Billboard Gallery: October 2022

The Holland Project’s Billboard Gallery showcases the work of exceptional emerging and established regional artists on billboards throughout Reno’s surface streets. Three new artists are installed every four weeks in 2022. For October, the artists highlighted include Arleen Nebeker, Vivian Magaña, and Michael Sarich.

OCTOBER 2022 ARTISTS + WORKS

Location #1: Virginia Street & La Rue Avenue

Artist: Arleen Nebeker
Artwork: On Our Way Home, paper collage and found materials, 2022
Website | Instagram

Bio: A native desert dweller, Arleen Nebeker was born and raised in Elko, Nevada and has been based in Reno, Nevada for the last four years. Being surrounded by things that thrive in harsh desert conditions has profoundly impacted her life and also drives her artistic inspiration. She strives to create things just as haunting as the desert landscape and the other beings that roam within it. As of the last two years, she has sought and explored her creativity through collage work. She especially enjoys collaging on three-dimensional found objects giving their once ephemeral lifetime new life. Being self-taught in this art form has created challenges that she had to work through, and opened up her eyes to the lost and to the found. Nebeker has exhibited work throughout Reno including at The Holland Project, the HP Satellite Gallery, UNR Student Galleries South, and the Black Rock Press. In addition to art making, Nebeker also volunteers at The Holland Project and KWNK Community Radio as a graphic designer, marketing associate, and community DJ.

Location #2: Wells Avenue & Broadway Boulevard

Artist: Vivian Magaña
Artwork: Messier 1, digital, 2022
Website | Instagram

Bio: Vivian Magaña is a self-taught freelance Artist/Illustrator living in Reno, NV who works in traditional, digital, and mixed media. She most enjoys working with a technique that focuses on exploring form & gesture through lines as well as a paint. The subjects of her personal body of work are informed primarily by her experiences as a chronically ill, Trans – Feminine Non-Binary person. The topics of gender identity & life with occasionally debilitating chronic illnesses through figurative abstraction & body horror are the most predominant of various themes she enjoys exploring.

Statement: I can only walk sideways.

Location #3: 2nd Street & Keystone Avenue

Artist: Michael Sarich
Artwork: Outline, acrylic on canvas, 2020
Website | Instagram

Bio: Michael Sarich (b. 1955, Chicago) is an artist based in Verdi, Nevada. Sarich received an MFA from The University of Oklahoma; BFA from Northern Illinois University, and studied printmaking at the College of Salzburg in Austria. Born the year Disneyland opened, and raised in Chicago in the 60s, Sarich’s early exposure to art was through comics, as well as the Chicago-based underground art of the Hairy Who and the Chicago Imagists. His similarly saturated iconographic works in printmaking, painting, ceramics, and sculpture have been included in many national and international exhibitions. He has received numerous awards, fellowships, and residencies, including at The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, The Robert M. MacNamara Foundation in Maine, and Visual Arts Fellowship from the Nevada Arts Council.

Despite living with Parkinson’s Disease since 2000, Sarich has maintained a rigorous studio practice. In 2007, he was a recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant. The following year the Nevada Museum of Art organized a major retrospective exhibition of his work entitled “Like, Love, Lust” with accompanying book publication. Since that time he has continued to exhibit work, most recently in Cologne and Munich, Germany in 2017 and 2018.

Statement: Processing and reprocessing cultural and personal iconography, my work ranges from visual diary to social critique; narrative symbols and metaphoric images weave stories and pose questions from the daily to the universal. Just as in Pop Art, my work vibrates between “low” and “high”, influenced as much by art and painting history as consumer culture, religion, outsider and folk art, graffiti, and tattoo flash—finding expression in painting and drawing, ceramics, and mixed media sculptural constructions. They are all forms of storytelling, and the work is meant to be read. Through ranging mark-making language, speed, and layering—from the rendered to the naive, I am able to adjust possible meaning, interpretation, and expectation.


The 2022-23 HP Billboard Gallery series is supported by an Arts Belongs Here grant from the City of Reno Arts & Culture Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as generous donations from generous donations from supporters like Temple Builders LLC, Brooks Family Dental, and Sierra Hearing Center.