“It’s about ‘sense of place.’ You’ve got to go there to be there.” The work, heavy on contributions by women and artists of color, challenges the mostly white provenance of the state’s Land Art inventory, he adds, and poses fundamental questions: “What does it mean to be a body in space? What is wilderness? What is civilization.” “The sensibility is real desert art by real desert people,” says artist Brent Holmes, a co-curator. But it’s the larger surrounding site that’s more pertinent to the artwork. The exhibit site is the Goldwell Open Air Museum and Red Barn Cultural Center, adjacent to the Rhyolite ghost town and famous for its outdoor sculpture park, particularly the ghostly riff on the Last Supper by the late artist Albert Szukalski. Not coincidentally, that coincides with the town’s Beatty Days festival. The 2021 “Bullfrog Biennial” features more than 20 selected artists, most local but some from California and as far away as Chicago their work will be shown in a facility just outside Beatty Friday through Sunday.
What we think of as the middle of nowhere isn’t - that’s the underlying message of a weekend-long art exhibit that dwells on the “diversity, biological and cultural,” of the desert.
