Pursuit of happiness

First Thursday is a staple event at the Nevada Museum of Art. With live music curated by radio station KTHX and beer from Great Basin Brewing Co.—not to mention the art in the galleries—it’s been a reliable monthly event for years. Other local galleries and businesses have started timing their art openings and gallery receptions to also happen on the first Thursday of every month.

On Nov. 7, for example, this month’s first Thursday, Never Ender Boutique and Art Gallery, Java Jungle coffee shop and Noble Pie Parlor pizza joint, among other places, all had art openings. This expanded calender of First Thursday art events, still anchored by the NMA, has created a new opportunity for Renoites to engage in a favorite local activity: the crawl.

But perhaps the art gallery that benefits most from hosting its artist receptions on First Thursday is Liberty Fine Art Gallery, next door to the NMA. The gallery opened on Aug. 15 last year. There’s one large gallery space, as well as three attached smaller galleries, and, as of a couple of months ago, a new medium-sized gallery. So there’s a lot of gallery space, but it’s run as a collective among 14 active artists, so no problem filling it. There’s a diversity of art that might appeal to a variety of tastes, though most of it is fairly accessible. Liberty Fine Arts Gallery is somewhere between a bulk, commercial art gallery and an academically-oriented gallery.

“We’re selling work,” says artist Rich VanGogh, who manages the gallery. “And not just to our friends, but throughout the community.”

The November exhibition, 2nd Year, 2nd Gear, features work from the 14 artists in the collective as well as work by guest artist Judy Hilbish, whose series Mona-Opoly recasts Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” as a variety of figures from history and fiction, like Albert Einstein, George Washington and Darth Vader.

Gallery artist Richard Wells is fluent in a couple of different art styles. A gallery visitor might see two of his pieces hanging next to each other and not realize they were made by the same artist.

“I’ve always worked in two very different directions—abstraction and almost photorealist figuration,” he says.

His mixed media art includes representational works and abstract works of geometric shapes. He credits his background in theatrical stage design for his strong sense of spatial composition

Jill Glenn also uses a variety of media to create fantastical, nearly Suessian landscapes.

“When you look at a painting, you should want to enter into it—to engage with it, make up stories about it,” she says.

Gina Breslow’s works in the gallery are giclées—digital prints—of her landscape paintings. She modifies many of the prints, sometimes with specific recipients in mind. The landscapes depict idyllic scenes, like Greek coastal towns.

Grant Miller is a psychiatrist and former instructor at the University of Nevada, Reno. He’s also a sculptor, a fabricator of metal sculptures, sometimes made from found objects, other times from stainless steel. He creates minimalist, elongated forms, narrow steel sculptures that stand six or seven feet above the ground. One is called “Meerkats,” because the three tall pieces of steel look like a mob of giant meerkats scanning the horizon. Another, called “Six Feet Under, Two Feet Above,” is two long pieces of steel that, from certain angles, looks like a pair of flailing legs.

His work often has an understated sense of humor, which is relatively rare in the context of minimalist art.

“It leaves a little for your brain to do,” he says.