- Hello, I'm Beth MacMillan and welcome to "ARTEFFECTS".

The Nevada Museum of Art is thrilled to welcome the community to a brand new multimillion dollar expansion.

The Charles and Stacie Mathewson Education and Research Center opened at the Museum on Liberty Street in downtown Reno in August, 2025.

Museum leaders are confident the expansion will give more people access to the arts in new and exciting ways.

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

In fact, we're only one of two in the entire great basin.

We serve many audiences that includes our regional community, but it also includes an international community that comes and visits us on a frequent basis.

So it's a museum that has, over time, guarded quite a reputation.

(lively music) Our mission statement begins with, "We're a museum of ideas."

What's on the walls is not always the most important thing.

What's important is the conversation and the curiosity that the things on the walls spark within us.

- The Charles and Stacie Mathewson Education and Research Center is the pride and joy of this museum right now, and it is the newest addition to our wonderful organization over its, nearly, a hundred year history.

- Three, two, one.

(group applauding) - The project as a whole came to fruition because of the generosity of many significant donors in our community and in the region.

And because of the vision of our CEO David Walker, who nearly 10 years ago started down a path of imagining how the next phase of this museum's life would look and how it would function.

- The Charles and Stacie Mathewson Education and Research Center puts a fine point on our commitment to education, lifelong learning and access in this community.

Its primary purpose is to welcome people of all ages and specifically younger people, school tours and other kinds of programs that come into this building and have an opportunity to see the world through a new lens.

(whimsical music) - The Charles and Stacie Mathewson Education and Research Center is a major expansion of the Nevada Museum of Art.

Our existing facility has been about 70,000 square feet in total since 2016.

And now with the addition we exceed 120,000 square feet of new space, and that space encompasses both new gallery spaces on the third and second floors of the building as well as new education and research space on the second and ground floors, which is really exciting.

It's a brand new library space that's in excess of 4,000 square feet and holds 13,100 and some volumes in our book collection and special collections, as well as a new classroom for school-aged kids and the museum school audience on the ground floor, the Dermody classroom, which is just tremendous.

And then this space, which is the Clarence and Martha Jones Family Foundation and Charlotte and Dick McConnell Art and Environment Education Lab, which is both a hybrid gallery space as well as an education space that'll be utilized by the University of Nevada Reno and Truckee Meadows Community College for courses starting this fall.

(whimsical music) - The research initiative of the museum, which we've had in place for a couple of decades now, now gets a formal center.

A beautiful space for researchers to come from around the globe to spend time with the archives, to spend time with the special collections here at the Nevada Museum of Art, but it's also opened to our K-12 educators and the general public.

Research is often seen as a highfalutin word and it's only for scholars, and graduate students, and writers, but we also see five-year-olds as researchers because research begins after it's been sparked by curiosity.

And art museums are so wonderful because you come in and it's so easy to have that spark.

(lively music) We've more than doubled the square footage of our gallery space here at the museum.

So we now have close to 40,000 square feet of galleries.

And what's exciting about that is that we have a very impressive permanent collection that we've been building over decades.

And the permanent collection is now going to be seen by people and I'm really excited about that.

In fact, we're gonna dedicate 50% of all the galleries going forward to the presentation of the permanent collection.

We've seen, over the last five years, major collections of artwork, of books, of special collections and archives that have been gifted to this museum as part of this campaign.

Be it 400 unique Native American baskets, Judith Lowry's collection, be it the Australian Aboriginal Art Collection donated by the Seattle collectors, Margaret Levy and Bob Kaplan.

That has been transformative in terms of gifts that are really changing the reputation of this museum.

- Beginning in 2011, this museum started conversations around an artwork proposed by a conceptual artist and experimental philosopher named Jonathan Keats.

And Jonathan proposed an idea for a clock as an artwork that would tell time in both standard time, like we think of it, as well as in Bristlecone pine tree time.

The clock is called Centuries of the Bristlecone and the clock was fabricated over the course of the last two and a half years by a clock maker known as a horologist named Phil Abernathy in Vancouver Island, British Columbia, his collaborating clock maker Brittany Nicole Cox and Jason Iceman, who developed some of the technology and software that helps this clock tell Bristlecone time over many years to come.

The Great Basin Bristlecone pine tree is one of Nevada's two state trees and they are among the oldest and longest lived things on earth.

They only grow from about 9,800 feet of elevation to about 11,000 feet of elevation.

And they do so in extraordinarily difficult environments.

And if we study them more carefully and learn how they have survived in those less than ideal circumstances, we might learn how to be better stewards of the resources that we have here on earth.

The artist, Jonathan Keats, was really interested in the possibilities of how Bristlecone pine tree time might challenge us as viewers and as visitors to this museum to think about time in a different scale.

(airy music) It's so beautiful as an object, of course, but it's such a beautiful idea for an artist like Jonathan to really engage viewers in thinking about how to live better on earth and how to take better care of the natural resources around us.

In our community, there is a shortage of exposure to and education about the visual arts in particular, and I am so overwhelmingly excited about the opportunity to make use of this space to expand on that.

- I think the guiding principle of the Nevada Museum of Art has always been to break down any sense of pretense so that anyone who comes through the doors feels welcome and, you know, it's their museum.

- [Announcer] 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.

(bright music) (bright music continues)