RENO, NV.- The Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art launches this month with a series of highlights including the appointment of William L. Fox as the Center’s first director, the formation of an international advisory group and the acquisition of archives from the Land Arts of the American West, as well as never-before-seen Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria archival materials from The Deiro Collection.

The Center for Art + Environment builds on the Museum’s long history of involvement with the subject which includes 700 photographs in a signature collection titled The Altered Landscape: The Carol Franc Buck Collection which focuses on the changing topography of the West, as well as the Museum’s recent exhibition Chris Drury: Mushrooms | Clouds as part of its ongoing exhibition series related to art and the environment.

The establishment of the Center follows The Art + Environment Conference, a two-day event that brought together notable artists, architects and designers, as well as 18 presenters including renowned artists such as Vito Acconci and Lita Albuquerque and scholar W.J.T. Mitchell. In addition to a sold-out audience of 170, live blogging from the event by Extreme Media Studies added an additional 250 live participants to the Conference.

“The success of The Art and Environment Conference last fall provided the momentum to formalize the vision for the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art,” said David Walker, Executive Director and CEO, Nevada Museum of Art.

The Center for Art + Environment is a leader in supporting the practice, study and awareness of creative interactions between people and their natural, virtual and built environments. The Center serves as a programmatic focal point for the Nevada Museum of Art and will work in tandem with the development of the Museum’s exhibitions, collections, programs, facilities and online presence. The work of the Center is threefold: to encourage the creation of artworks expressing the interaction between people and their environments; to convene artists, scholars and communities to document, research and analyze such artworks; and to increase public knowledge of these creative and scholarly endeavors. During its first year the center will inaugurate a research exhibition series, public lectures, and begin to make public the significant archival materials being collected.

“The combination of these events – archival acquisitions, the selection of the Center’s first director along with the launch of the Center – is confirmation that the Nevada Museum of Art is the ideal institution to generate and lead the research, scholarship and creation of art related to environments,” Walker said.

William L. Fox , Named Director, Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art
William L. Fox has been called an art critic, science writer, and cultural geographer. He will be responsible for developing a long-range plan for the Center's growth and programming, including an exhibition and publications series, residencies for artists and scholars and partnerships with other institutions around the world. Fox has published ten books on cognition and landscape, fifteen collections of poetry, numerous essays in art monographs, and articles and poems in more than seventy magazines and journals. Among his nonfiction titles are Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent; In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle; Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty; The Black Rock Desert; and, The Void, the Grid & the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin. Born in San Diego, Fox grew up in Reno, and earned a degree in English Literature from Claremont McKenna College. Continually active in the fields of scholarship and poetry, he worked at the Nevada Arts Council from 1979 until 1993, where he was the executive director for seven years.

“It is a real privilege to have Bill serve as the first director for the Center for Art and Environment,” said Walker. “For more than three decades Bill has been a highly-respected critic, scholar and creative practitioner. His expertise and leadership will generate global art and environment dialogue.”

Advisory group to the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art
With the formal establishment of the Center, an international advisory group has been created and includes: Matt Coolidge, Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation; Bill Gilbert, Director of the Land Arts of the American West program; Lucy Lippard, cultural critic, Geoff Manaugh, senior editor of Dwell magazine and author of BLDBLOG; and Steve Wells, Ph.D., president of Desert Research Institute (DRI). The advisory group meets on an ad-hoc basis and offers strategic planning and connectivity to ongoing art and environment initiatives around the world. Nevada Museum of Art staff members participating on the task force include Ann M. Wolfe, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Nevada Museum of Art and author of Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl; Colin Robertson, Curator of Education, Nevada Museum of Art and author of several essays on the intersections of art and environment; and Fox.

Acquisition of archives and archival materials
One of the principle points of the Center’s mission is the acquisition, preservation and scholarly presentation of related materials including art and environment project archives. The Center launches with two significant gifts: the acquisition of archives from the Land Arts of the American West, as well as never-before-seen select project archive materials from land-artists Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria as part of the The Deiro Collection.

“The acquisition of these items is a remarkable accomplishment for the Center,” said Walker. “The American West and specifically Nevada is known internationally as the birthplace of the Earthworks or Land Arts movements. Collecting and preserving these materials at the Center for Art and Environment ensures that the legacy of these artistic movements is continued.”

The Deiro Collection is a body of material held by private collectors G. Robert and Joan Deiro in Las Vegas. An early friend and business associate of well-known land-arts artists Michael Heizer and Walter de Maria, Deiro amassed a collection of sketches, correspondence, daily log books and photographic plans of such popular works as de Maria’s Lightening Field and Heizer’s City – Complex One, which is located in Nevada. These items, as well as candid photographs and reference materials including books and exhibition invitations and catalogues were gifted by Deiro to the Museum in early 2009.

The Land Arts of the American West is an interdisciplinary field study program at the University of New Mexico and the University of Texas Austin which expands the definition of land art through direct experience with the full range of human interventions in the landscape. Its work considers a wide range of interactions between humans and the environment such as the inscriptions of pictographs and petroglyphs to the construction of roads, dwellings, and monuments, as well as traces of those actions. Included in the gift of archives from The Land Arts of the American West are artworks, physical and digital journals and records of the program’s work since its founding in 1971.