The Las Vegas Art Museum (LVAM) started as the Las Vegas Art League. Lucile Bruner, Vivian Woods, and Helen Wooley Willis founded the League in 1950 to bring fine art to Las Vegas, Nevada. The League held meetings, offered instructional art classes, created exhibitions and contests, and provided a network through which artists and art collectors could buy and sell art. In 1967 the City of Las Vegas bought the Twin Lodge Resort and renamed it Lorenzi Park. The Las Vegas Art League rented one of the old Lodge buildings to create a permanent space for art education and exhibitions. In 1974 the Las Vegas Art League was renamed and incorporated as the Las Vegas Art Museum (LVAM), the first fine art museum in Southern Nevada. LVAM continued to operate out of the Lorenzi Park buildings until 1995 when the City of Las Vegas terminated their lease to expand the Derfelt Senior Center's facilities. The museum's collections were temporarily loaned to the West Charleston campus of the Community College of Southern Nevada until 1997. At that time, the Las Vegas Art Museum moved into the Sahara
Scope and Contents Note The Las Vegas Art Museum Records (1952-2009) span the history of the Las Vegas Art Museum (LVAM) in Las Vegas, Nevada from its start as the Las Vegas Art League in the 1950s until it closed in 2009. The collection contains materials related to its business functions and museum publicity. Business records include annual reports, income statements, board meeting agendas and minutes, and materials related to planning the museum's future growth and expansion. The bulk of the collection is dedicated to museum publicity, including promotional postcards, event invitations, press releases, and an extensive series of local newspapers and magazines containing articles about the museum and its exhibitions. The collection also includes photographs, recorded radio interviews on CD, and video recordings of museum events and display materials
I have a profound and deeply improbable love for Las Vegas, a place I’d never expect to like at all. But improbability is the lifeblood of this town, according to Dave Hickey, late art critic and longtime resident. In his 1997 essay, “At Home in the Neon,” he described the true heart of the city as the sublime and irrational thrill of going against the odds. Las Vegas lives, he wrote, “in those fluttery moments of faint but rising hope, in the possibility of wonder, in the swell of desire while the dice are still bouncing, just before the card flips face-up.” In short, he continued, “anything can happen.”
There is, in Las Vegas, a singular commitment to simply having a good time. The highest of high-brow comfortably coincides with the cheapest of thrills; although the architecture is fake, the enthusiasm is real. Art is commodified and reduced to spectacle, but also ubiquitous, accessible, and often top quality. With no major institution in town, you tend to find works in unexpected places: embedded into the surrounding landscape, from Michael Heizer’s City (1970–2022) and Double Negative (1969) to Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains (2017), or installed in shopping malls and hotel bars. Then there is digital artist Refik Anadol’s exterior LED screen of the soon-to-debut Sphere events venue, billed as the largest such screen in the world.
“Our museums are actually our casinos,” said Neon Museum Las Vegas director Aaron Berger, a true Vegas insider. He recommends visiting Jeff Koons’s mirror-polished Tulips sculpture at The Wynn with “a cigarette in one hand and a martini in another.” I recommend a visit to the Neon Museum for a surprise lesson in urban history.
The following introductory guide is full of real recommendations and personal favorites. Hickey lovingly wrote that Las Vegas is “an ardent explosion of lights in the heart of the pitch-black desert,” and my hope is that you’ll love it, too.
The Bellagio is a great choice for first-time visitors in that it’s central and quintessentially Las Vegas. When then-owner Steve Wynn opened the hotel in 1998, his pioneering inclusion of real art set a new standard of Vegas luxury. The vibe maintains its late-’90s sophistication with villa-inspired architecture, the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, commissioned Rauschenbergs decking the halls, and fine dining restaurants hung with Sol Lewitts and Lichtensteins. (The Picasso restaurant once featured real Picasso paintings, but they were recently sold by current operator MGM. “It used to feel like dining in a museum,” one longtime server lamented.)