The Following the Box exhibition is made possible with the support of:
Edna B and Bruno Benna Foundation; Hilliard Endowment; The Kipper Family Foundation
Past Exhibitions
Following the Box
July 15th – September 16th, 2022
Guest curator: Jerri Zbiral and Alan Teller
About 70 years ago, towards the end of World War II, a U.S. soldier stationed in rural West Bengal grabbed his Speed Graphic 4x4” press camera, hopped into a jeep and went off into the countryside to photograph. Who was he? Why did he leave his airbase to do that? We have no idea. What we do know is that he created remarkable images — sensitive portraits of villagers, respectful views of temples, documents of everyday life, a few military scenes. And how did a shoebox full of 127 of his beautiful negatives and prints made in India end up at an estate sale in Chicago many years later? Curators Alan Teller and Jerri Zbiral made a serendipitous find and have been "following the box" ever since.
Following the Box, initially funded through a Fulbright award, is a mystery story, explored through an art exhibit and a documentary film. The film features interviews with 12 contemporary artists, 10 Indian and two American, who created work specifically inspired by this chance purchase of old photographs half a world away. Their artistic response can be seen in the exhibit form of this project. The exhibit and film illustrate the point that photographs are both windows to another time and place and mirrors of ourselves and our culture.
Each artist included in this project interpreted these images in their own unique way, shaped by their personal artistic vision and by the cultural net that envelops us all. This exhibit is an aesthetic and cross-cultural exploration of historic imagery, a celebration of universal power of photography to elicit memory and spark conversation. Following the Box is both a mystery story and a visual dialogue between Americans and Indians over time, ultimately a celebration of the power of art.
Thirty-Six Views of Japanese Art
March 15th - May 27th, 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.
EN MEDIO | Senses of Migrations
July 9th, 2021 – January 15th, 2022
What made you leave? What did you have to abandon? How did you leave? What did you take with you? What happened when you arrived?
EN MEDIO | Senses of Migrations will attempt to stimulate dialogue, raise consciousness about issues related to the act of crossing the U.S.-Mexico border through all the facets of art. The exhibition includes artists from all over the world that explore the theme of this show through music, photography, painting, video and performance art.
Participating artists: Rafael Blanco, Ana Teresa Fernández, Guillermo Galindo, Xandra Ibarra, Tom Kiefer, Kiara Aileen Machado, Jean-Paul Perrotte, Josué Rivas.
Curated by Vivian Zavataro and Jeannette Martinez in collaboration with Dr. Deborah Boehm.
En Medio Installation Video
En Medio Exhibit
This exhibit was sponsored by the following:
Leonor Fini | Not A Muse, An Artist
January 29 – May 15 2021
Leonor Fini | Not A Muse, An Artist explores the life of Leonor Fini through her art. The exhibition includes more than 40 artworks from the artist and also explores Fini’s relationships with her contemporaries through their oeuvre. Pieces from Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, René Magritte, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Georges Bracque, and Victor Brauner will be displayed together with Fini’s works.
The intent of the show is to bring the spotlight to one of the most talented artists who created an incredibly valuable array of art pieces within the Surrealist canon. We hope to expose our visitors to the life and oeuvre of an overlooked artist, while inviting the viewer to ponder on the unequal representation of women in artistic movements throughout time.
Leonor Fini installation videos
Leonor Fini videos
This exhibit was sponsored by the following:
David R. Harper: My Own Personal Ghost
September - December, 2020
The scene is reminiscent of a marvelous feast, a brimming banquet hall that appears in a state of interruption from completion. It is as though someone was called to the kitchen in the midst of setting the table. The air of incompletion may be jarring to a viewer accustomed to entering a museum or gallery space with the expectation of encountering “properly” displayed, fully resolved works. This very notion is one that artist David R. Harper confronts in his installation My Own Personal Ghost.
Harper challenges his audiences to experience his work as a snapshot of a studio space frozen at the height of productive fervor. Harper’s vision is of that moment of high gear, full capacity rumination, and the visual cacophony that surrounds the cultivation of ideas and very busy hands. It is not the tidy, quiet wrapping up of a conceptual thought, but the idea in its moment of full bloom. There is yet more room at the table for potential and discovery.
Originally organized at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, this traveling exhibition is organized with The Lilley and accompanied by a new catalogue with original essays by Faythe Levine and Paul Baker Prindle.
This exhibit was sponsored by the following:
Shane Pickett: Djinong Djina Boodja | Look at the Land that I Have Traveled
January – September, 2020
Shane Pickett
Shane Pickett was an aboriginal artist born in 1957 in the farming town of Quairading, about 100 miles east of Perth, Western Australia. Since the mid-19th century these lands have been stripped and cleared by invaders and renamed the Wheatbelt. In result, the region became central to agriculture in the southwest, leaving little trace of the pre-colonial topography that had long sustained the Nyoongar people. Despite all this, Pickett grew up in a unique Nyoongar environment.
Surrounded by athletic siblings but suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, Pickett gravitated to art from an early age. In 1988 he reminisced, "I can’t recall a time I didn't have a pencil or brush in my hand." It was in the final five years of his life that Pickett broke from the studied realism of his youth, toward an expressive form of gestural abstraction. This exhibition serves not as a survey of Pickett's three-decade long career, but rather, a glimpse of the most significant period of his career where he reached the peak of his abstraction.
Nolan Preece
October – December, 2019
Nolan Preece has been a photographer for over 40 years and has devoted his work to understanding and mastering early photographic techniques, as well as new processes such as the chemigram (1980) and experimental processes he discovered in the late 1970s using cliché-verre. His materials include platinum, silver gelatin, cibachrome and digital prints. His work is a part of several collections including the Nevada Museum of Art, Logan, Utah and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, Utah.
Nolan uses the cliché-verre technique by smoking the surface of the glass plate with a kerosene lamp. He further continued his experimentation by seeing what would happen if he dripped mineral spirits onto the smoke, a process that creates a chemigram, which, in result, creates beautiful images.
The work presented in this exhibition was curated and hand-picked by the former director of The Lilley, Paul Baker Prindle and together serves as a retrospective of Nolan's work from 1979 to the present (2019) and showcases his journey working with chemistry.
Piranesi and the Eternal City
June – September, 2019
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Born in 1720 in the Republic of Venice, Giovanni Battista Piranesi originally trained as an architect and draftsman. He began training as an etcher with Giuseppe Vasi in Rome around 1740. By 1747, the body of work included in this exhibition had begun and was worked on for roughly 30 years until his death in 1778. During the creation of this work Piranesi quickly developed a bold style and became known for his dynamic compositions, high contrast and drama. He was believed to have created 135 etchings in total by hand.
Overtime as the copper plates aged, they were put through a process to be re-bit, which is a process involving placing the plates into an acid bath which deepened each line, allowing for more ink to sit within the marks. A newly re-bit plate resulted in a darker heavier print. Piranesi would also add cross hatching and other marks to his compositions thereby adding to the complexity, drama and high contrast between dark and light areas. Later in his career, Piranesi also purchased his own printing press in which its mechanisms produced heavier looking prints as well.
The figures present in the compositions are the everyday people and visitors in contemporary Rome. Many of them are up to no good. Through close observation, viewers may notice figures relieving themselves on ruins, drinking intoxicants and engaging in other types of vagrancy. Piranesi's interest in the sublime is depicted through contrasts of scale between buildings and figures, the range of the figures' activities, in the pulsating skies and the natural overgrowth overwhelming the manmade structures depicted. In result, Piranesi was largely responsible for creating an idea of Rome that inspired scores of later Romantic-era artists.
The Lilley is extremely grateful to the University of Nevada, Reno Special Collections for gifting these prints to our permanent collection. Also, through the generosity of Hon. Frankie Sue Del Papa and support from the City of Reno Arts and Culture Commission, College of Liberal Arts, School of the Arts, Department of Art, Associated Students of the University of Nevada, Reno and the Graduate Student Association, for the first time in over 30 years these works have had the opportunity to be seen together once again.
See Her
April – May, 2019
Dyani White Hawk
See Her, both an exhibition title and a body of work, encouraged viewers to increase and expand their ability to see and acknowledge indigenous women who have contributed to the artistic history of this land. A history that has been undervalued and remains taught from the perspective of European and Euro-American males, which, in turn, reflects the hierarchies made possible through processes of colonization of land and people. This work also aims to emphasize the need for proactive engagement and behavior that will help us prioritize recognition, respect and value for all people.
Hawk's work incorporates these histories through her use of materials, techniques, symbolism and motifs to promote dialogue and to critique the value systems and hierarchies made possible through capitalism and colonization upon, people, land materials and resources. She references artistic legacies that originated in this land that are still practiced by native women and men as well - such as porcupine quillwork, beadwork, weaving and basketry that are painted on top of materials, motifs and techniques common to modern abstraction.
Hawk reflects her own experiences and draws connections with the world around her. Through her passion for beadwork and quillwork, her practice critically examines North American art history and the broader history of this continent, being particularly interested in how we as people create value systems, how and why we bond to them and how we go about evaluating and evolving our guiding values. See Her aims to assist viewers to think about our collective mother. To see the resilience of the women in their lives. To see our own family history and labor in order to realize our likeness. To realize that we are all equal and capable to see others and practice compassion.
Terma: Images from the Ear or Groin or Somewhere
January – March, 2019
Sameer Farooq and Jared Stanley
Being the initial exhibition for the grand opening of The John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art at the University of Nevada, Reno, this exhibition challenges the authority of these exhibitions spaces, as well as the purpose of institutional collection and display practices, while simultaneously poking fun at them.
Several aspects of the exhibition space have been disrupted and is full of questions. From oddly placed text hidden behind the objects, hidden in darkness and even placed on the floor. To a heap of boxes of files, paperwork and documents that imagine the fictional world of a curator's space as they collect and dig through information and historical documents, working to find and preserve ideas.
Why do we care about tangible artifacts more than products of the imagination? What does it mean to investigate the ephemeral? How can we trust the authority of language, and who speaks on behalf of whom? In the attempt to restructure historical narratives in a museum, what gets lost? Terma invites viewers to reconsider preconceived notions of what a museum or gallery space is and what it can be. To imagine a world where objects speak with us and one another, where stories are hidden in the shadows and in our imagination, rather than through ordinary label text.