The UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum had housed tortoises in its front lobby but when it transitioned from a natural history museum to a fine arts museum in 2012 they created an ArtBar, a place for kids to create art.

Clutching Toto, shoeless Dorothy wanders a landscape where purple frogs and blue seals roam gaily (and symmetrically) and an orange turtle whispers from above. A smiling puppy decked with a bindi peeks over the marker-drawn hillside, and all is well with the world.

Panorama and Panorama+ at UNLV’s Marjorie Barrick Museum sport the sweeping titles of ambitious group shows. Curator Richard Hooker selected works from 12 Panorama participants chosen by the Nevada Arts Council (NAC), and UNLV Director of Galleries Jerry Schefcik and Hooker added pieces by eight more NAC artists for Panorama+.

Back in 1989, the Nevada Arts Council began offering fellowships to artists who excelled in their discipline. It was a way to champion and encourage contemporary professional artists throughout the state via individual gifts of $5,000.

He keeps returning to that number. Eighty-eight. The number of keys on a piano, as it turns out. The double-snowman. It would be a hard 16 on a craps table, if the dice had more sides.

The idea of time capsules as conduits of information between strangers over decades—or millennia—is something we easily wrap our heads around. But when the party bottling up today’s mementos and souvenirs agrees to reconvene 30 years later, crack open its own cache and explore past selves, the general idea of a collective future is suddenly replaced by something more personal—mainly thoughts of time, immortality, loss and change.

Betty Gripentag wasn’t even aware a movie was being made in the area. So when she zoomed past Elvis, or perhaps a stunt driver doubling as Elvis, she barely noticed. She knew something was up when an angry highway patrol trooper pulled her over, though.

Jerry Lewis always has been associated with pictures — moving pictures, that is. After all, the comedy legend (and longtime Las Vegan) has directed more than 20 movies and appeared in about 50 more.

Should you survive illness, be freed from false imprisonment or witness the safe return of your missing pig in 19th- or 20th-century Mexico, the proper response would be to express your gratitude to Christ, the saints or the virgins who saved you, via a narrative painting. The painting would then be presented at the altar, exposing the believer’s experience and sentiment to the world.

The Art for Art’s Sake show at UNLV’s Barrick Museum attaches an electrode cap to the skull. It’s a stimulating wake-up call to the senses, a consciousness-expanding razzle-dazzle, a mind-body excursion into the happy zone. The 43 paintings, sculptures and drawings hotdog between the fine wood floors and the partitioned ceilings, performing winsome visual stunts and curious optical contortions.

She led the effort to pivot the Barrick from a musty natural history museum (which also showed art) to a versatile contemporary art space...

A particularly amazing scene unfolded this week at UNLV’s Barrick Museum, where noted art conservator and curator Billie Milam Weisman worked alongside Jerry Schefcik and Aurore Giguet and an assortment of handlers to remove a giant, vigorous and densely textured abstract painting by Ali Smith.