Capital City Arts Initiative

Artist’s Reception: Saturday, June 4, 4-6pm
Exhibition Dates: June 4 – June 26, 2011
Exhibition Venue: 4th Floor Gallery, St. Mary’s Art Center
55 North R Street, Virginia City, Nevada

Mark NeuCollins’ CCAI Exhibition
at St. Mary’s Art Center

The Capital City Arts Initiative [CCAI] and St. Mary’s Art Center [SMAC] enthusiastically invite you to the reception for Mark NeuCollins’ residency exhibition at the art center in Virginia City. This year CCAI and SMAC hosted Mark NeuCollins from the country’s heartland for a two-week residency to experience art-making on the Comstock. His exhibition, “a thousand ways . . . .” opens this Saturday, June 4, 4 – 6pm and continues through June 26. St. Mary’s is open to the public Friday – Sunday, 11am – 4pm.

NeuCollins created a large earth mandala as the exhibition’s centerpiece using local natural materials. Hanging paper made from sage brush and a gate made from branches adds to the sense of transition and ephemerality. NeuCollins said about the exhibition, “This is a meditation on the environment and our existence within it. By gathering local materials and making these materials the focus of the installation, I hope to create a sense of reverence for the beauty that surrounds us every day.”

Note from the artist: “My how quickly two weeks flies by! I have been loving the time I have spent here “in the hills” of Virginia City, working in this fabulous Saint Mary’s Art Center building. I arrived here from Iowa with just a few tools and a lot of ideas, and have spent a lot of my time collecting local natural materials to use in my installation here in the “Under the Eaves” gallery. I am busy right now putting the finishing touches on it, and am quite pleased with this reflection of my Nevada experience. I hope to see you Saturday for the unveiling of the finished work, and that you take as much pleasure in the work as I have taken in making it.” – Mark NeuCollins

Katie Grace McGowan wrote the exhibition essay “An Exquisite Balance” available in the gallery; click here to read.

CCAI is funded, in part, by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Carson City Office of Business Development; Community Foundation of Western Nevada; Nevada Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts; U.S. Bancorp Foundation; and Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

A companion exhibition by northern Nevada’s group Printmakers’ Conspiracy also opens at SMAC Saturday, June 4, 4 – 6pm and continues through August 2011. The exhibition includes work by Carol Brown, Amy Currier, Cindy Gunn, Valia Hylin, Rachel Kaiser, Susan Kotler, David C. Laws, Liz Paganelli, Carole Ricketts, Sharon Tetly, Sue Roberts, and Lynn Schmidt.

top image: NeuCollins building the mandala
2nd image: mandala installation view
3rd image: installation view 2