Honoring and Protecting Sacred Sites: Spirit of the Land Exhibition at the Barrick Museum

Mikayla Whitmore, detail, *Sunrise Sunset*, two framed giclee metallic prints, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

By Laurence Myers Reese

How do you advocate over ownership over something that can’t be owned? This is the dilemma of sacred sites. When sacred land, like that of Avi Kwa Ame (Spirit Mountain), is under threat of defacement through private land bids, what is a sufficient way to advocate for something that can feel so intangibly powerful and culturally, spiritually important?

Spirit of the Land brings the desert to the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, along with its history, memory, and experiences. Spirit of the Land, a group exhibition of more than forty artists, looks at civic environmental responsibility using art as an activist tool for the rematriation of Avi Kwa Ame (Spirit Mountain). The Honor Spirit Mountain project works towards making the area a national monument in order to “protect significant ecological, cultural, and recreational resources.”

In a tour of the land around Avi Kwa Ame, Nevada Conservation Lands Foundation advocate Bertha Gutierrez explained the biodiversity, the geographic range of endangered animal and plant species, and the historic ties to the land of the people indigenous to it. “Animals don’t see borders,” she said. Boundaries between private and public, or between states or nations, are all arbitrary when it comes to the environment.

Mikayla Whitmore examines the cultural practices of locals in contrast with the safety of the environment. “Christmas Tree Pass” is an annual tradition around Christmas in which locals of the area “decorate” a section of trees on a highway. These trees are left covered in trash and refuse, with areas left littered with materials that no one cleans up. Whitmore’s photo diptych shows the before and after of a littered tree, with a frame decorated by tinsel removed from Christmas Tree Pass. While this tradition is a danger to the land, it is a celebrated practice, and there is nuance in understanding how to approach conversations. Whitmore advocates for a cultural sensitivity when approaching celebrated traditions, even as one advocates for respect of the land and preservation of the environment.

However, desert and landscape as a desolate, pristine human-free area is a dangerous myth of Manifest Destiny. Landscape painting in the 1800s became a tool of this ideology, depicting the west as empty territory, full of natural resources to be claimed and exploited.

Justin Favela’s work Avi Kwa Ame, a painting made of tissue paper, depicts a landscape with a piñata-like dimensionality, a stylistic approach informed by his Guatemalan-Mexican-American heritage. The vista is Avi Kwa Ame, and its composition evokes the western landscape style. Favela, in his statement, reckons with this concept of manifest destiny in depicting and advocating for landscape as “pristine” or in need of “preservation,” while forgetting the people and cultures that have been here for millenia.

The importance of Avi Kwa Ame as a national monument is not just to protect wildlife, but will protect the culture and heritage of the indigenous nations that are tied to it. “The entire area within the proposed monument is … considered sacred by the Yuman speaking tribes which include the Mohave, Hualapai, Yavapai, Havasupai, Quechan, Maricopa, Pai Pai, and Kumeyaay.” says HonorSpiritMountain.org “Spirit Mountain, called Avi Kwa Ame by the Mojave Tribe, is located on the eastern boundary of the monument, and is also a sacred site to the Hopi and Chemehuevi Paiute.”

Indigenous artists, like Fawn Douglas (Las Vegas Paiute) show the preservation of traditional practices through colonization and the importance of rematriation of land to sovereign nations. The Gift of the Land uses fabric and ribbon to reflect the body, the landscape, and the metaphysical. Blue strands run down the sides of the torso-sized canvas, spooling onto the floor. These azure and turquoise strands could be the rivers, the rains, the precious water that is a life giving force in the desert. It could also be the tears shed for the destruction of sacred lands in the name of economic gain. What is the “gift” from the land? Is it the water, the natural resources? The land as a place for us to dwell? Or is the gift the very existence of the land? Douglas relates the bodies to the land, and gives us permission to see the land as a timeless experience rather than a limited commodity.

Where Spirit of the Land ends and other shows begin can feel like a mystery. The exhibition sits in a zeitgeist of concurrent shows at the Barrick which also deal with land. Towards the edge of the Spirit of the Land exhibition sits a cactus in a wheelbarrow. Nanda Sharif-Pour’s work Cereus Repandus aka Peruvian Apple Cactus shows the precarious balance of life and death that migrants experience.

This work is part of the exhibition Still Motion, featuring works by women of color exploring relationships between the land and the body. Most notably the exhibition features Ana Mendieta’s video work Silueta, in which the artist creates silhouettes of her body in the earth, filling them with colorful powder, or fire. This exhibition includes an installation involving bags of water by Quindo Miller titled When You’re Older You’ll Understand. The work gives more context to their work in the SOTL exhibition, A Wild in the Stillness, in which a small dust storm is intermittently created inside a small display box on the gallery wall. This larger work explores their grandmother’s practice of hanging bags filled with water to prevent flies. Landscape as habitat for humans becomes a current through these exhibitions.

On the opposite side of the museum is Kim Stringfellow’s multimedia exhibition The Mojave Project, which takes an anthropological and scientific approach examining the Mojave desert. The human stories combined with history and geography tell a compelling story about a land that is overlooked or misunderstood in the larger US cultural narrative.

Walking in the Mojave is an artistic experience in itself. In my brief visits to the area, I’ve been able to experience a feeling of desert stillness (not emptiness) that cannot easily be described in words. A museum exhibition could never recreate the bodily creaks of Joshua trees in a strong wind. Quindo Miller’s simulated miniature dust storm tells us that we can’t try to capture environment in a bottle.

The Mojave Project and Still Motion ask us to consider the elements of the landscape, while Spirit of the Land asks for our involvement and investment into the land we are on.

Spirit of the Land challenges us to do more than just learn, but to take direct action and engage.

The organizers and artists of Spirit of the Land do not expect the art to be the last word or answer on this kind of a project. Visitors are given the opportunity to write to congresspeople and state officials to advocate for the land to be protected and valued. The postcards are pre-filled out, and contain work from the exhibition on the reverse side. This creates a place for visitors to reflect individually while working towards a communal goal. The exhibition ranges in style and experience, with works filling the space so that a symphony of voices is mounted up for the charge. Only in collective actions do these issues become solved. We are required to interact with the world around us, and that includes the Mojave, even though it feels separate from the valley of Las Vegas.

It is impossible to understand a land unless you’ve been there. It is even more impossible to understand how or why specific sites or places have broad spiritual ties to a variety of communities. It can be dissected anthropologically or historically, but there’s no real way to parse the theology or energy around a site of land that is seen as holy. Art becomes a mediator between the mundane and the ecstatic, and allows us, the museum visitors, to see the land through the eyes of those who have walked there, and to share and reflect our passion for the land we live on.

While the Honor Avi Kwa Ame initiative continues, Spirit of the Land closes at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art July 22, 2022 with a closing reception 5-8pm.

Laurence Myers Reese (he/him, they/them) lives on occupied Southern Paiute lands, in Paradise, NV. Their research investigates the use of the queer body and queer semiotics to navigate and disrupt cis-normative environments. They received their BFA in Studio Art from the University of Oklahoma, Norman in 2012 and their MFA in Art from UNLV in 2021. Reese is a co-founder of the Vegas Institute for Contemporary Engagement, a research lab for art and experimentation. They have worked as an independent curator, arts writer, non-profit administrator, factory worker, educator, and art gallery director. His work can be found at www.lmyersreese.com

Published by Wendy Kveck on July 22, 2022.