A 1600-square-foot mural within the Church Fine Arts courtyard will soon be on display. The initiative celebrates the arts and is part of UNR’s sesquicentennial celebrations.
Artist-in-residence Eric J. Garcia was commissioned to design and paint the mural. A month prior to the project, Garcia traveled from Albuquerque to Reno to work on the design. He met with faculty, students and community members.
“A lot of the input that I was getting back had to do with water within the environmental aspects of what's happening here in Reno, Nevada. And a lot of input was talking about an Indigenous presence. I gathered all this information, and I had to put it all in one pot and figure out what kind of single image I could create,” Garcia said.
The mural is made up of various elements that symbolize water, nature and powerful forces, Garcia said. Water is the strongest soft power in the world, just like the arts.
“There's the Pyramid Lake, and from the Pyramid Lake, there's a river flowing from it, and that river eventually gets bigger and bigger as it comes forward to the viewer, and it eventually rises up in a giant fist,” Garcia said as he stood in front of the mural.
Garcia also thought about using different signage from downtown casinos and the big billboards that make Nevada famous, he said.
“And as the catch line, the mural states ‘the strongest soft power in the world,’ as a riff on the slogan for Reno, ‘The Biggest Little City in the World,’” he said.
He incorporates different texts and fonts that reference the university’s Black Rock Press, a project within the Department of Art that experiments with publication arts techniques.
The mural uses a simplified three color design, said Austin Pratt, curator of university galleries.
“There's a kind of a landscape quality to this. We've got Pyramid Lake in the desert and the mountains. It's a really strong yellow ochre color with this great turquoise blue in the water and this kind of burnt sienna that is a lot of the text language in the casino signs. It's a simplified three color design. It's really kind of strong and poppy and iconic already, instant classic,” Pratt said.
The mural is a collaboration between the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Art, Art History, & Design.
“If you come to campus to see a music performance or an exhibition in our Sheppard Gallery or the Lilley Museum or theater and dance, any visitor will be able to see this coming to you on our campus,” said department chair Kelly Chorpening.
A wrapping celebration party and soft opening will be held on June 6 at 5 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
García will also collaborate with University Black Rock Press to produce a limited-edition hand-printed broadside poster of the mural design.
