It was hard to miss last week’s RTC Clean Energy and Transportation Summit. Along with elected officials, utility executives and regulators, businesspeople, union representatives, and academics, there were electric buses parked out front.

Is this the first time Erik Beehn has connected his altered flower prints so clearly to his hometown?

The towering technicolor totems in the Las Vegas desert that comprise “Seven Magic Mountains” cost slightly over $3 million to construct.

Just off North Nellis Boulevard in front of Sunrise Mountain, you’ll spot something similar to the famous Seven Magic Mountains. Its creators dubbed it ‘Seven Magic Tires’.

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.

Two artists in the Las Vegas valley have created their own version of Seven Magic Mountains called Seven Magic Tires.

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.

Performer April Kidwell is an expert at portraying a frenetic female anti-hero. Her first major role was as Cleopatra at Caesars Palace. Kidwell’s dazzling smile, bedazzled bra and feathered headdress may have said “Vegas showgirl” more than “fierce queen,” but it paid her way through a theater and dance degree at UNLV. And more importantly, it set the stage for a career to come.

Nevada offers more than tax incentives. Our natural advantages include desert landscapes and sunny days perfect for filming and snow and mountains in Northern Nevada. In addition, the Las Vegas Strip could have been made for movies with the glamour and number of entertainers both performing in Las Vegas and making it home.

Now in its third year, the Bus to the Barrick program provides free transportation for K-12 Clark County School District children to visit UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. Most of the students in attendance have never been to an art museum prior to their field trip, and without free transportation and admission, many of them wouldn’t be able to afford the experienc