Oscar Tuazon
On wall: Oscar Tuazon, “Water Map (Bahsawa bee, Spring Valley, NV),” 2018. India ink, watercolor, marker on paper. Sculpture: Tuazon, “Twin Post”, 2023, Juniper, madrona and cinder block. Credit: Benjamin Rasmussen, via Nevada Museum of Art
The Nevada Museum of Art, in Reno, is uniquely placed as a witness to the Great Basin’s environmental magnificence and degradation. Co-founded in 1931 by a group of regional landscape painters and the environmental scientist James E. Church, the museum focuses on Land Art, Indigenous art and photography of the altered environment.
“Into the Time Horizon,” a yearlong multipart exhibition of environmental art organized by the museum’s chief curator Apsara DiQuinzio, hones the museum’s focus, inviting participants to consider how to confront climate change, especially in the Great Basin Desert. In April, the “Art + Environment Summit” convened artists, performers, writers and advocates.
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Bahsahwahbee is the Shoshone name for Spring Valley, an area of eastern Nevada where subterranean aquifers support unusually large specimens of Rocky Mountain juniper trees (known locally as swamp cedars), which the Shoshone believe embody the souls of ancestors killed by the Federal Army in the 19th century.
Around 2018, the Los Angeles-based sculptor Oscar Tuazon heard of a conflict between the Shoshone and the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which proposed connecting the aquifers of Spring Valley to Las Vegas, 200 miles south.
Tuazon was developing a project, titled Water Schools, intended to create spaces to educate about threatened water sources. Much of his work is architectural; in Los Angeles, he built a prototype polyhedral structure known as a “zome home,” insulated by stacked barrels of water, in which he hosted water-related events. He wondered if eastern Nevada might be a suitable location for another Water School.
Read full article at nytimes.com