Marjorie Barrick Museum Podcast

Unknown Speaker 0:00
The following special programming aired in collaboration with the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art on the campus of UNLV, and does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 jazz and more the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Leilu Hernandez 0:21
Hello and welcome to the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art radio show. My name is Leilu Hernandez, and I'm here today with Davey and Deanne. We're going to be talking about a number of things, but mainly the hands on how to community workshop that is going to be running at the museum from now until the middle of 2025 thanks to a grant from the Nevada Arts Council. We ran a series at the start of this year, just for students, faculty and staff, a series of workshops, and we decided to organize another set of workshops for the whole community. While you're listening to this, our next set of workshops will be running from October 16 through 19th. It's going to be a photo montage collage with Diane Bush. But first to introduce everyone here again, my name is Leilu Hernandez. I'm a creative practice student, and I also work at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. Davey and Deanne, if you guys want to introduce yourselves, yeah, hi.

Davey Parks 1:17
I'm Davey Parks. I also work at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, and I am a senior film student at UNLV.

Deanne Sole 1:22
And I'm Deanne. I work at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. I am not a student at all.

Unknown Speaker 1:31
All right, so I just wanted to talk a little bit about the workshop series we have going on right now. Do you guys have anything to say about the ones that we ran last year?

Unknown Speaker 1:43
Not the ones we ran last year, but recently, we had one that was cyanotypes, that was hosted by Ali Fathollahi, and he did a really amazing job. It was so popular, and it was, it was during the first, first or second week of school, and it was a really a great way to get a lot of people into the museum. And what we saw was a lot of people who, again, had never really, you know, used cyanotype dye, who weren't really familiar with the practice, who really, just like, came in and just like sunk their teeth into it. They made so much cool art and so many cool projects. People started bringing in not just paper, but people brought in like socks and like T shirts and stuff to dye, which was so interesting. So people were like, going in with socks and coming out with a pair that had, like, the Mona Lisa's face on it, covered in like fish bones or whatever. And that was really exciting. So, yeah, yeah,

Unknown Speaker 2:41
something I love about the workshops is that they introduce art to people that have just never even thought about making art before, and about how art can be a number of different things, like sun prints, crocheting, collaging, all sorts of different stuff. So that's something I really like about them,

Unknown Speaker 3:02
Definitely. I mean, I love the fact that the first two workshops we had were so different. You know, you've got the the cyanotypes, which, of course, are flat and blue, and then you've got the crochet where people were creating these really dynamic, three dimensional, squishy, blobby sea creatures, which was great

Unknown Speaker 3:21
Our art bar. Our art bar is now the home to a number of jellyfish and octopus. Yeah, so adorable and cute. And I love seeing what people are making with the crochet.

Unknown Speaker 3:33
Yeah, absolutely. And seeing people come there day after day and sit and learn, you know, and really apply themselves, was great.

Unknown Speaker 3:43
And so it's, you know, really exciting seeing, you know, maybe person comes in on Monday, and then on Tuesday or Wednesday, they come back with a friend, and then that friend comes back on Thursday or Friday with a few more people, and seeing it sort of spread, and that social aspect of art that is like, not just, you know, showing people art, but making art together. It really like Leilu said, like, brings the community together.

Unknown Speaker 4:07
Yeah, I hosted a crochet workshop last year. It was my first time teaching a workshop or hosting an event like that, and the turnout was just absolutely amazing. We had so many people show up. It was our most popular workshop that we ran, and I was so surprised that people, like, sat down, and I was teaching people how to do granny squares and beanies. And I was really surprised people sat down and made whole beanies and made projects. It was just really amazing.

Unknown Speaker 4:37
That's kind of what you focus on, right?

Unknown Speaker 4:41
Fiber arts, yeah, I've started making art around like around this time last year, I had a friend teach me how to crochet, and I just kind of got hooked on it. It. I just fell in love with it, and I started experimenting with different mediums. And yeah, it was it's just been pretty amazing. I actually wanted to ask you, Davey, how you kind of got into working at the museum as a film major, and how film and the museum kind of coincide with each other.

Unknown Speaker 5:27
Yeah. So I think in terms of when people think about film and cinema, they think it as an art form, but they don't really often associate it with the kind of symbiotic way it exists with, like, you know, like art and drawing and sculptures and stuff like that. My focus in film, we used to be screenwriting, but then I got really into production design, which is, you know, the designing of sets, things like props and stuff, costume design. And I was really interested in how, you know, the people who make sets on a lot of my favorite movies do the things that they do. How do they, you know, pick what color wallpaper they want for the set, or, like, how a certain prop should look. And so I started talking to a lot of different production designers. And the great thing about being an artist is, if you ask an artist, like, how did you become an artist, they all have different answers, right? There's no like, formula like, Oh, you do this many years of school and then this many years of, you know, postgraduate, and then you are suddenly a certified artist. So a lot of the different production designers I talked to had different answers, but one of them mentioned that he had worked in an art museum as an art handler, and I thought that was really cool, because part of being a production designer is knowing a lot about a lot of different things, and you know, what better way to learn that than from a museum? So after talking to that production designer, I became a volunteer at the museum, and I was a volunteer for about six months, and then I was brought on as a student worker, and I've learned so much just about art in general, that I've not been able to apply to my film sort of practices. So I've learned so much about, you know, how to employ color, shape, texture, things like that, onto film. And so it's really interesting because I'm working with these sort of three dimensional spaces on sets and things, and how that translates into the two dimensional aspect of film and how you watch film. And so, like, I've learned a lot about, you know, like, I was at an exhibition at one of the Clark County Public Libraries, and one of the artists had created these pieces with fake mold and moldering food, and they had used yarn and crochet materials to make the mold. And about two weeks later, I was on a set where we needed food that was moldy, and, you know, everyone's trying to figure out how to do it. And I was like, Well, you know, I just saw this art piece that used fake mold, and so I was able to use that. So, yeah, it's a pretty symbiotic relationship.

Unknown Speaker 7:59
Thank you. Deanne, do you have any projects you're working on at the museum at the moment that you'd like to share with us?

Unknown Speaker 8:05
Oh, at the museum, I'm mainly writing blurbs and promotional materials for different things. Actually, we've got some really great shows coming up next year. We're going to have a group show based around the idea of color and color being, say, either put on the surface of something or being an intrinsic part of something. So say, the difference between painting acrylic paint on a canvas where you're you know, the color is exterior to the surface, it's just on it, and, say, something made out of cast glass, where the glass itself is the color, so the whole form of the object is color. You know, you can't take the two things apart. So I've been working on some text that's going to be around that we're going to have a solo painting show with an artist who's been making paintings in Las Vegas for a very long time. I think she's going to come in tomorrow to the museum. Yeah, we're going to have a lovely conversation with her and and figure out more about how she liked things laid out and which pieces she'd like to be included. So that is my big upcoming project, in my own head, is just prepping for that interview tomorrow.

Unknown Speaker 9:21
Yeah, I feel like I took a lot of inspiration from my time working at the museum, and I think Davey has as well, because we're currently curating an exhibition that's going to take place at available space art projects in December. Davey, do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Unknown Speaker 9:42
Yeah, for sure. I like that you brought up kind of the relationship between the museum and our curatorial projects. We are doing a show that focuses focusing, focuses on the sort of queer history of pop art, and how this idea of pop art, and what pop art is, is really rooted in sort of, like mid century perspectives from the, you know, 20th Century, and how it hasn't really updated. You know, we think of pop art, we think of Andy Warhol, we think of bright, you know, repetitive prints, and it hasn't really been updated since. And so what we wanted to do was we wanted to ask a bunch of artists who, you know, are from our generation, who were queer, and ask them what their relationship with pop culture was, and ask them to make art about it. And we have some really exciting pieces that are going to be in the show, and some really insightful perspectives on the queer relationship to pop culture, because I think that's something that people know but don't really think about. You know, gay men love pop culture. Queer people love pop culture. It's something that's really intrinsic to, I think, to our culture as a whole. And so what we'll be seeing is sort of this, what's the word, intersection of how all these different identities come together and share a community over our bonded love of music, film, TV, the day to day, things that we all share. So I'm really excited about it.

Unknown Speaker 11:21
Yeah, I'm also very excited about it. I'm really looking forward to seeing the show coming together. I've just learned so much from working at the museum, and it really inspired me to reach out to Davey with this project proposal, and we've been putting something together. I'm just really, I'm learning so much from this experience, from this experience of curating and co-curating with Davey and also working at the museum.

Unknown Speaker 11:55
Oh, yeah, there's, there's a huge um intersection between the museum and how we got inspired through it. You know, in the last show, there was Miguel Rodriguez's piece with the Grimace sculpture through the museum. I've gotten to meet Marty Kreloff, who's one of my favorite artists now, and he was a big pop artist towards, like, kind of the later end of the pop wave movement, or pop art movement. And he inspired me, you know, as someone who didn't really consider themselves, you know, like a gallery artist, like someone who like makes art to be like presented, to really explore that. Because, you know, I'm not a great illustrator, like, I don't really have a lot of practice and, you know, drawing forms and stuff, but he really encouraged me to explore, like, conceptual art and sculptural art, and think about what that might look like for someone with my background in film. And so that's something I owe to the Barrick.

Unknown Speaker 12:57
So, yeah, that's fantastic. Where's your show going to be?

Unknown Speaker 12:59
It's going to be at Available Space Art Projects, ASAP.

Unknown Speaker 13:05
It's at New Orleans Square, yeah, the historic downtown area.

Unknown Speaker 13:11
Gotcha. The sort of Commercial Center area, Yep, got it. Now, I love that gallery. They really have some fantastic shows, so I am very much looking forward to finding out what you guys do with that space.

Unknown Speaker 13:24
I'm excited too. I think they do a really good job of highlighting a lot of really great local artists. They just this month, had a show with Jessica Oreck, who runs the office of collecting and design there, and she's wonderful. I always recommend people check her stuff out. She is so talented, not just in her film, but her curation and the sort of works that she does. So, yeah.

Unknown Speaker 13:48
That was such a beautiful show. Still is a beautiful show at the time that we're recording it. It's, I think it's still there. I think she's doing an artist talk. I mean, this is going to go to air on Sunday, but I think she's doing an artist talk on Friday, or something like this. Yeah, looking forward to that. I mean, talking about film editing and her pieces in that show, I suddenly think of the way that she's taken little images and cut them up and arranged them in grids and shapes and things like that. And I wonder if that idea of, you know, taking snippets and rearranging them and meticulously putting them in some sort of order is another commonality between, you know, the visual arts and films.

Unknown Speaker 14:37
For sure. You know it's, it's arranging, yeah, to have an effect, it was like, you know, the iconic dolly shot of the cloud going across the eyes like so I keep bringing up this word, but like, semi like, they're, they're so intertwined. Yeah, that idea of, you know, cutting and pasting and editing and choosing what makes what, it's literally just curation of visuals and sound and stuff. So, yeah, I. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Is there any other shows you've been to lately, Deanne, that really stand out to you?

Unknown Speaker 15:08
We've been I've been kind of busy, uh, putting together a show of my own recently, so I've had trouble actually getting to other people's things. I have a list of shows that I'd like to see, I'd like to see Linda Alterwitz's show at Sahara West. I'm going to get to that. I know that Nuwu art has a show at the moment. Louis Varela-Rico, I'm really bad at pronouncing his name, but he did that. That sculpture downtown, but I think it's on the median strip between two pieces of road, and it's like two Paiute baskets, sort of sliced into sheets and sort of put together so that they merge. And I know he's done work for Burning Man and things like that, so I'm really curious to see what he's done that's going to fit into a gallery, because so much of his work that I've seen elsewhere has been so big. What about yourselves? Is there anything you've seen?

Unknown Speaker 16:07
I'm trying to think, I think the last show that I went to was it's unfortunately over now, but oops, two curated by Bailey Anderson at Core Contemporary. I know me and you were both in that show, but there was so many pieces that were just the show was all about making mistakes. And I love that. I love the idea of making mistakes and kind of making art that isn't perfect, and showing that,

Unknown Speaker 16:41
yeah, I like the perspective they had when they were approaching people for that show and they talked about the mistake being something that brings you to something else. You know, it's not as if you make a mistake and you say, okay, that's the end of everything. I'm devastated. I can't move on you. You know, there was the whole idea of taking what you'd done with that mistake and transforming it into something else, or saying, Okay, I'm going to diverge now completely, because I see this is not my path. This has shown me this. So the mistake as a step in your progress towards something. I love that way of looking at it. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 17:22
Another show that I saw, I don't know if it's still up, but the faculty show, yes, it is, yeah. I really recommend that. It's just really amazing to see the people, like some of my professors, in the show and see the kind of art that they create, because sometimes I just have no idea what they make, and it the art. The show was just incredible. I really, I really recommend that show as well.

Unknown Speaker 17:51
Yeah, I'm trying to remember now when it when it does end, but I'm pretty sure it's up for a while. Yeah, I think I believe, yeah, I

Unknown Speaker 18:00
think so.

Unknown Speaker 18:02
And there's a show in Grant Hall, since we're talking about galleries on campus, there's one in Grant Hall gallery at the moment with a student org called Digital Darkroom. And I think that ends on Friday. So again, unfortunately, by the time this goes to air, it's going to be over. But I've talked to to a couple of members of that RSO, I'm really impressed with them. They really put in such an effort to get their their their members' photographs seen. It's great.

Unknown Speaker 18:32
Yeah, I really like the community of the art community that we have at UNLV. I feel like there's always different shows going on. And I believe that the BFA cohort has an upcoming show. So I'm really excited to see all the cohort members.

Unknown Speaker 18:55
I think they've got some of their work at the Student Union. You know, the second Oh yeah, that wall on the second floor you go up the stairs there is, I think they've I was by there the other day and I saw a whole row of new paintings. I think that's them. It's a really painting heavy cohort. I noticed, yeah, when I was visiting their studios, lots of figurative painters. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 19:18
I'm really excited to see what upcoming work they have.

Unknown Speaker 19:24
Yeah, absolutely.

Unknown Speaker 19:28
All right. Well, thank you everyone for listening, and don't forget to come to the Photomontage Collage with Diane Bush. October 16 through the 19th The workshops are supported in part by the Nevada Arts Council, a state agency which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency in the state of Nevada, the.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai