At the entrance of the Nevada Museum of Art, formatted like rocks and overlapping layers of Earth, edible flowers and fruit trees peek through, as an immersive experience with sunlight trickles through the windows behind vibrant drapery and flower-painted walls.
“This is the sister installation to [Fallen Fruit],” director of communications Valerie Primeau explained during a recent interview. “One of the themes that you are going to see a lot is bringing the outside inside, so this is called Power of the Pollinators. What the artists [David Allen Burns and Austin Young] did was walk around Reno through the general Great Basin and looked through the flora and fauna and used that to create this immersive wallpaper and drapery.”
Primeau joined the museum as director of communications late last year in a busy period with an expanding museum, new installations and headlines of a costly relocation of the Seven Magic Mountains from outside Las Vegas to northern Nevada.
Another current mission is to make the museum greener.
“Museums have highly calibrated HVAC systems and aren’t always the most emission-friendly,” Primeau said. “But we have a green team and quite a few sustainability initiatives underway. We just installed a solar panel array, and we hope that it will offset about 20% of our emissions.”
It’s a busy time at Nevada’s only accredited art museum, with a First Thursday concert coming up on April 3rd, curated by Loud as Folk.
Recent news releases have focused on an upcoming conference in early April for Nevada educators to incorporate Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) in the classroom. “The 2025 conference theme, The Joy of Discovery, will explore innovative ways to inspire curiosity and creativity in students through the fusion of art and science,” a press release indicates.
Two recently opened exhibits are called “The Art of Judith Lowry and The Lowry & Croul Collection of Contemporary Native American Art” and described as “two groundbreaking exhibitions that celebrate the artistic contributions and community legacy of the accomplished Native American artist. The Art of Judith Lowry is a retrospective exhibition that highlights Lowry’s large-scale colorful storytelling paintings. Her vivid narrative works draw on family stories and communal Indigenous histories to explore themes of identity, resilience, and spirituality.”
“Through her bold, large-scale paintings, Lowry brings to life the legends, traditions, and personal histories of her Indigenous ancestry—transforming oral storytelling into a modern visual language,” the museum added on its Instagram feed, which is marked by vivid photography and inviting videos.
Just opened above, the “Desert Dialogues” exhibit has ushered into existence the museum’s Art + Environment Education Lab. It features photographs from the “Altered Landscape” collection, highligting the desert “as a place of exploration, solitude, and survival.”
Primeau came to the position with 15 years of prior experience in the communications and media industries, most recently, as corporate communications manager at Sierra Nevada Corporation.
It’s now her job to make the Nevada Museum of Art seem fresh, relevant, evocative, accessible and a wanted destination for the public.