Exhibition

  • Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices, and Architectural Inventions
    Geoff Manaugh
    Curator
    Nevada Museum of Art, Reno
    Sep 13, 2011 to Feb 19, 2012
  • GRANTEE
    Nevada Museum of Art
    GRANT YEAR
    2010

Smout Allen, Surface Tension, Landscape Futures exhibition, 2011, Reno, NV. Courtesy of the Nevada Museum of Art.

Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices, and Architectural Inventions explores how planetary landscapes, and our perceptions of them, can be transformed by technology, design, and shifting terrains of architectural invention. The exhibition was guest curated by Geoff Manaugh and coordinated by Ann M. Wolfe. The exhibition is mounted in the Nevada Museum of Art's 2,500 square foot Contemporary Gallery as a part of the Museum's 2011 Season of Art + Environment exhibition series. The exhibition served as the backdrop for the museum's second Art + Environment conference. The exhibition is accompanied by a book  copublished by the museum and Actar in 2012, and a collaboration between architects and students at the Bartlett School of Design in London.

Geoff Manaugh is author of BLDGBLOG and The BLDGBLOG Book (2009). He is also codirector of Studio X in New York and on the faculty of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. BLDGBLOG was named one of the top 100 blogs in the world by the Times UK (2009). It has also been listed as a Time Magazine Style & Design 100 blog (2007), a Planetizen Top 10 Website (2007), and a Yahoo! Top 25 Pick of the Year (2006). Manaugh is also contributing editor at Wired UK, and former senior editor of Dwell magazine. He has also written for Volume, Domus, Abitare, and Space & Culture, and has been described as "the world's greatest living practitioner of 'architecture fiction'" by novelist Bruce Sterling. Manaugh holds a BA with highest honors from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and an MA in art history from the University of Chicago, which he attended on a Century Fellowship.

Colin M. Robertson is curator of education at the Nevada Museum of Art, responsible for planning, developing, implementing, and evaluating public programming, school services, docent training, and educational and interpretive information about the Museum's collections and exhibitions, including the 2011 A+E Conference. After completing his graduate work in the University of Nevada, Reno's Literature and Environment Program, he taught environmental literature and composition at UNR. Recent essays for publication and presentation include Chris Drury: Toward an Ecological Consciousness and Inverting the Sublime: Contemporary Artists' Responses to the History of an Idea.

Ann M. Wolfe is curator of exhibitions and collections at the Nevada Museum of Art, where her scholarship is focused on art and environments. She has written and curated extensively on contemporary art and photography. Past exhibitions include: Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl and Some Dry Space: Photographs by Michael Light. Her 2010 book Chris Drury: Mushrooms/Clouds, is distributed through the University of Chicago Press. Wolfe received her MA in art history and museum studies from the University of Southern California. Prior to Nevada, she was a curator at the San Jose Museum of Art.

Founded in 1931, the Nevada Museum of Art is the only art museum in Nevada to be accredited by the AAM.  Our mission: We are a museum of ideas. While building upon our founding collections and values, we cultivate meaningful art and societal experiences, and foster new knowledge in the visual arts by encouraging interdisciplinary investigation. The Museum serves as a cultural and educational resource for everyone.

The Museum established a research institute, the Center for Art + Environment (CA+E) in January 2009. The mission of the CA+E is to be a global leader in supporting the practice, study, and awareness of creative interactions between people and their environments. Three goals: To encourage the creation of artworks expressing the interaction between people and their natural, built, and virtual environments; to enable artists, scholars, and communities to document and study such artworks; and to increase public knowledge of these endeavors.