When Melissa Melero-Moose went on elementary- and middle-school field trips to the Nevada State Museum in Carson City in the 1970s and ’80s, she saw something that made her cringe every time: the Native Americans exhibit.
“It was naked mannequins. It was humiliating,” said Melero-Moose, who is a Northern Paiute enrolled with the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, as well as an abstract painter, and the co-founder and director of Great Basin Native Artists. “It’s typical of most museums from my mom’s era.”
Displays like that one tend to stay on view, she said, “until a community comes in and says, ‘You know, let’s have something that looks like we’re still alive. Let’s not have just these dusty baskets that portray us just as these artists who came from ancient times.’”
For a couple of decades now, Melero-Moose has been one of the region’s main drivers of these conversations. Before the Lilley Museum of Art opened at the University of Nevada, Reno, the director consulted with her about ways to showcase Indigenous artists. In 2015, she and Ben Aleck started Great Basin Native Artists, a group that makes sure work by Native artists from Nevada and neighboring states is exhibited and kept in the spotlight. In 2019, she donated GBNA’s growing archive—which contains files on each artist, exhibition posters, magazine articles and the like—to the Nevada Museum of Art, where she has since been a consultant and adviser for occasional projects.
By now, Melero-Moose is something of a one-woman “museum.” She curated the new exhibition, This Is Us: Contemporary Art From the Great Basin Native Artists, which opened late in November at the Nevada State Museum, asserting artists’ individual styles, stories and identities. The show includes dozens of paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, basketry, beadwork and works in other mediums. It’s a beautiful selection—a far cry from the exhibit that embarrassed her as a kid. And there’s a surprising detail that you won’t learn about in the wall text: All but a few pieces are from Melero-Moose’s own collection.
Before you conjure a mental image of an “art collector,” consider that she lives in a small house in Hungry Valley on Reno Sparks Indian Colony land outside of Spanish Springs, far off any beaten path of commercial activity, and this small house contains no “gallery room” or “great hall” to speak of. While personal art collections are often amassed, at least partially, for the purpose of showcasing one’s wealth and taste, this one was accumulated for more practical reasons. Melero-Moose realized years ago that, if she was going to be able to put on exhibitions successfully without a large institution behind her to make studio visits, transport artwork (sometimes large, and often from remote locales, sometimes from as far as Arizona or New Mexico), and produce inventories, bios and other paperwork in short order, she was going to have to have all of this artwork on hand. (If you are entirely new to art-world goings on, I’ll put this in context for you: This is the first time I’ve ever heard of such an arrangement.)
“I have to work either within my collection, or just a few artists can participate,” Melero-Moose said. “It’s too hard to wrangle everybody together, especially when half of them are rural.”
At this point, Melero-Moose’s collection functions like one held by a museum or a homeowner with a great hall. Works like Monique Sol Sonoquie’s “Post-industrial work basket,” which looks like a traditional fishing basket but is made of plastic-coated wire cables, has traveled to Santa Fe with Melero-Moose and recently returned from being on loan in Los Angeles.
“And Stewart (Indian School Cultural Center and Museum in Carson City) is borrowing my Jacqueline Rickard beaded basket that I had purchased from her when she was here for the (Nevada Museum of Art’s) basket symposium,” Melero-Moose said. A piece she owns by GBNA co-founder Ben Aleck is on long-term loan to the Lilley.
“They officially borrowed it from me,” she said. “I was like, whoa, people are borrowing from my collection. How cool is that!”
This Is Us: Contemporary Art From the Great Basin Native Artists is on view at the Nevada State Museum, at 600 N. Carson St., in Carson City, through October 2026. Museum admission is $10 for adults, and free for people 17 and younger, and museum members. Learn more at carsonnvmuseum.org. To learn more about Great Basin Native Artists, visit www.greatbasinnativeartists.com.