Defining the Las Vegas Artist

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A Beautiful Deep Dive Into Our Worldwide Arts + Culture

This collection of essays by high desert creatives attempts the impossible, to define an ever changing arts community.

DEFINING THE LAS VEGAS ARTIST

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Las Vegas is an important city. But it is misunderstood. It’s been so good at marketing itself as a place where anything goes, it is sometimes hard to see it as anything else. What is it like to be an artist in this maligned city supposedly so bereft of culture? Will the new LVMA be the beacon that brings the city the attention and cultural cache it really deserves?

Does Las Vegas make me question my artistic identity any more than I would question it if I where anywhere else? Having arrived from London nine years ago, the answer to that is no, I am the same person, asking the same questions. If you are committed to your practice, your sources of inspiration may change but in every other respect you can make Las Vegas your home. Las Vegas cast a spell on me, it really was a mad leap of faith, an insatiable fascination that drew me to it. This might be a common theme with a city that is constantly evolving, has the brightest lights and a most intriguing history.

There is a slight feeling of impermanence to the city, it can feed you and your work, and it can make you more self-reliant. It forces you to look beyond the city and I think that’s a good thing for an artist. There are a reasonable number of galleries, generally the international / wealthier ones are on the Strip, and the smaller independent ones are Downtown, and they are only recently starting to communicate, and they serve distinctly different audiences. There’s a very well-organized library district which has a host of different exhibition spaces with a one-stop-shop application process to disseminate calls for exhibitions, both the city and the county have gallery spaces and active exhibition calls too. Las Vegas has a low key but sustainable offering for artists in relation to bigger cities, but it does offer a career path of sorts when combined with UNLV, CSN and the Nevada Arts Council.

You can look to Las Vegas’s location to understand its role in the contemporary art world and the opportunities it offers to artists. It is isolated, it is not on any ‘must do’ lists for art lovers, and it just isn’t known for its art. You must put the work in and seek the art out. The casinos are doing a better job since City Center opened in 2009, i.e Vegas - A scrolling words piece by Jenny Holzer, 2009 at The Vdara Uber Pickup area, and until relatively recently you could see Reclining Connected Forms (1969-74), a large Henry Moore sculpture at the entrance to the Aria City Center, admittedly it’s now gone. The Aria Fine Art Collection was a fantastic discovery; it had a professional brochure and a trail to follow. Clearly it isn’t enough, but it was exciting and possibly, just maybe, a sign of things to come.

Art has escaped the gallery but not yet in a revolutionary way, that is still a very exciting opportunity waiting to happen, and if it can happen anywhere, it can happen here. Looking beyond Las Vegas quickly reveals an amazing heritage and one that has fed my practice and inspiration from before I even arrived. The desert, dry lake beds, mesas, and mountains, not to mention water, or lack of, offer opportunities for artistic research and expression. As an artist you might find entirely new inspiration or themes to build into your personal practice, you can quickly be engulfed in the scale and expanse of Nevada, it is an all-pervasive powerful force in its own right. Walter De Mario’s Lightning Field put New Mexico on the land art map and Michael Heizer did the same for Nevada, making me as an artist proud of my adopted state and its land art heritage that also includes Jean Tinguely, Cj Hendry, and Emily Budd. Having an art heritage to reference is important, having a sense of time and your place within it helps ground those artists who do make Las Vegas a more permanent home.

In 1963, a not so young Marcel Duchamp came to Las Vegas. He was among the many, over the last 100 years plus, who felt it necessary to venture to the American West, and to be more specific, mainly Los Angeles. He didn’t think to settle in Las Vegas for the sake of his work, no, he came to have dinner with friends at the Stardust.

Lots of people, including Andy Warhol, came to party but over the years an increasing number have left a more indelible, if still temporary mark on the city. Denise Scott Brown (with Robert Venturi and Steven Izenour) arrived with a group of students in 1970 to study the city and to try to make sense of its architecture. Her work had an impact on architectural classifications, she coined the terms ‘The Duck’ and ‘The Decorated Shed’, and she gave Las Vegas a place in architectural history.

Frank Gehry, with the Ruvo Center for Brain Health and Paul Revere Williams with the Googie atomic-age La Concha building are also notable architectural works. The fantastical casino architecture inspires many and offers a rich seam of artistic inspiration. Las Vegas isn’t short of amazing things.

It has a burgeoning international reputation, but it’s been hard to get anyone to stay, even the star studied Alan Yentob documentary A Kick in the Head: The Lure of Las Vegas wasn’t enough to kick start intellectual interest in the city, or confirm it as a worthy subject, maybe a new national art gallery can.

Las Vegas is growing and moving on from its former Sin City reputation, but it might be too much to expect LVMA to add to that growth, it’s also about the fabric of the city and its issues e.g. difficulties for families with children, minimal connected transportation, and so on. Until Vegas sorts those things out, like many cities, it will be limited, and a place that continues to cater to gamblers, holidaymakers and the retired. It is likely to remain a place that the young have to leave to pursue a career.

Nevada, with a population of 3.2 million people spread over 110,000 square miles, brings vast landscapes and new perspectives in terms of contemporary and historical art heritage, it isn’t London, it isn’t like anywhere I know or have ever experienced before. But I feel at home here and it’s not just because I am following the well-trodden path of the pioneers heading west, it’s because I am also in the company of the likes of, Richard Long, David Hockney and Anthony Gormley who all came to Las Vegas from the UK. I know they didn’t stay, but they left significant pieces of work for me to enjoy, they made a commitment to the city, and I feel I am doing the same thing, if on a smaller scale. It’s also because Las Vegas is so much more than the casinos; it’s a 24 hour city, with world class restaurants, sports, music, shows, history, oh and a speak easy disguised as an ice cream parlor. It’s a place made for your imagination to run wild, it is the manifestation of what America wants when it wants to have fun. And 41M tourists came to Las Vegas in 2024 bringing in 13.5B in gambling revenue alone (Source: LVCVA), it’s a big deal.

It’s an extraordinary place on the verge of getting a major art gallery, it is finally going to pull some of those artists back, it’s going to be a transformative few years with all local artists and art organizations polishing their windows and getting ready to be amazing neighbors and friends, it’s going to be an absolute blast and you aren’t going to want to be anywhere else. Unlike Moore and many others, I am hoping to stay, this place is so unique, it is a pot of gold, it is my inspiration, from the fakeitecture to the colossal Hoover Dam and on to area 51, there is nowhere like Las Vegas Nevada.

Maybe when Dave Hickey said, on leaving UNLV, in 2010, in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper, "Improving the intellectual reach of graduates has been my task… but they have nearly all left town. There’s no intellectual critical mass here."

Maybe this time, 15 years later we will achieve an intellectual critical mass.
I hope so, I am willing it so!