RENO, NV (PNAN) – Opening Saturday, August 26, 2023, “Guillermo Bert: The Journey” at the Nevada Museum of Art, Bert’s artworks explore the endurance of immigrants who have left their home countries behind. Rooted in his personal story, his primary focus has been the experiences of people and families who enter the United States along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In his multi-media and conceptually layered works, Bert addresses the ways in which colonization and capitalistic systems contribute to cultural displacement and the loss of Indigenous identities, traditions, and religions.
His artworks draw metaphorical relationships between the journeys of migrants, harsh and empty desert landscapes, and the commodification and objectification of American values.
This mid-career survey includes artworks in a variety of traditional and contemporary media that are drawn from the entirety of Bert’s career, as well as new works produced exclusively for this exhibition.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a book published by the Nevada Museum of Art. The book will include an interview between Guest Curator Vivian Zavataro and artist Bert as well as other scholarly essays by Alma Ruiz, an independent curator and Senior Fellow at the Center for Business and Management of the Arts, Claremont Graduate University, and former senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Tressa Berman, Ph.D., an anthropologist, curator, and writer who lives and works in California and New Mexico; Ximena Keogh Serrano is a writer and transdisciplinary scholar based in Portland, Oregon.
About
Bert Guillermo was born in 1959, raised in Santiago, Chile, and left his home country in the early 1980s before immigrating to Los Angeles in 1981 in search of a more open and inclusive society. Bert worked as an Art Director at the Los Angeles Times and taught art at the Art Center School of Design in Pasadena, California, before dedicating his time exclusively to his own art and design.