The Nevada Museum of Art in Reno is the state’s only accredited art museum, and now there’s a lot more of it. A $60 million addition, the Charles and Stacie Mathewson Education and Research Center, opened in August. Paid for entirely with private funds, the expansion added 50,000 square feet, for a total of 120,000, including a new research library, classroom, rooftop garden, and plenty of extra gallery space.
Despite all this newness, continuity has been a top priority. “What we’ve done that I think is really incredible is that, by working with the same architect, we’ve connected a 22-year-old building with a brand-new building, and it all looks the same,” museum CEO David Walker says. “On the outside, you could see some articulation of the new with the old, but when you come in, we’ve redesigned so much of the interior that it feels like just one big museum. And we now own the whole block.”
Walker says this while standing in front of one of the museum’s newest fixtures, “Centuries of the Bristlecone,” an 11-foot pendulum clock that measures time as we perceive it as well as in bristlecone time, an homage to the state tree and one of the planet’s oldest living organisms. Walker calls it a work of art set inside a work of art. It also speaks to the museum’s emphasis on land art, the focus of its internationally recognized Institute for Art + Environment.
The expansion has been a decade in the making, Walker says. “We’ve been working with the architect for many years to look at how we could better accommodate and facilitate the vision for the museum to have a better connection to the community, and to do a better job of presenting the permanent collections, and to really put a fine point on our commitment to education, lifelong learning, and access,” he says. “And here we are standing today in what I think is one of the more beautiful buildings, certainly, in Nevada.”
Will Bruder is the architect. He designed the original museum, which opened in 2003. With his background in sculpting, he says, he wanted to create a building that would not just serve a purpose but also reflect the community. So, he looked to Nevada’s rugged landscapes.
“Things that tie the original building with this building, material-wise, are its blackness,” Bruder says, “with this inspiration from the nature of the Black Rock Desert and looking at how the sun plays on the natural geology.” Lining the exterior of the building are dark-gray rectangles, almost black, placed in long vertical lines.
They randomly alternate between smooth and craggy textures, like rock strata. They were produced specifically for this project, and Bruder worked side-by-side with the builder to ensure that each one was placed just so.
“It’s unglazed, it has this blackness, it has its iridescence, but it’s like belly buttons,” he says. “There are innies and outies. So, when you look closely at the skin, 50 percent of the skin is backward; it’s the back of the tile that’s out, rather than the inside. That’s how you get a play of variability, and again you’re playing with a geological metaphor. Anyway, you’re trying to create something that feels so organic, so natural that it just happened.”
Currently on display are the works of Judith Lowry exploring Native American creation stories, legends, and traditions. There are shows of photography and pottery. There’s a small exhibit about Langston Hughes and his time in the Biggest Little City; it features a recording of the famed Harlem Renaissance poet. Another exhibit tells the story of Nevada’s prehistoric past.
Museum visitor Peter Barber and his wife, Karen, took in the sights as they walked down a hallway where toy dinosaurs hang from the ceiling and cast shadows on the wall.
“I’m just so proud of Reno,” Barber says. “That they’re able to do something like this ... that they have people here who would contribute to this, and the museum leadership, must be amazing. Hard to believe this is Reno, Nevada. It is pretty special.”
“Obviously, the stereotypes about Reno still persist, very much, and some of them are true,” museum-goer Alissa Surges says. “I mean, Reno is a town that’s definitely changing, but I think the museum sort of reflects this kind of mix of what Reno has to offer.”
For Walker, the expansion underscores something he has known for a long time: Despite the Nevada Museum of Art’s relatively modest size compared to other institutions around the globe, it’s having an outsize impact on the art world.
Part of that renown comes from the museum’s permanent collections, which include more than 2,500 pieces of altered landscape photography. The museum has also expanded its Art of the Greater West Collection, which showcases Indigenous art and culture.
Those collections also help pay the museum’s $8 million annual operating budget.
“People think, ‘Oh, you work at the art museum, how much fun that must be,’” Walker says. “Well, it is fun, but it is a lot of work, too. There’s a lot to it, but we see that about 20 percent of our annual operating revenue comes from donors and foundations in L.A., Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and so forth, and that’s because the museum has a reputation. When you do great work, you get support in places you never expected.”
