The approved amphitheater for Rancho is expected to be Artown’s main stage (eventually)
Washoe County has greenlit a new amphitheater for Rancho San Rafael Regional Park.
The preliminary plan calls for an open-air stage with a green room, new restrooms and lawn seating for up to 2,500. (For comparison’s sake, the Pioneer Center seats 1,500.) It will be located near the park’s arboretum, southeast of the dog park pasture—close to where Artown’s temporary main stage was installed last summer.
Once the amphitheater is completed, it is expected to be Artown’s main venue each summer—although no promises are being made about the summer in which that arrangement will begin. This year, with Wingfield Park still potentially closed for bridge construction, Artown again plans to bring a temporary stage to Rancho.
Artown director Beth Macmillan said that the more performance venues there are in town, the better. She likes this one for its proximity to UNR and its open space. “It feels rural out there, but you’re in an urban environment,” she said.
The first round of funding for the amphitheater project comes from a $1 million American Rescue Plan Act allocation that the Board of County Commissioners approved in 2024. At its March 17 meeting, the board approved an $866,000 agreement with DOWL INC—an engineering firm with branches in several Western cities including Reno—to design the amphitheater. An additional $10 to $15 million will be needed to complete the project. A Washoe County spokesperson told the RN&R that the county will be responsible for the capital campaign to raise the funds.
Once the venue is built, its programming and administration will be handled by Washoe County Regional Parks and Open Space, which already oversees the stages at Bowers Mansion Regional Park and Bartley Ranch Regional Park.
The newest Neon Line sculpture is Italian marble, not faux neon
A new outdoor sculpture brings a vibe that Reno has not yet seen the likes of. Until this week, the artworks that the J Resort has installed along West Fourth Street—the grizzly bear made of pennies; the stainless-steel rocket ship—had all debuted at Burning Man.
On Wednesday, workers with a crane installed a marble sculpture near the J’s new north expansion, and this one looks more like it could have come from a sculpture garden in upstate New York or Switzerland than the Black Rock playa.
The artist, Richard Erdman, who works in Vermont and Italy, specializes in marble sculptures up to the size of a small house that seem to defy the laws of giant chunks of metamorphic rock. While he contends with the physical reality of multi-ton blocks, his design hallmarks are fluid swoops whose spiritual home seems to be somewhere closer to cursive or calligraphy.
The new piece, titled “Belladonna” (“beautiful woman” in Italian), is carved from a single piece of marble quarried in Italy. Its shape resembles a softly pointed, gently twisting, italic figure 8.
For some fascinating background on Erdman’s medium, I recommend this segment from 60 Minutes, which gives airtime to both sides of the debate over whether using robots to carve marble is a sacrilege or a welcome technological trend. Erdman, who long carved by hand and now uses a combination of robot and human labor, weighs in toward the end. The footage of a marble quarry at the peak of an alp is an amazing site and a good morsel of visual context to bring with you to Fourth Street.
Beck Baumann’s Sierra Arts show, ‘Pawn Shop,’ glitters and gleams
Back during the 2008-era recession, Beck Baumann lost her job and decided to turn her crafting hobby into a business. Now, she’s deep into an art practice that involves covering Styrofoam forms (ideally fished from the trash and carved to her needs) with sequins and beads (thrifted whenever possible). She takes ordinary but beloved objects—fruit bowls, avocado toast, pie with whipped cream—and applies her disco-slick-yet-still-somehow-granny-core-hip-handmade touch to every inch of all of them.
With each exhibition, Baumann busts out a new theme. Sequined foods, sequined mouths, sequin foods in mouths—that kind of thing.
This month, she has a solo show at Sierra Arts’ downtown Riverside Gallery called Pawn Shop, packed with her shiny versions of items you might just find in a pawn shop—guitars, a boom box adorned with Candy Land trinkets, and a sparkly pay phone rendered as realistically as could possibly be done in sequins.
The show is advertised as being up through May 4, but Sierra Arts is closed on Sundays and Mondays, so you have until Saturday, May 2 to see it.