The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art started as UNLV’s first gymnasium. Students would come to cheer others on and to get their sweat on. Now, it’s home to contemporary artists work and is one of the only contemporary art museums in alas Vegas.
The museum began as a natural history museum on the other side of Maryland Parkway but found its way to its current home near Lied Library at the end of the 1970s. The museum showed artifacts, live reptiles, traveling exhibits from the Smithsonian and much more during the 1980s-2000s. There were very few contemporary art shows throughout that time because the museum was under UNLV Sciences. However, when “the recession hit at the end of the ’00s and [they] passed from the sciences to the Department of Art and consolidated [their] identity as a contemporary art museum,” according to Deanne Sole, the museum’s editor and one of their curators.
Elena Brokaw is one of three UNLV students whose work is currently on display at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art. Her piece is a collaboration between her and her late father, Ramiro Garcia. Brokaw is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department and has had artwork in the Barrick Museum before. The Barrick gave her a space even though she was a “completely unknown artist,” and the confidence that she “could have a place in the arts.” While this was solo work, she did work with the photography department to learn how to develop her photos and digitize them. Brokaw hopes that her installation not only shares a piece of her history but also highlights that there is room at UNLV for interdisciplinary work.
Brokaw’s piece is part of a larger exhibit, “Contemporary Ex-votos: Devotion Beyond Medium”. According to the Barrick Museum’s website, the exhibit encourages “all of the artists to consider ex-votos in their holistic complexity—the way they look, the religious and cultural contexts they carry, and the deeply personal stories they insist upon—using them as a lens to magnify contemporary perceptions of history, labor, gender, class, race, colonization, immigration, families, and more.” Brokaw personally views the exhibit as a “modern-day devotion we have to our community.” She even found community within the three-day installation she did in the museum. During that time, she met other artists, and they discussed their work and supported each other when needed.
Her current piece, “(from) his Eyes,” is a collaborative work between Brokaw and her late father. When asked about how it feels for her art to be up in public constantly, she said it’s “a bit overwhelming” to know that it’s up to public perception. The piece is a series of photographs that her father took in Guatemala during the Guatemalan Civil War before he was assassinated by the Guatemalan government. Her father was a photographer, graduate student and teacher, and was a member of two organizations that were protesting against the government. The photographs show her family, and her process of developing the photos, framed by red carnations on a black wall. It was one of the museum’s first black walls.
Brokaw wanted her piece to not just be about tragedy but also joy. There are pictures of her mother buying produce, a group of theater kids performing, a girls’ dance group and more. The red carnations, while being the flower of the Civil War, are also a pop of color to show the joy and hope that the pictures represent. However, underneath that is a story of a family known and unknown. Creating a feeling of love, hope, and melancholy.
“Contemporary Ex-Votos” is up until Nov. 23 and has free admission Tuesday-Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
