Avi Kwa Ame, known also as Spirit Mountain, is a 500,000-plus acre protected national monument located approximately 80 miles south of Las Vegas. It’s home to bighorn sheep, desert tortoise, a number of Joshua trees and lands that are sacred to several indigenous tribes, particularly the Southern Paiute. It is also an absolute gift to the eyes, a feast of color and chiaroscuro.
With her Nevada Humanities show Avi Kwa Ame: Between Presence and Protection, running through August 27, Alina Lindquist digs heartily into that visual repast. Created during a 30-day stint at Mystery Ranch—a desert research station and art residency located within the monument—Between Presence and Protection is a collection of oil paintings, gouaches, pencil sketches and even Polaroids that translates Avi Kwa Ame’s natural splendor into bright, vivid, kinetic bursts of artistic imagination.
It’s a big artistic step for Lindquist, a young artist who’s a relative newcomer to plein air (outdoors) work.
“I started to learn how to oil paint in 2019. I took a workshop with an artist, Phyllis Shafer, and it was literally my first time learning oil in plein air, which is like Mission: Impossible if you’ve never painted oil before,” she says. “And now you’re outside, battling all the things that come with it. But I absolutely fell in love.”
Some of that plein air art is true-to-life. The four “Portrait of a Joshua Tree” sketches could be the work of a lifelong naturalist discovering Yucca brevifolia for the first time. The large oils—particularly “Serene Summits,” “Long Awaited Rain” and “Into the McCulloughs”—depict their natural subjects with a bit more personality, a bit more color than they might have presented on the day; much as we post-process our photos with filters, Lindquist transforms these natural wonders from mere documented scenes to remembered moments laden with emotion.
“Into the McCulloughs”
Her gouache works soar above documentation, above heightened reality and into magic. She imagines and reimagines the desert sky from one work to the next: as a black-and-midnight blue field bisected with jagged clouds (“Returning to My Favorite Spot”), as rippling gradients of color (“Grapevine Canyon”) and, most delightfully, as a flickering mosaic (“The Stories that Stars Tell”). Those reinvented skies are a modest point of pride for Lindquist, who was only trying to avoid an artistic pitfall: “I was trying to figure out how to represent the nighttime sky without just making dots on the paper.”
Once its Nevada Humanities run ends, Lindquist says Between Presence and Protection will travel to Walking Box Ranch, within the Avi Kwa Ame monument, for a showing this fall. What would have seemed a happy homecoming this time last year is now strangely charged as the Trump administration guts the Bureau of Land Management and considers resizing our national lands, of which Avi Kwa Ame is one of the newest.
But if Lindquist’s work says only one thing to you, it should be that the natural world can’t be contained or diminished. It may take a thousand years, but Avi Kwa Ame will wait out our interference and keep going. Lindquist got proof of that one night while walking through the monument with a friend.
“We got to witness a tarantula hawk wasp stunning a tarantula and moving it,” she says, still awed at the sight of a giant flying insect dragging a big spider. “We got to see that play out, which was terrifying and awesome. And I had so many more questions, like how did this happen? [Laughs.] … The more time you spend out there, the more you see the natural world taking place.”
AVI KWA AME: BETWEEN PRESENCE AND PROTECTION Thru August 27, Monday-Friday 1-5 p.m., free. Nevada Humanities, nevadahumanities.org.
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