Archives | Winter 2009

William L. Fox Founding Director for The Center for Art + Environment T he Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Arts was launched in January 2009. With its formal establishment, the museum has appointed a former Nevadan, writer and poet William Fox for its director. Fox will be responsible for developing a s programming, including an exhibition and publications series, residencies for artists and scholars and partnerships with other institutions around the world. There are a lot of upcoming projects in the center and Fox is looking forward to working with volunteers on many of them, such as exhibitions, field projects, and many more.

Fox has written several books, numerous essays in art monographs, and articles and poems in more than seventy magazines and journals. Inspired by land, he has had fourteen collections of his poetry published in three countries: Canada, New Zealand, India and the Netherlands. His nonfiction titles about the relationships among art, cognition and landscape are comprised of : Terra Antarctica: Looking Into the Emptiest Continent; In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle; Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty; The Black Rock Desert; and The Void, the Grid & the Sign: Traversing the Great Basin.

Born in San Diego, CA, Fox grew up in Reno. He graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a degree in English Literature. Fox is an art critic, science writer and cultural geographer, dedicated to the fields of scholarship and poetry. From 1979 until 1993, he worked at the Nevada Arts Council as the executive director. Fox taught rock climbing at the University of Nevada, as well as led treks in the Himalayas.

In 2001-02 he spent 10 weeks in the Antarctic with the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Visiting Artists and Writers Program. Fox also worked as a team member of NASA’s Haughton-Mars Project, testing methods of exploring Mars on Devon Island. He was a visiting scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, nominated Lannan Foundation’s writer-in- residence, and has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“It is a real privilege to have Bill serve as the first director for the Center for Art and Environment,” said David Walker, our CEO and president. “For more than three decades Bill has been a highly-respected critic, scholar and creative practitioner. His expertise and leadership will generate global art and environment dialogue.”

The Center for Art + Environment’s primary mission is to engage in a comprehensive study of people and their environments. Its goal is to bring together artists, scholars and communities to document, research and analyze connections between art and environments, acquisition, preservation and scholarly presentation of related materials including art and environment project archives and to increase public knowledge of those creative and scholarly initiatives. Initial plans are to install a research exhibition series, hold public lectures, and begin exhibiting collected archival materials.