Last week over coffee, we were talking about the Nevada Museum of Art’s permanent collection and an upcoming visit to see our Looking Forward; Looking Back exhibit. “What’s with the truck?” my friend who knows everything about everything asked me. “I don’t get it. What’s it doing in an art museum anyhow?” she continued.

Like any good docent, I took a deep breath and calmly explained the concepts -- Nevadiana, sculpture, craftsmanship, mining, altered landscape, Nevada artist and so on. Then, realizing that talking was going nowhere, I suggested she withhold further criticism until she had seen the exhibit. It certainly explains better than any words why the bigger-than-life Tonka toy is right at home in our permanent collection. The entire show illustrates the reasoning at play in selecting all additions made to our collection since our founding in 1931.Robert Wysocki, Nevadan, 2002, Mixed media, 27 x 24 x 264 inches. Collection of Nevada Museum of Art, Purchased with Funds from Volunteers in Art.

The mighty truck sculpture itself, proudly named the Nevadan, is the work of Robert Wysocki, Assistant Professor of 3-D and Conceptual Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Our truck is a replica of a three-trailer-long gravel transport that you might see on any or our state’s roads in our mining districts. Meeting one coming toward you on a narrow gravel byway is one of the things that makes traveling Nevada’s back country a real adventure. It was purchased for the museum after the Nevada Triennial Exhibit in 2005 with funds provided by the Volunteers in Art.

Wysocki was inspired to build replicas of Tonka toys in memory of his childhood. It’s a given that little boys love trucks and earth-moving equipment. Wysocki has simply carried his youthful enthusiasm over to making adult art. Tonka miniaturized real working vehicles, perfectly in scale, with clean lines, careful craftsmanship and vivid colors. Wysocki reverses the process, making his steel, aluminum, silicone, vinyl and polyester resin miniatures to a more human size that almost beg to be played with and driven about. Ask any docent about touring with children when the Nevadan is on display. We actually have to position ourselves between our young audience and our truck and be prepared to lunge at any determined little boy who’s had enough talk and is ready for some action. I’ll even admit to wanting to play with this big toy-as-sculpture myself --fantasizing my Shirley Temple doll in the first trailer, Raggedy Ann in the second and poor Teddy-with one-ear in the back.

In the current exhibit, the Nevadan is in a section titled Excavation surrounded by paintings and photos of big holes in the ground, big steel and, tacitly, the big money that continues to be dug from our severely altered landscape. I know my smarty-pants friend has seen the exhibit by now. Seeing our truck in context, I’m sure she finally “gets it.”