Past Exhibitions

Explore past exhibitions by internationally recognized artists displayed at the Lilley Museum of Art by year.

2025

To Hold a Form: Art with sound in the work of Jennie C. Jones, LaRissa Rogers and Naama Tsabar

Aug. 19 - Nov. 15, 2025

This exhibition explored the boundaries between sound and silence, examining how artists use listening and noise to engage cultural, political and phenomenological questions. The works invited audiences to consider how sound reverberates through history and interacts with physical form as a means of resistance and expression.

Naama Tsabar Performance

To Hold a Form installation photos

Plates with faces, feet and hands painted on them hung on wall in front of a platform with microphones pointing at it
"To Hold a Form" painted on black wall next to staircase
Shadows of hands painted on wall and two mini trampolines on floor
Guitar taken apart on floor
String being held by metal piece
Purple and silver guitars taken apart on white floor
View of To Hold a Form exhibit
Black screen hanging on the left wall with two other exhibits in the background
Close up of a plate with 3d painted face
Wooden bench in a room with art hanging on the walls
Glass doors of the Lilley Museum of Art leading to the "To Hold a Form" exhibit
Artwork on walls

On Beauty

Sapira Cheuk

Aug. 21 - Nov. 20, 2025

Displayed in the Front Door Gallery, On Beauty presented delicate abstract paintings by Sapira Cheuk, created with sumi and India ink, whose contrasting material properties produced depth, tension, and subtle negotiation within monochromatic compositions. Through this interplay of media, the work explored enduring questions around beauty, impermanence, and embodied ways of knowing.

Photograph of tree trunks in Whittell Forest

Whittell Forest - A Living Laboratory

Bobby Lee

Jan. 1 - May 30, 2025

This exhibition, on view in the Front Door Gallery, presented geotagged photographs by Bobby Lee that documented the diverse landscapes of the Whittell Forest and Wildlife Area on the traditional homelands of the Washoe people. The work offered a deeper look at the forest’s ecological and cultural richness through careful observation and place‑based imaging.

Geometric graphic design that is slightly scrambled

Off Kilter, On Point: Art of the 1960s

Colorado State University

Jan. 14 - May 23, 2025

Off Kilter, On Point: Art of the 1960s highlights the breadth and depth of mid-century artworks in the permanent collection of the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art at Colorado State University. The exhibition showcases a wide range of media and styles, from abstraction to pop art, and presents novel juxtapositions that reflect the tumult and innovations of their time, exhibiting most of the major stylistic trends in the art of the 1960s in the U.S. and Europe.

2024

Paper strung together and hung from the ceiling against a white background

Resilience: A Sansei Sense of Legacy

Group exhibition

Sept. 5 - Nov. 15, 2024

Told from the perspective of Sansei Japanese Americans, this exhibition brought together artists whose work reflects on the legacy of wartime incarceration and its enduring emotional and cultural effects. Through diverse artistic approaches, the exhibition explored resilience, withheld histories and the urgency of addressing racism and collective memory.

Grid-Body-Place

Candace Nicol Garlock

June 25 - Aug. 3, 2024

Candace Nicol Garlock’s retrospective highlights an interdisciplinary practice that merges printmaking, painting, photography and sculpture to explore the interconnectedness of bodies, systems, and communities. Tracing early works and formal experiments with grids, Grid-Body-Place emphasized relationship, collaboration and the artist’s sustained commitment to creating in dialogue with others.

Photo from exhibit of person standing above a mountainous landscape looking out

THE COUNTER/SELF

Group exhibition

Feb. 29 - June 1, 2024

This exhibition brings together artists who construct and perform alter egos to examine how identity is formed, negotiated and resisted. Through photography, video, performance, and mixed media, the works challenge assumptions about gender, race, nationhood and power by confronting the performative nature of the self.

2023

Image of a newspaper in the background with cut out people in the foreground

Layer Upon Layer

Sept. 3, 2023 - Jan. 7, 2024

Artists throughout history have often used found objects, scraps and even garbage to tell stories in their work. This use of non-traditional media may have come from material necessity, or as a critique of traditional methodologies in art making. This display of works from the Lilley Museum of Art permanent collection traces the lineage from the Surrealists to contemporary art practices, where artists use collage in creative, political and sometimes subversive ways.

Image of two sumo wrestlers wrestling overlapped with a collage of torn magazines

Groundwork

Guillermo Bert

Sept. 5, 2023 - Jan. 7, 2024

Groundwork presents the work of Guillermo Bert, whose multimedia practice examines migration, endurance and cultural displacement shaped by colonization and capitalist systems. Drawing on personal history and broader Indigenous experiences, the works reflect on identity, loss and survival across borders. A companion exhibit was also on view at the Nevada Museum of Art.

The Lilley Co-Lab

The Lilley Co-Lab was an audience-centered curatorial experiment where we encouraged visitors to the Lilley Museum of Art to share their thoughts, feelings and responses to our permanent collection. This was the beginning of phase two of the participatory exhibit, then curators and staff analyzed and interpreted all received feedback, leading to the permanent collection being reinstalled in Fall 2024.

A summer squash held by two hands resting in a lap draped with a colorful and patterned fabric

Birthed From the Soil

Iyana Esters

Oct. 23, 2023 - Jan. 1, 2024

Displayed in the Front Door Gallery, Birthed from the Soil presented a multidimensional portrait of Yawah Awolowo, highlighting ancestral knowledge, community care, and connections between land, body and Black diasporic histories.

Oh, Joy! The Collection of Margo Piscevich

Margo Piscevich

June 5 - Aug. 12, 2023

This exhibition traces the collecting history of local collector, Margo Piscevich, featuring remarkable works from regional, national and international artists.

Black and white image of a person to the side, with the sleeve rolled up to show the shoulder

Injecton Site

Linda Alterwitz

March 27 - June 25, 2023

Displayed in the Front Door Gallery, Injection Site: Making the Vaccine Visible presented Alterwitz’s thermal photographs that visualized the body’s response to the COVID‑19 vaccine and prompted reflection on public health and collective responsibility.

Cattail plants wrapped with colorful fabric

Self Without Interpretation

Linda Alterwitz

March 1 - May 13, 2023

This exhibition explored how Alterwitz integrated art and science to investigate the body’s relationship to the natural world through large‑format photographs, constructed images and immersive installations.

2022

Oil painting of river with fall leaves and bushes

The Nature of Time

Phyllis Shafer

Oct. 13, 2022 - Jan. 27, 2023

The sun’s movement across the sky and around the planet affects not only the 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. The Nature of Time focuses on Shafer’s personal bond with nature and the reveling cycle of growth and death.

Old photograph from World War II era in Bengal, India of two children smiling outside straw hut

Following the Box

Guest curators: Jerri Zbiral and Alan Teller

July 15 - Sept. 16, 2022

Following the Box unfolds as a visual mystery, beginning with an anonymous soldier’s photographs from wartime India and extending into new works by contemporary artists responding across cultures and generations. Together, the images reveal photography’s power to connect past and present while sparking reflection, memory and dialogue.

Thirty-six Views of Japanese Art

Guest curator: Brett M. Van Hoesen

March 15 - May 27, 2022

This exhibition presents a rare selection of Japanese woodblock prints and related works drawn from The Lilley Museum of Art’s permanent collection and private collections. Inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty‑six Views of Mount Fuji, it explores key themes in Japanese art, including landscape, animals, poetry, Kabuki theatre, and the aesthetics of wabi‑sabi.

2020-2021

Senses of Migration

EN MEDIO

July 9, 2021 - Jan. 15, 2022

Senses of Migration presented international artists whose work framed migration as an embodied human experience shaped by movement, loss and arrival.

Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities proudly sponsored this exhibition.

Not a Muse, An Artist

Leonor Fini

Jan. 29 - May 15, 2021

Not A Muse, An Artist positioned Fini’s work alongside her Surrealist peers to assert her central role in the movement and challenge gendered exclusions in modern art history.

The City of Reno proudly sponsored this exhibition.

Watch more exhibition videos

View of art gallery with different art pieces

My Own Personal Ghost

David R. Harper

Sept. - Dec. 2020

My Own Personal Ghost presented Harper’s immersive installation as an intentionally unfinished studio environment that foregrounded process, experimentation and artistic discovery.

Nevada Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the City of Reno proudly sponsored this exhibition.

Four pieces of artwork displayed on wall

Djinong Djina Boodja | Look at the Land that I Have Traveled

Shane Picket

Jan. - Sept. 2020

Focusing on the most significant phase of Picket’s practice, the exhibition traced his move toward expressive abstraction, shaped by personal resilience and the enduring effects of colonization on place and identity.

2019

Nolan Preece

Nolan Preece

Oct. - Dec. 2019

This retrospective exhibition surveyed more than four decades of Nolan Preece’s photographic practice, tracing his sustained experimentation with early processes and chemically driven techniques as a foundation for image‑making.

Piranesi and the Eternal City

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

June - Sept. 2019

Spanning three decades of work, this exhibition examined Piranesi’s evolving etching practice and its lasting influence on perceptions of Rome through dramatic scale, atmosphere, and imagination.

See Her

Dyani White Hawk

April - May 2019

This exhibition examined Indigenous women’s artistic legacies, using materials and motifs drawn from both traditional practices and abstraction to critique hierarchies shaped by colonization and capitalism.

Terma: Images from the Ear or Groin or Somewhere

Sameer Farooq and Jared Stanley

Jan. - March 2019

As the inaugural exhibition at the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art, this project challenged the authority of museum spaces by playfully disrupting conventions of collecting, display and institutional knowledge.