An online platform creates a community around southern Nevada’s transitory creative life, but there’s a problem with its name.
Las Vegas
Posted inArt
Politics and Joy Come Together in an Artist’s Tribute to Her Murdered Father
Elena Brokaw’s work serves as a reminder of the tangible remains of American foreign interference and state-sanctioned violence in Guatemala — the pieces left over, decades after the collective American conscience has moved on.
Posted inArt
Meet the US Southwest’s Art Community: Chase R. McCurdy Says Artists Live “With a Certain Spirit”
An interview series spotlighting some of the creative community members in the US Southwest. Hear from artists, curators, and art workers about their current projects and personal quirks.
Posted inArt
In Las Vegas, an Artist’s Neon-Tinged Compositions Riff on Social Media Aesthetics
Though social media and the artsy sensibilities of ad marketing are cribbing the same aesthetic ideas, the details of Mikayla Whitmore’s photography are distinctly unique and homegrown.
Posted inArt
Queer Artists in Their Own Words: Denise R. Duarte Helped Lead the Charge for LGBTQ Equality in Nevada
LGBTQ Pride Month is now. Every day in June, we are celebrating the community by featuring one queer artist and letting them speak for themselves.
Posted inArt
A VR Exhibition Pays Tribute to a Long-Gone Vegas Casino
The Sands, opening on August 12, features works by 15 artists on rotating display in a one-to-one virtual replica of the Lower East Side gallery Essex Flowers.
Posted inArt
An Online Exhibition Explores the Cultural Legacy of Prohibition
The Mob Museum in Las Vegas explores the jazz, flappers, and mob violence of America’s Prohibition era in a new online exhibition.
Posted inArt
What Is James Turrell Doing in a Las Vegas Louis Vuitton Store?
SAN FRANCISCO — On a hot desert afternoon nothing sounds better than the arctic blast of a shopping center. Yes, it is a “dry heat,” but at 110 degrees, the relevance of humidity levels dissipates. So what store should you go to? If it were me, I’d call Louis Vuitton at City Center and make an appointment to see the new James Turrell! Number one: yes, you read that right — there is a permanent installation by Turrell at Louis Vuitton City Center. Number two: yes, you read that right — you will have to make an appointment to see the work.
Posted inArt
No Vacancy in Vintage Vegas
As an adult, I fly back to Las Vegas frequently and I relive my youth by driving around the city in a rent-a-car with my camera in tow capturing the city I once knew. In this piece for Hyperallergic, I am posting photographs from my ongoing photo documentary series consisting of Las Vegas hotel & motel photographs from 2007 to the present.
Posted inOpinion
Vegas Underground: A Destitute Community With Art
Underneath Las Vegas are 200 miles of flood tunnels that are also home to 1,000 people and an art gallery. According to the Daily Mail, “… the destitute and hopeless have constructed a community beneath the city and have even dedicated one section of tunnels to an art gallery filled with intricate graffiti.” [Daily Mail]
Posted inArt
The Last Boom Palace of the Second Gilded Age: Las Vegas & Libeskind
Daniel Libeskind, until recently, was one of the high-end architect’s of choice for war museums and somber memorials. Jagged, clean-faced metal-clad shapes torn by sharp little windows characterized a style that took trauma and produced memorial. The style was similar to Frank Gehry, but no curves to suggest the wry, playful smile of decadence at work — something I always see just beyond the magnificent and smooth sheet steel smiles of Gehry’s structures. And no 90 degree angles, either; everything is crooked, everything is asymmetrical, everything is torqued into the misshapen fragments that we piece together in turmoil to remember the parts of the past that are not pleasant. A friend who lives in Las Vegas said of the mall Libeskind designed for Las Vegas’s CityCenter: “I can never figure out how to walk around that building.”
Posted inBooks
One Bag, One Month, Two Books: Michael Cunningham on Art World Angst & Learning from Las Vegas in Vegas
With a month on a plane, I had boredom on the brain and packed what books I could to feed it. The worst decision I have made to date was to bring Michael Cunningham’s latest novel By Nightfall with me and read it over the first few days of jetting … because the book’s protagonist, Peter Harris, is an art dealer suffering from a crippling bout of nihilism and, when you’re setting out from New York City to look for what’s happening elsewhere in the art world, the least helpful thing to bring along is a book busy interrogating everything that underpins the creation, enjoyment, and dissemination of contemporary art. But I read on, attentive to detail in a fit of masochistic idiocy, and because I had room in my backpack for two books and the other one I brought was Learning from Las Vegas, which I wanted to save, of course, for Las Vegas.