In 1942, in response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law Executive Order 9066. The law ordered the forced imprisonment of all Japanese Americans living on the west coast of the United States, which has the second largest population of Japanese people living outside of Japan.
William Weege, All American, Serigraph, 1976, Collection of the Lilley Museum of Art.
Guillermo Bert makes artworks that explore the endurance of immigrants who have left their home countries behind. In his multi-media and conceptually layered works, Bert addresses the ways in which colonization and capitalistic systems contribute to cultural displacement and the loss of Indigenous identities, traditions, and religions. Bert was born in 1959, raised in Santiago, Chile, and left his home country in the early 1980s before immigrating to Los Angeles in 1981.
The Lilley Co-Lab is an audience-centered curatorial experiment where we encourage visitors to the Lilley Museum of Art to share their thoughts, feelings, and responses to our permanent collection. We are entering phase two of this participatory exhibit: curators and staff are analyzing and interpreting all the audience feedback from the Lilley Co-Lab, and the permanent collection will be reinstalled in fall 2024. Stay tuned and keep participating as we work to revitalize the museum space, and share the Lilley Museum of Art’s collection in a new, expansive way.
"Birthed from the soil" is a new project by artist Iyana Esters. The exhibition presents a multidimensional portrait of Yawah Awolowo, known as Mama Yawah, an organic farmer, natural food chef, and midwife from the Black Belt of Alabama. This exhibition highlights the functionality of Mama Yawah’s life, demonstrating the beauty of ancestral knowledge of caring and working with the earth for generations, while living and tending to the community.
Injection Site: Making the Vaccine Visible, an ongoing series by Linda Alterwitz, invites viewers into the inner workings of the body, in a series of illustrations about how the COVID-19 vaccine reacts in peoples arms at the site of injection. In this remarkable photographic study, the artist uses a high-resolution thermal camera to document and track the body’s reaction to the vaccine. The resulting photographs reveal unique immunological responses, and provide an entry point into a dialogue about public health, personal choice, and our responsibility to one another.
Linda Alterwitz (b. 1960, Indiana) is a Las Vegas-based visual artist utilizing photography, collage, and interactive methods. Her practice focuses on envisioning the unseen rhythms of the human body and our relationship to the natural world. An informative fifteen-year exploration within the fields of science and technology led her toward an in-depth investigation of the nexus between nature, society, and the individual. Her current work integrates the authenticity of science and the communicative power of art, sparking dialogue on the intended and unintended consequences of humankind when we separate ourselves from our natural environment. Final works take the form of large format photographs, constructed images using non-traditional materials and woven tapestries presented in both traditional exhibition and immersive public installation experiences.
The sun’s movement across the sky and around the planet affects not only connection between brightness and shadow but also the emotional atmosphere of an environment. As a plein air painter, Phyllis Shafer captures the fleeting quality of light present in a landscape. Phyllis Shafer | The Nature of Time focuses on Shafer’s personal bond with nature and the reveling cycle of growth and death.
Thirty-Six Views of Japanese Art
March 15 - May 27, 2022
Guest curator: Brett M. Van Hoesen, associate professor and area head of art history, University of Nevada, Reno
The exhibition, “Thirty-six Views of Japanese Art,” draws from an alluring selection of the never-before-exhibited permanent collection of Japanese woodblock prints at The Lilley Museum of Art as well as from private collections of Japanese prints, paintings, ceramics, baskets and mixed media objects. The title of the exhibit, inspired by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai’s famous print series, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, explores a wide range of themes integral to Japanese art – including the representation of animals, landscapes, water, poetry, wabi-sabi, Kabuki theatre and much more.
