The Nevada Museum of Art and the University of Nevada, Reno, are teaming up on an education collaboration.
UNR President Brian Sandoval and museum CEO David B. Walker signed an agreement on April 11 to formally designate the museum as a new location for UNR classes, beginning this fall. The agreement comes as the museum’s expansion—with additional library, exhibition and storage space—is opening in stages.
“We feel like it’s an opportunity for our students to have more firsthand learning within the museum,” said Kelly Chorpening, the UNR art department chair and a professor. “We’re trying to give people exposure to practices that maybe are quite ephemeral or are situated out in the world somewhere, and not in a gallery.”
For the Nevada Museum of Art, “practices out in the world” means a couple of different things. First, the museum’s Center for Art + Environment houses themed collections of artworks related to landscape, land art and land use. Examples include the Altered Landscape Photography Collection, along with archive materials documenting projects that originated outside of museums, including major land art installations, Burning Man, and the Great Basin Native Artists.
Second, those land-related materials aren’t just nice to have; they’re a big part of the museum’s identity. The NMA—which was founded in 1931, but only moved into its current building in 2003—is a comparatively young museum. According to a 2016 New York Times piece, “Some young contemporary-art museums in smaller cities … are trying to think outside the cookie-cutter approach to developing a program and a reputation at a time when art prices have made building a large, diverse collection almost a fool’s game.” So, rather than compete with the Guggenheim or the Met, Nevada’s museum, in the words of the Times, “has increasingly staked its future on becoming known for its expertise and holdings in materials related to art and the land, not just in the United States but around the world.”
The NMA has even commissioned a massive piece of land art, Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains—an innovative move for a museum.
Chorpening noted that a proximity to archival items such as notebooks, documentary photographs and letters will provide students with increased opportunities for research. She also said that students are likely to pick up some museum skills along the way.
“We would be trained on how to handle objects, or how not to handle them, according to whatever their rules are,” she said.
The newly formalized collaboration doesn’t just benefit art students; the idea is to encourage multidisciplinary study as well. Plans are in place for “Field Methods,” a geography class, to meet at the museum at the same time and room as “Field Studies,” an art class.
UNR psychology professor Lars Strother also plans to teach a class at the museum this fall. “His area of research is in perception, how the eye perceives things,” Chorpening said. “So, he’s actually using the museum as a resource for his students in psychology.”
Colin Robertson, the museum’s vice president of education, explained, “The rationale for this is to activate the museum’s collections, and that is inclusive of art collections, but also the Center for Art + Environment archive collections and the library collections that relatively few people know we have, especially locally. As we move into the new building, the Center for Art + Environment will be rebranded the Institute for Art + Environment. The library on the ground floor of the new building will take up about 3,600 square feet … and be a free and publicly accessible library.”
It’s not a lending library, so you can’t check out materials to take home; scholars and researchers tend to be the primary users. Some of the 1 million-plus items in the archives are also digitized and easily searchable online.
“I think the benefit to the university is interacting—helping offer students opportunities to interact with a growing and globally relevant collection,” Robertson said.
He said that while museum staff members won’t technically be teaching classes, they will be available to students in other capacities.
“My job is activating the connections between education and research,” he said.
The Nevada Museum of Art, at 160 W. Liberty St., in Reno, offers free admission for students of the University of Nevada, Reno; Truckee Meadows Community College; and Nevada high schools, with a student ID. Learn more at www.nevadaart.org.
This article was originally published on Double Scoop, Nevada’s source for visual arts news.