Aurore Giguet wasn’t worried when funding cuts last year threatened to turn the Marjorie Barrick Museum on the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus into an endangered species.
If art can sleep, there’s a lot of it snoozing peacefully in the secure storage room at the former Las Vegas Art Museum space in the Sahara West Library. The museum has been in hibernation since it closed in February 2009 after chronically low membership and dwindling donations gradually shut the contemporary art space’s doors.
Art never disappears. It only takes vacations. Maybe three years is more of a sabbatical. So it is with the collection of the Las Vegas Art Museum, which succumbed to the economy and shuttered its doors in February 2009. Now, its long-homeless inventory will land at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
For nearly three years, the Las Vegas Art Museum collection has been looking for a good place to hang. The long-anticipated announcement today that LVAM is teaming with the UNLV College of Fine Arts to exhibit the LVAM collection this year is a relief to any Las Vegan concerned that the museum’s closing undercut the city’s attempts to enhance its cultural image.
The Barrick transforms Staff efforts to turn the Barrick Museum into an art museum prove successful when UNLV announces that Barrick is now part of the College of Fine Arts.
UNLV’s Barrick Museum has been through a lot of changes during the past year: losing its funding, raising money to support itself as an art museum and now becoming part of the College of Fine Arts.
The craziest thing happened at the closing of a Picasso retrospective at San Francisco’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1940. Call it a sit-in of sorts. More than 1,000 visitors refused to leave until they’d “had their fill,” according to the museum.
The Barrick Museum at UNLV is now officially part of the College of Fine Arts, the school announced today. The news comes after Aurore Giguet, the museum’s program director and biggest proponent for the museum’s focus on art, kicked up the art component considerably and scheduled multiple rotating exhibits, something she began as a way to fill the void created by the Las Vegas Art Museum’s closure in 2009.
Once a natural history museum, the Barrick Museum on the University of Nevada Las Vegas campus has changed its focus to art in an attempt to fill the void left when the Las Vegas Art Museum closed its doors in early 2009.
The applause portion of the Barrick Museum auction was still underway. Some of us were lined by the payment table, credit cards in hand, when a young reporter for the college newspaper was soliciting information on the benefits of benefit auctions, particularly this one.
In the 1940s and ’50s, a hysteria snowballed across the U.S., leaving in its wake the powdery ashes of burned books. Which books? Comic books. Not just bloody crime and horror books, but also the Batman tales (deemed “homoerotic”) or the scantily clad Wonder Woman.
While Las Vegas continues to mourn the closing of the Valley’s only art museum more than two years ago, the Barrick Museum forges ahead with an art focus, asserting with each exhibit and awareness campaign that it will not falter.