Nevada Museum of Art presents a live seismic earthwork by Ken Goldberg

RENO, NV.- The Nevada Museum of Art presents ReBloom: Reno, a new site-specific earthwork by Bay Area artist Ken Goldberg, created in collaboration with Kabir Shah, Sanjay Krishnan, Fernanda Viégas, and Martin Wattenberg. On view October 10, 2026 through February 7, 2027 in the Thomas Lee Bottom Gallery, the installation draws on live seismic data from a local seismometer station, transforming the earth's constant motion into circular blooms of color that suggest fields of flowers.

“As an artist and roboticist, I use new technologies to express the contrasts between what is natural and what is artificial, the liminal spaces between reality and representation. I’m excited to present this installation created uniquely for the Nevada Museum of Art,” said Ken Goldberg.

For centuries, artists have worked to represent land that is too vast to control, combining firsthand impressions of the natural world with concerns about human encroachment and a respect for the sublime, an experience of awe and vulnerability to forces larger than ourselves. ReBloom: Reno extends that tradition into the present, offering a new way to visualize our shared environment: not as a fixed image, but as a living system, rendered moment to moment from data the earth itself is generating right now.

Chester Arnold, Fin du Siecle, 1992. Oil on canvas, 62 ¼ x 82 ¼ in. (158.12 x 208.92 cm). Nevada Museum of Art, gift of Susan Cummins © Chester Arnold

COLOR PALETTE

ReBloom: Reno is part of a long tradition of landscape painters and earth artists who have sought to represent the expansive scale of the natural world. Here, that tradition is folded directly into the work's material: the never-repeating bands of color in each bloom are drawn from five landscape paintings in the Nevada Museum of Art's permanent collection, by Chester Arnold, Sandow Birk, Maynard Dixon, Jean LaMarr, and Phyllis Shafer. The five paintings are displayed just outside the installation. Inside, ReBloom: Reno samples from each painting for one minute at a time, so that all five are represented every five minutes, an evolving palette drawn directly from the museum's own walls.

Among the source paintings, Maynard Dixon's 1927 desert scene contributes a dusk palette of dusty gold sagebrush, violet mountain silhouettes, and a pale, glowing sky. Jean LaMarr's painting, depicting four figures riding in the bed of a green pickup truck against magenta mountains and a warm orange sky, lends ReBloom: Reno some of its boldest, highest-key color. Chester Arnold's densely worked wetland landscape, featuring a gnarled, broken tree set against golden marsh grass and a storm-darkened sky, contributes a deep register of umber, olive, and slate.

ReBloom: Reno is the latest chapter in Goldberg's ongoing series of site-specific seismic installations, and one of two major museum presentations for the artist this year: his surveillance installation Demonstrate is concurrently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Ken Goldberg in collaboration with Kabir Shah, Sanjay Krishnan, Fernanda Viegas, and Martin Wattenberg, screen capture from ReBloom: Reno, 2026. Live feed projection, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artists. Image courtesy of Ken Goldberg © Ken Goldberg

SEISMIC DATA

ReBloom: Reno draws on live seismic data from the NN.JVTV.HNZ seismometer station on the University of Nevada, Reno campus. By linking artistic interpretations of the land to real-time geological activity, ReBloom: Reno creates an evolving and unpredictable experience that extends beyond the museum's walls, connecting viewers to the pulse of the earth itself, its past, present, and potential future, at a moment when social and political forces, including recent developments in artificial intelligence and data centers, continue to place new pressures on the natural world. ReBloom: Reno offers an immersive meditation on fragility, hubris, and geological endurance.

Special thanks to Cleat Zeiler of the Desert Research Institute for the ongoing live data feed, and to University of Nevada, Reno professor Jim V. Taranik, in whose honor the seismometer station is named. Thanks also to JoAnne Northrup, Catharine Clark, David Nachum, Vijay Vasudevan, and Woj Matusek for their work on previous seismic installations with Goldberg.

Maynard Dixon, Edge of the Amargosa Desert, 1927. Oil on canvas, 15 3/8 x 19 ½ in. (39.05 x 49.53 cm). Nevada Museum of Art, gift of Houghton family in memory of Samuel G. Houghton.

Ken Goldberg is an artist and William S. Floyd Distinguished Professor of Engineering at UC Berkeley. He uses new technologies to express the contrasts between what is natural and what is artificial, the liminal spaces between reality and representation. His artworks include a live garden tended by a robot controlled by more than 100,000 people via the internet, a 1-millionth scale silicon model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, installations generated by live seismic data, an award-winning ballet, and short documentary films. Goldberg's work has been exhibited in over 70 exhibitions, including at the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Center, the Walker Art Center, Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), ZKM (Karlsruhe), the ICC Biennale (Tokyo), the Kwangju Biennale (Seoul), Artists Space, and The Kitchen. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Recent works include a collaboration with dancer Catie Cuan on Breathless, an eight-hour performance with an industrial robot alluding to the lifting, cleaning, caring, and maintaining motions performed by essential workers each day, presented by National Sawdust in Brooklyn in 2023 and at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 2024; and Ancient Wisdom for a Future Ecology, a 2024 collaboration with artist Tiffany Shlain for PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the Getty's Pacific Standard Time initiative in Los Angeles, later presented in an extended version at the di Rosa in 2026. In 2026, alongside ReBloom: Reno at the Nevada Museum of Art, Goldberg's surveillance installation Demonstrate is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Goldberg is Professor of Engineering and Art Practice at UC Berkeley and Founding Director of Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium. He is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. For more, visit goldberg.berkeley.edu/art.