The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is pleased to present Lined and Torn: Paper Works from the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection.

Lining and tearing represent two contrasting ways of looking at paper: as a flat space where deliberate marks can be created, or as a physical material that can be sliced, ripped, and shaped into sculptural pulp or crumpled waves. The artworks in this exhibition exemplify and combine those two ways of thinking, while also using the treatment of paper as a reflection of the emotional themes that can be seen throughout the adjacent East Gallery in The Emotional Show. 

Edda Renouf uses the surface of a white sheet as the material that generates her lines as well as the surface that foregrounds them. Larry Zox’s forms respond to the commercially-printed grid on a sheet of graph paper. Daniel Samaniego divides his paper into the shapes of broken shards to emphasize the “shattered” emotions in the faces of his realistic horror mask drawings. Kara Walker’s black cut-paper silhouettes mimic the domestic portrait craft of the Civil War era to draw attention to the roots of the present-day biases that move her and power her work. In the hands of these artists paper becomes a purposeful collaborator, a substance that shapes the way their art looks, feels, and creates meaning.

Lined and Torn features a number of new additions to the collection, including a suite of Eri King drawings inspired by Las Vegas casino carpets and Walker’s satirical 1997 artist book, Freedom, a Fable: A Curious Interpretation of the Wit of a Negress in Troubled Times. Other works are drawn from the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art’s portion of The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, and a group of collection pieces that were once held by the Las Vegas Art Museum.

This exhibition includes artworks by Stephen Antonakos, Lynda Benglis, Lee Cannarozzo, Salvador Dalí, Natalie Delgado, Claudia DeMonte, Andreana Donahue, Ashley Hairston Doughty, Gerald Gooch, Eri King, Branden Koch, Mark Kostabi, Candice Lin and Marcus Civin, Ayanah Moor, Joseph Nechvatal, Michael Ogilvie, Pablo Picasso, Michael Reafsnyder, Edda Renouf, Daniel Samaniego, Lance L. Smith, Brent Sommerhauser, John Torreano, Kara Walker, and Larry Zox.

Lined and Torn: Paper Works from the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection will be on view in the West Gallery of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art at UNLV starting Aug. 28, 2023, with an opening reception on the evening of Sept. 1.