Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art

Welcome to the Marjorie Barrett Museum of Art at the University of Nevada Las Vegas we’re standing in our new workshop gallery as you can see we’re currently surrounded by an exhibition of work by Makayla Whitmore the show is called between a rock and a cliff and it runs from January 13th to February 8th to give you some idea of the space itself it’s fairly long about 50 feet long by 13 feet wide note one end there’s a lintel above a doorway that leads to our East Gallery and that’s a much larger space where we have exhibitions that usually run for several months at the

other end there’s a gray door with the word exit above it fire safety regulations stipulate that the door always has to be visible which means

that our curators need to take it into account every time they plan a show here we also have fixed lighting instead of the track lighting we use everywhere else all of that means that this gallery has a different character to the rest of the museum and we decided to build on that by making it deliberately flexible we called it the workshop because we wanted it to be a space where things could be created quickly with a kind of

freedom we wanted it to be a place where we could invite artists to experiment where they could show new work or where they could test out new ideas with older works or we could invite people who had maybe done research into just one or two paintings or into a small area of an

artist’s career the shows are shorter there’s less pressure to get things absolutely right we want artists to feel that the shows here don’t have to feel

totally closed off and complete we want them to be ladders that you can climb to find more ideas after you leave.