For three days (Thursday, October 19 through Saturday, October 21), the Nevada Museum of Art will present the 2017 Art + Environment Conference. Our guests will traverse time and space across the unsettled terrains, shifting frontiers, and limitless horizons of a super-region we call the Greater West.
The Greater West was the last part of the planet to be explored and settled by Homo sapiens. It spans the entire west coast of the Americas, from Alaska to Patagonia, and across the Pacific Basin to Australia and New Zealand. It is a geography of frontiers characterized by vast expanses of open land, rich natural resources, diverse indigenous peoples, colonialism, and the ongoing conflicts that inevitably arise when these factors coexist.
The Conference investigates this exploration in multiple overlapping spheres: the cultural tectonics of the New World from Alaska to Colombia; the radical self-reliance and civic evolution of Burning Man; the fluctuating ecotones of rural/urban land use; and outer space—the ultimate mirror for humanity’s aspirations.