You’ve never seen flower paintings like these before. The blossoms in Erik Beehn’s latest exhibition, Are We There Yet?, materialize and disintegrate before your eyes. You can almost inhale the fragrance before they drip, bleed and seep into the mysterious ground from which they bloom. They become ghosts of themselves. And then they come back to life.

At 4 pm on Thursday, August 8, 2019, Justin Favela, Mikayla Whitmore, and Geovany Uranda loaded stacks of brightly painted tires into three cars and quickly drove northeast from Las Vegas’ Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art.

This past spring, Brooklyn-based artist Amanda Browder was invited to Las Vegas as the inaugural Transformation Fellow in the Department of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where I teach. Browder makes monumental, vibrantly colored fabric sculptures that are designed and constructed to be draped and formed over buildings, activating the architecture beneath.

There are many arts for which Las Vegas is known. Contemporary art is not among them. The city has museums devoted to the Mob, and to its own famous neon signage, but it lacks a world-class art museum. When artist Wendy Kveck led school tours through the Guggenheim art collection formerly housed at the Venetian Resort, what bothered her most was not navigating kindergarten-through-12th-graders through a casino, but what she discovered about the kids’ experience of art: “Many of my students had never been to an art museum in their entire life,” she says.

Someone in the impromptu barbershop quartet jokes about performance art being “all bullshit,” setting off a rumble of laughter in an audience of artists, performers, art lovers, and writers, all familiar with the conflicted nature of the medium. It’s another evening of RADAR, a new, regular Downtown performance event. Frequently not as palatable as more traditional painting and sculpture, nor easily defined or understood, performance art can be a difficult medium to establish in a local art community, though it’s been a fixture in some cities for years. Still, it’s natural that an art movement such as this would grow in the shadow of the Strip — and it feels long overdue.

The Nevada Arts Council is unveiling a new traveling photo exhibition – “Home Means Nevada” which will start its journey in the hallways of the Nevada Legislature during the 2019 session.

The work of Las Vegas artist Erik Beehn is on display at the Volunteer State Community College Art Gallery. The exhibit will be an installation, meaning that Beehn will build some of the art on location. The show is based on the novel “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

New year, new artistic endeavors. What does 2019 have in store for the Las Vegas arts and culture scene? What do our city’s creative folk wish to see in the new year? We polled some of the local movers and shakers, asking them to share their cultural New Year’s resolutions, hopes, plans and wishes. Here’s what they had to say:

Beyond the tourist corridor’s fl ash, Las Vegas’ art community has been making, collecting and showing great art for years. From established organizations to those in the making, from the Downtown gallery scene to blue-chip public art all over the city, art in Las Vegas is fascinating, varied and defi nitely on the rise. Of course, the excitement is fueled by people, and here we profi le the local art world’s most pivotal players, from its public faces to those moving the needle behind the scenes.

No matter where he stands, Kent Twitchell looks to be in scale with the environment. At Lam Gallery in Los Angeles, he greeted friends who had come to the opening reception of Kent Twitchell: The Man Who Paints Giants, a show filled with photographs, renderings, and sketches of his signature massive California murals, including the eight-story “Harbor Freeway Overture” he completed in 1993; one of his smaller works, “Nelson Mandela Monument,” installed on a piece of the Berlin Wall in 2014; and a photo of his two-story “The Freeway Lady” from 1974, a portrait of the adored matriarch for 101 freeway commuters that was recreated at Los Angeles Valley College and dedicated Thursday.

People here can no longer marvel at the public display of one million dollars, be dazzled by “the world’s largest rhinestone” or even watch showgirls prance in ostrich-feather headdresses. All have vanished.

Just because it looks easy doesn’t make it so.

Consider the works of renowned abstract artist Ellsworth Kelly, who died at 92 late last December in his native New York state.

- See more at: http://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/arts-culture/ellsworth-kelly…