Melissa Melero-Moose, who curated the new exhibition, ‘This Is Us: Contemporary Art From the Great Basin Native Artists’ at the Nevada State Museum, realized years ago that, if she was going to be able to put on exhibitions of Native artist work 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 deal with paperwork in short order, she was going to have to have all of this artwork on hand. On behalf of Great Basin Native Artists, she started purchasing it.
