/Bobbie Ann Howell.
Bobbie Ann Howell is a Program Manager for Nevada Humanities, working statewide from the Nevada Humanities Program Gallery located in Las Vegas. She is a visual artist who is from Nevada and grew up in Lee Canyon, and Las Vegas, Nevada. Her bachelor of fine arts is from Abilene Christian University, Abilene Texas. She received her master of fine arts in sculpture and drawing from Southern Illinois University. Howell works from her studio, B.E.S.T. Arts 4 U, in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she continues to teach and create. Her artworks are exhibited in regional and national exhibitions and collections. In 2018 she received the Nevada Arts Council Visual Art Fellowship Award.