By Amanda Horn, Director of Communications, Nevada Museum of Art
Over the past three years, the Nevada Museum of Art has gained quite a reputation for throwing an October costume party themed around the season’s feature exhibition. Last year’s Steampunk soiree, Honest Abe’s Imagination Celebration, served as a 150th birthday party for the Silver State with a very special guest of honor—the original Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, on loan from the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Like last year, this fall’s party promises to be nothing short of epic. Electric Wagon Train, scheduled for Saturday, October 24, celebrates the largest exhibition the Museum has ever organized. Tahoe: A Visual History is the first major art survey of historical painting, Native baskets, photography, architecture, and contemporary art dedicated to Lake Tahoe, Donner Pass, and the surrounding Sierra Nevada region. The massive show—400 artworks by 175 artists—takes over all 15,000 square feet of Museum gallery space and spans more than two centuries of cultural and creative production related to the cherished freshwater alpine lake.
Five years in the making, Tahoe: A Visual History combines historically significant cultural and art objects with contemporary works inspired by a shared reverence for our region. The show’s narrative details a cultural evolution fueled by an unrelenting Westward-push. Innovations like the railroad and automobile enabled varying cultures to meet, and sometimes collide. Artists both historic and contemporary respond to these manifest destiny themes in diverse ways, romanticizing to memorializing, documenting to contemplating.
Electric Wagon Train provides the chance for you to stroll through this story while celebrating manifest destiny with a digital twist. At this party, encounter a wilder, more whimsical West where the pioneering spirit rises to fantastical new extremes. Equal parts Steampunk ball and surreal saloon, Electric Wagon Train will feature a bona fide electric stage coach called Jimmy Whomp and a live performance by San Francisco’s Le Cancan Bijou. This imaginative evening also includes live music by Mighty Dave and beats by DJ Damien/Smudge and Materialized.
Don your best Western-flair Steampunk garments and experience one of America’s most beloved landscapes like never before. Dance the night away as you immerse yourself in panoramic landscapes, sail on turquoise waters, soar to breathtaking mountain views. What better way to see Lake Tahoe come alive, artfully?
Tahoe: A visual History is on view through January 10 exclusively at the Nevada Museum of Art, Donald W. Reynolds Center for the Visual Arts, E. L. Wiegand Gallery in downtown Reno. A 488-page book by the same name, co-published with Skira Rizzoli and distributed by Random House, accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase in the Museum Store.
Tickets for the Tahoe-themed costume extravaganza, Electric Wagon Train, are available through the Nevada Museum of Art website, nevadaaart.org, or by calling 775.329.3333. Tickets cost $50 or $40 for Museum members.
