- On this edition of ARTEFFECTS, meet the artist behind the 2025 Artown Poster.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - Discover the podcast from PBS Reno, that dives into arts and culture in northern Nevada.

It just really brings joy to me to just think that we have changed the cultural landscape of our community for one twelfth of the year, every single year.

Plus, a multifaceted exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, that explores the history of the ichthyosaur.

- I'm dealing with something that is really bigger than us as people, both on the physical scale and also on the time scale.

I think that is the most important message of Deep Time.

- It's all ahead on this edition of ARTEFFECTS.

(upbeat music) - [Narrator] Funding for ARTEFFECTS is made possible by, Sandy Raffealli, with Bill Pearce Motors.

(upbeat music) Heidemarie Rochlin.

(upbeat music) In memory of Sue McDowell.

(upbeat music) The Carol Franc Buck Foundation.

(upbeat music) And by the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members.

(upbeat music) - Hello, I'm Beth Macmillan and welcome to ARTEFFECTS.

2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Artown.

The organization behind the Arts and Culture Festival that attracts thousands of people to Northern Nevada each July.

Every year the Artown team selects a local artist to capture the spirit of the festival.

Meet Connor Fogal, an artist who has been painting portraits and murals in Reno for more than 20 years.

And who refuses to let cerebral palsy get in the way (gentle music) of his passion for creating.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) (audience applauds) - Connor, it's been an absolute honor to work with you, alongside you and to see the work that you've created.

And I'm sure everybody is going to agree with me.

Meredith, show us the poster.

(upbeat music) (audience applauds) (upbeat music) ♪ Never give up ♪ Never give up ♪ Never give up ♪ Never give up - To learn more about Connor Fogal, visit, mylownv.com.

In 2024, PBS Reno launched "PBS Reno Arts".

A podcast that celebrates local arts, arts organizations and upcoming events.

It's a perfect compliment to ARTEFFECTS, which has been on the air for 10 seasons.

I joined Dave Santina, the host of "PBS Reno Arts" to preview Artown 2025.

I am really excited to make July a month in our community this year for 30th anniversary, to make everybody so proud of our community.

So happy to be here.

It just really brings joy to me to just think that we have changed the cultural landscape of our community for one twelfth of the year, every single year.

- Exciting, so what's coming up that is changed this year?

What's new?

- Well, one of the biggest changes is, you know, they're redoing Arlington Street Bridge.

- Right.

- So Wingfield Park is closed.

And that's where Artown started 30 years ago.

And so, we have been working with the county and they have been absolutely incredible and gracious to work with.

And we're moving all of our Wingfield Park events up to Rancho San Rafael.

- It's almost endless, the number of things that you've got coming.

- Well, let me tell you a little bit about the little book.

- I was gonna ask you, you know, how people can.

- Have you felt the little book?

Feel that.

- I have not seen this.

This is the little book that.

- It's heavy.

- Every year this gets published.

- It's the biggest it's ever been.

It's 128 pages.

What's great is, you can look at this and you can go to artown.org and you click the day on the calendar and all the events for that day will pop up.

So you can really read about each event, decide where you wanna go to.

Most of the events are admission free.

We're multidisciplinary, so we cover every aspect of the arts, whether it's culinary arts or historic events or fashion arts or any kind of music and dance and theater, tons of kids' activities, great outreach by the artists that we're bringing in from all over the world.

So check out all of that in this wonderful, handy, it fits in a purse, fits in a pocket.

It's wonderful.

To listen to the full episode, visit pbsreno.org/pbsrenoarts.

There you'll find more than two dozen episodes, featuring artists and organizations in our community.

(upbeat music) Long before there were humans or even dinosaurs, there were ichthyosaurs.

Colossal marine reptiles that swam and thrived in an ancient ocean.

That's the focus of Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada.

A dynamic exhibit at the Nevada Museum of Art.

(upbeat music) - The Nevada Museum of Art is the only accredited art museum in the state of Nevada.

And we also have a really unique focus.

We have a research center that's dedicated to art and environment.

(upbeat music) A few years ago we saw a major article in the "New York Times" about this huge ichthyosaur skull that had been excavated in the desert of Nevada.

And we soon realized the paleontologist behind that was Dr. Martin Sander, from Bonn, Germany.

These special fossil finds from Nevada often get taken out of Nevada and housed elsewhere, at museums in California, in Utah.

And we wanted to find a way to bring those back, bring them close to their point of origin and to create an entire exhibition and an experience around this animal we know as the ichthyosaur.

(upbeat music) - What is an ichthyosaur?

The name means simply, the fish lizard.

(upbeat music) The ichthyosaurs of the Jurassic look very familiar to us.

They look like a modified dolphin.

But the ones from Nevada, from the Triassic period, is something that has evolved before, in a group called, mosasaurs.

So it's really kind of a sea monster design.

It's a fierce head and then a very long body with four fins.

(upbeat music) There's a long thin snout and there is an enormous eye that is nine inches in diameter.

So, like this.

A large eye will indicate one of two things or two things together.

Either, high visual acuity or low light conditions.

For low light, you can do two things.

You can either be active at night or you can go deep into the ocean.

These giant eyes evolved very early on.

And then there remained a hallmark of ichthyosaur evolution, to the end of when they died out, about 90 million years ago.

(gentle music) - Dr. Martin Sander is a paleontologist who has been working here in Nevada for over 30 years.

He continues to return to Nevada because Nevada truly is one of the globes epicenters for research, when it comes to ichthyosaur fossils and paleontology.

- Martin Sander has found 80% of all the ichy fossils in Nevada, over the period of the last 30 years.

- In August of 2024, we convened a group of journalists and paired them with Dr. Martin Sander, for a trip out to the Augusta Mountains.

You really can't fathom the scale of the desert and the location where these fossils are found, until you see it in person.

- From my personal experience, I have fun asking the people, "Do you know where the Augusta Mountains are?"

The Augusta Mountains are a small and extremely remote mountain range of Nevada.

And to visualize the remoteness, basically it's two hours east of Lovelock, two hours south of Winnemucca and then it's three hours northwest of Austin and three hours northeast of Fallon.

If you look around, none of the mountains here is quite as rugged as this one.

The good news is that it gives us the steep slopes that will provide us with the fossils.

If we want to find fossils, we don't want to have grass growing on them, we want to see the bare rock or the bare dirt.

The bad news is, that we have to climb it or fly.

(upbeat music) Today we are in the far reaches, near the end of Favret Canyon, in the Augusta Mountains.

And we are at an altitude that's nearly 6,000 feet, in a ichthyosaur quarry.

The fossil that is largely taken out from here, is a big ichthyosaur, nicknamed Martin One.

For each of these fossils, of course, we keep a field log, plus a photo album.

So you see how heavy these blocks are.

- Probably like this, right?

- [Martin] Does it give you a fit?

I think it must be something like that.

- [Companion] That's okay.

Push it go there.

- All right.

Yeah, I think that looks pretty good, okay.

So we'll leave it like this.

We left part of this in the field, which we knew but we didn't know about that bone and sometimes it's really hard to see these bones because.

- It was dark too.

- It was dark.

And because they're very black in the rock.

And when they whither, then their color becomes much more obvious.

We have some ribs that we have, sort of, reflect the discovery situation.

(upbeat music) - I think one of the most important parts of the process of doing Deep Rime, was trekking out to the desert with Martin and his scientists.

To the site where the specimens are still in the rock.

And then spending the day there and coming back with a little tiny rock and then coming back the three and a half hours down the mountains again, to the base camp.

So this is really skin in the game and I think it's not convenient, it's inconvenient.

But that really gives you, almost like a physical appreciation for what you're actually dealing with.

(upbeat music) - These fossils from the Nevada desert became ever more important.

And then eventually the idea grew that we should display them to the public and in particular, the people of Nevada.

And this then came to pass in a cooperation between the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles and the Nevada Museum of Art.

(upbeat music) - Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada, is a major exhibition in our 10,000 square feet of galleries.

When we started putting this exhibition together, we knew that it had to be something special because it was going to be in an art museum.

And so we invited Nik Hafermaas to collaborate on the design, so that it would take us beyond a traditional natural history museum exhibition.

- I grew up in Germany's, probably most boring city, called Kassel, which would turn every five years into Germany's most exciting city because it's home of Documenta.

And Documenta is one of the biggest international art fairs.

Contemporary art, big installations.

And it would transform the whole place for 100 days.

And for me as a child, it was so fascinating.

'Cause, of course, you know, from this perspective, everything is much bigger.

And you don't ask why something is, you just take it in and you're just fascinated in wonderment.

Recreating this kind of wonderment and fascination, that's my driver for designing exhibitions.

(upbeat music) I am most interested in how the digital finds its way into the physical and how the physical finds its way back into the digital.

And trying to find, capture the essence of the digital and bring it back into the space and make it tangible and to somehow relate to our human scale and our human sophistication, as people who have so many different senses at the same time.

That's something that I'm really passionate about.

- We titled the exhibition, Deep Time because we are asking our visitors to look back in time, 250 million years.

This was a time when Nevada was completely submerged beneath the waters of an ancient ocean.

- Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada, is an exploration on scale, I would say.

It's an exploration of physical scale.

And, for me, even more importantly, as in the title, it's an exploration of timescale, in relationship to our own timescale as human beings.

We're talking about 250 million years.

So, for me to imagine 1,000 years, 10,000 years, 100,000 years, a million years, 10 million years and so on and so on.

It is so abstract.

We're so caught up in our daily lives, in our very narrow view of the world, that we sometimes miss the big picture.

And Deep Time is about the big picture.

- Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada looks at these fossils from both, a scientific and an art perspective.

We have historical organization of the ichthyosaur finds, starting with the oldest finds, by miners and by the King survey, in the 1860s.

And then we have three big bays, the first one being the work of John C Merriam and Annie Alexander, in the Humboldt range.

Mainly in a 1905 expedition.

Then we have the 50s and 60s.

Work at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, by Charles Camp, as the second bay.

And then the third bay is the work of my team, in the Augusta Mountains, since 1991.

The whole process of ichthyosaur collection is embodied by this place here, Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park.

Charles Camp, professor of vertebrae paleontology, came to this place on a tip by a lady from Fallon, on reporting ichthyosaurs.

And then he spent, probably about six field seasons, out of this place here, excavating ichthyosaur fossils.

(upbeat music) We are here at the fossil shelter, at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park.

And its general purpose is to preserve some of the ichthyosaur fossils in place.

We have ichthyosaur bones in the ground.

The most recent analysis found that we're probably looking at seven skeletons.

So we have ribs here.

I mean, there's a rib cage here and there are also some ribs here.

The upper arm bones of these ichthyosaurs are just very short and stout.

This here is the shoulder girdle.

So, here, basically what we have here.

So then this is one of the upper arm bones.

This is the other upper arm bone.

Why is this place important?

Because when Camp started here in the 1950s, then he recognized these are very large.

And that was the first glimpse, where it became really clear, Triassic ichthyosaurs are much bigger than the Jurassic ones.

(upbeat music) Nevada is sort of my second home because I've never tallied up how many weeks or months, in the end, I have spent out in the Augusta Mountains, in our camp.

And I've also learned to love the people of Nevada.

And I'm super happy now that the first time, really, the people on a large scale get to see what is found in this state.

- [Ann] When you encounter this exhibition, you'll not only encounter original fossils, spectacular fossils that have never been seen before but you might turn the corner and encounter a historical painting.

And then you might see a large scale digital immersive installation, by a contemporary artist that really brings these animals to life.

(gentle music) - Such joy to be here today.

And what an effort to put all this together.

I am David Walker, I'm the CEO of the Nevada Museum of Art.

And we expect a huge turnout from the region but also from around the globe, for this exhibition.

- There's absolutely something for everyone in this exhibition.

Whether you're a lover of geology, whether you have an interest in paleontology, whether you love art and history.

But I think what's also fascinating, is that we really delve into the popularity of the ichthyosaur in our collective imaginations.

- If you ask me what is the most favorite part for this exhibition, for me personally, is, I get to see a reunion of the fossils that I've collected over the 30 years, in one place.

- Nevada has an amazing community of very active paleontologists, as well as museums that are dedicated to telling all of these different stories related to the ichthyosaur.

However, I think this is really the first major exhibition that brings all of those voices together.

So we've been fortunate to work with partners, across museums and different fields, to really celebrate this beloved state fossil, that we all know as the ichthyosaur.

(gentle music) - To learn more about the exhibit, Deep Time: Sea Dragons of Nevada, visit, nevadaart.org.

And that wraps it up for this edition of ARTEFFECTS.

If you want to watch new ARTEFFECTS segments early, make sure you subscribe to the PBS Reno YouTube channel.

And don't forget to keep visiting pbsreno.org, to watch complete episodes of ARTEFFECTS.

Until next week, I'm Beth Macm illan.

Thanks for watching.

- [Narrator] Funding for ARTEFFECTS is made possible by, Sandy Raffealli, with Bill Pearce Motors.

Heidemarie Rochlin.

In memory of Sue McDowell.

The Carol Franc Buck Foundation.

And by the annual contributions of PBS Reno Members.

(gentle music) (upbeat music)