See Hear Do: Start your summer with some culture | Desert writer Phyllis Barber and her Precarious Walk | I graduated from the MFA writing program and all I got was vague despair
A Sista’s Imagination
Through July 31
Art
To scroll through Karena and Angela Graham’s Instagram account @sistasthatpaint is to plunge into brash, bold color and, damn, what look like some wonderfully raucous paint parties. The local artists known for their vibrant, splashy canvases are marking Juneteenth with an exhibit that celebrates Black culture. And if their ’Gram is any indication, this summer exhibit A Sista’s Imagination will be an explosion of color — and the reception will be a party to remember. Andrew Kiraly
Reception 3p June 18, free, West Las Vegas Library, lvccld.org
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Nevada Watercolor Society’s Spring Show
Apr. 15 – June 19
Art exhibit
Winter can feel like a grim time for Las Vegans, being in an environment with neither the aesthetic joys of snowfall nor the balmy Southern California weather. That makes the glories of spring even more important, and what better way to celebrate their arrival than with watercolor? Local and national painters are currently displaying their work at the Nevada Watercolor Society’s Spring Show, which showcases 40 pieces created by the nation’s watercolor masters. Located in Spring Preserve’s Primrose Gallery, the exhibit offers the chance to soak up the bright colors and tones of spring! Anne Davis
Each Friday through Monday, 9a-4p, free with general admission, Springs Preserve, springspreserve.org
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Asylum: Reflections on Refuge
June 4
Exhibit/Performance
Across the desolate Smolenska Street, in Kyiv, Ukraine, near the small, independent ProEnglish Theatre, a barricade has been erected. In that space, art and resistance meet. The theater has served as an “art shelter,” taking people in since the war began. As the air raid sirens roar throughout the city, the troupe of artists continues to write plays, dance, sing, and create art. Now, they’ve taken their all-out creative resistance abroad, live streaming a performance from their wartime bunker in Kyiv for an art exhibition called Asylum: Reflections on Refuge. “Art transcends boundaries and reaches into war zones,” says Sarah O’Connell, artist director of the Las Vegas-based Asylum Theatre. “Theatre artists know they are the first and last defense of free choice and individual dignity.” This collaboration brings together a diverse group of visual artists, poets, and dancers to honor refugees of the war in Ukraine, and reflect on the dispersed culture of Ukrainians. It’s a chance to raise awareness of the global refugee crisis and celebrate the diverse culture of asylum seekers. Lourdes Trimidal
7p-8:45p, free, Winchester Theater, 3130 McLeod Drive near Desert Inn Road, https://bit.ly/3w4O1HJ.
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Verano Mexicano
June 10
Dance
Most art lovers are already familiar with classical ballet, but not as many have had the privilege of seeing the Ballet Folklorico Izel, a dance troupe native to the Las Vegas Valley that combines Mexican dance styles and traditional folkloric garb to create unique, culturally enriching performances. From the mind of Roman Lizaola, a Tijuana native and himself a folkloric dancer, this show samples various dances from around Mexico, most notably the fun and high-energy dance known as calabazeado from sunny Baja California. This is a show for both seasoned fans of Mexican folkloric art, as well as newbies hoping to broaden their ballet horizons. AD
7-8:30p, free, Winchester Dondero Cultural Center, 702-455-7340, www.ClarkCountyNV.gov/parks
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Tosca
June 10-12
Opera
If you need a break from the grim drumbeat of WTF headlines pounding your soul into a whimpering veal cutlet of catatonic despair, this classic Italian opera rife with rage, obsession, assault, murder, and torture should, uh, definitely offer a suitably soul-shattering cathartic escape. Set in Rome during Napoleon’s invasion of Italy, the tumultuous Tosca plunges the human condition into a crucible of jealousy, paranoia, and violence — and sets it to some of the most beautiful singing you’ll ever hear, as gigadiva Tosca fights to help her bae escape the clutches of a maniacal police chief. Better yet, this Opera Las Vegas production features a wealth of local talent, including soprano Shannon Jennings in a role debut, Las Vegas Philharmonic members in the pit, and the Las Vegas Master Singers bringing the choral oomph. AK
7:30p June 10, 2p June 12, $25-$75, UNLV Judy Bayley Theatre, unlv.edu/pac
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Clown Bar 2
Until June 12
Musical Comedy
Clowns meet underground criminal mobs and cops with confetti guns in the return of the immersive musical comedy Clown Bar 2, the sequel to the original noir Clown Bar. This time, Happy, the newly crowned clown boss, is missing. Suspecting foul play, two cops go undercover to find out what happened. Created by Adam Szymkowics and directed by Troy Heard, the performance will transport you to a different world where the gunplay is wilder than before and the only rule to surviving is to be funny. With whiskey-fueled dialogue and lots of cigarette smoke, this performance promises to be chaotic good fun. LT
8p-9:45p, $35, ages 18 and above, Majestic Repertory Theatre (1217 S. Main St. 89104), tickets at www.majesticrepertory.com
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Juneteenth in the 106
June 17
Festival
On June 19, 1865, federal troops descended on Galveston, Texas, to formally enforce the Emancipation Proclamation, signed two and a half years earlier. Clark County Parks and Recreation marks the 157 th anniversary of that day, which has become known as Juneteenth — the true end of slavery — with a community festival in Las Vegas’ Historic Westside. The annual event includes arts and crafts, educational exhibits, hands-on activities, musical performances, product vendors, soul food, and other celebrations of African American culture. In a press release, the district’s Clark County Commissioner, William McCurdy II, says the event is the pinnacle of the community calendar, “an occasion I look forward to every year.” HK
6-9p, free, Dr. William U. Pearson Community Center, clarkcountynv.gov, 702-455-1220
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Barber will be familiar to some readers from 1992’s How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir, part of the contemporary Nevada canon. She’s since written two follow-up memoirs, Raw Edges and The Mountain: One Mormon Woman’s Search for Spirit. The pieces collected here source from across that same time span, and bear on some of the same concerns: growing up in the deserts around Boulder City and Las Vegas; being the daughter of a mother disappointed by the smallness of her life; an unabashed love of music and dance; leaning into and cautiously away from her inherited Mormon faith.
Wherever these essays roam, the desert is never far from Barber’s mind, and the first section of The Precarious Walk is devoted to it. She recalls her Boulder City childhood, thrilled that she could say “dam” all the time, testing the mouthfeel of a swear word signifying damnation. Visiting the dam, she scanned its smooth surfaces for lumps marking bodies in the concrete. Years later, a bike ride to the ruins of St. Thomas finds her musing on history — her great-great grandfather was among St. Thomas’ first settlers — ecology, hydrology (“A land short on water, but the word short is too generous”), and more. Austere, unpredictable, scoured to some eternal essence by erosion, for Barber the desert can’t help but be immanent with spirit. “Of course there is another world,” the poet Max Ritvo once wrote. “But it is not elsewhere.” And so, filtered through the memories of old sermons and church teachings, for her this landscape “explains God, heaven, and hell with no words, no scriptures, no ideologies.”
Barber’s writing is often sharp: Of Boulder City she writes, “One could almost smell the town’s respectability.” Yes! Exactly! Now and then a cliché gums things up: “always a bridesmaid, never a bride." A few times, she tries to match the mythic resonance of the desert by affecting a poetic viscosity that sometimes intensifies the reading experience but occasionally gels her sentences into awkward shapes. I didn’t hate it; your tolerance may vary.
The second section is more miscellaneous, with travels and portraits — “The Knife Handler” is a particularly affecting account of attending church with a rural Southern artisan she’s just met — and lots of dancing. She compulsively visits churches. In an essay about writing, she’s particularly good in the way that the writer and her material conspire to devise the self that will write that material.
What coheres all this is the presence — up close or at a remove, but always there — of her faith. If, as I do, you flinch when someone talks directly and unapologetically about his or her belief in God — if you’d just rather not hear it — consider yourself warned. But not warned away. Throughout, Barber is upfront about her spirituality, but never dogmatic. Indeed, while we’re right to be skeptical of religion’s role in America these days — it often seems to exist mostly to apply a Biblical shimmer to the necrotizing politics of the right — Barber shows how, at the individual level, it can bestow dimensionality to one’s life and perceptions. And she exhibits an appealing independence of spirit. The title essay finds her straining against the received dictates of her LDS upbringing; she will always question her way toward the divine, wherever that takes her: “It was necessary and compulsory to find my way to God by myself.” So she will consult with shamans in South America, attend a Gullah church in South Carolina, and play piano for a Baptist congregation in backwoods Arkansas. She’s familiar with the Eastern texts. At no point does the reader feel Barber is busking for her church; she’s making room within a system she wants to belong to, but on her own terms.
From an anecdote about tumbling bloodily into a mountain stream, “The Art of Falling” builds into an extended riff on the many meanings of “falling.” Falling down. Falling from grace. Falling in love. Falling off of a motorcycle, as she once did, the whole essay capillary with gradients of meaning, building to her implied challenge: What’s more important about a fall, the hard landing — or that fleeting instance of suspended gravity when you’re aloft with the birds and the angels? What can you pull from that moment to make it worth the splat?
To the extent that she’s able to answer that question, she has the desert to thank. Because of it, she tells us, “I’m a creature who has found a way to live in the midst of challenges.”
Phyllis Barber reads from The Precarious Walk 7p June 3 at The Writer’s Block.
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And yet, by the time our commencement arrived a few Fridays ago, I wasn’t surprised to hear a friend say that only two people from our cohort planned to walk across the Thomas & Mack stage to receive their diplomas. A rolled piece of blank paper accepted in front of a crowd of strangers wasn’t going to restore what we’d lost over the previous three years. How had we gone from Moby Dick to “meh”?
Three years ago, we came together, a disparate band of writers eager to solve humanity’s problems from within the elite confines of academia. My cohort could turn anything pop culture into esoteric talking points. “Yes, yes, watching the Kardashians makes you feel stupid, but you can’t tell me it isn’t Jane Austen for the zeitgeist!” The first semester, I took to showing off every obscure writer I had read. And I would have continued doing so had a poet not interrupted one of my pontifications with, “We get it, Soni; you read.”
Then, in the middle of our second semester, the pandemic lockdown hit. Our collective dreams faltered, along with our manuscripts. The U.S. president offered false hope. Mask-wearing became a political statement in some places. We couldn’t see our loved ones. I didn’t know what to do but watch Netflix and troll TikTok. Fellow writers signed up for low-cost online therapy, offered through the school. Our group chats increased as we tried to find light in the heavy. Some in the group left Las Vegas to save money on rent or care for family members. I was stuck, juggling my classes and graduate assistantship, while worrying about my elderly mother in a nursing home. My partner and I transitioned to online teaching, hoping things would go back to normal in six months.
I struggled to write. I couldn’t make a daily habit of it because it was only possible when I had childcare. After daycare centers closed, my husband and I prioritized whose work would come first — while his paycheck paid the rent, we could get by without my stipend — but the decision felt tainted by the traditional notion of child-minding being a woman’s domain. My husband stole time so I could attend Zoom classes. I would go off-camera to change diapers or make dinner while giving my thoughts on an assignment. But uninterrupted writing time was a luxury we couldn’t afford. I could only muster something if I had a deadline.
At one point, an instructor sent the group an email reminding us to take the downtime to create art. We have a better understanding, he wrote, of disastrous events like the Black Death because of the artists and writers who documented the era. His intention was to validate our craft, but in the early days of the lockdown, it came off as tone-deaf. So much of our worth is already defined by our labor under capitalism. People were dying and getting sick, and his expectation was that we produce art.
It's hard to pinpoint what fractured our group: Perhaps it was the constant unspoken pressure from the university to keep everything business-as-usual — but remote. Maybe it was the social and physical distance. We missed the collaborative process done face-to-face. We were stuck at home in front of a screen, unaware that this was to be the norm for two years. We became untethered and bereft.
MFA students teach undergraduate composition classes, tutor at UNLV’s Writing Center, and work on literary magazines like The Believer and Interim. Members of my cohort and I shared heartbreaking stories of students who had to quit school because a parent was laid off. We leaned on each other for support, but each week it got harder to write. Academic burnout is rampant in the halls of learning. A 2020 Chronicle of Higher Education poll found the percentage of faculty respondents who felt stressed had doubled over the previous year. People were rethinking their commitment to academia.
Making it even harder for us MFA students, the walls of prestige surrounding our illustrious program were slowly crumbling. In early May, Paradise Media, owner of The Sex Toy Collective — a website that reviews erotic accessories — announced in a tweet that it had acquired The Believer from UNLV’s Black Mountain Institute. It seemed like a consequence of Joshua Shenk’s resignation as the magazine’s editor and BMI director a year earlier. Shenk had left UNLV after exposing his genitals to colleagues during a Zoom meeting.
Paradise’s announcement was a giant middle finger to graduate assistants like me — student writers and editors who toiled for low pay in the belief that we were creating a lasting literary legacy. Fortunately, after a couple weeks of outrage, Paradise sold the magazine to McSweeney’s, its original owner.
The indignities weren’t over, however. The same week as our commencement, another slow-simmering scandal made national news. This involved alleged plagiarism by BMI PhD fellow Jumi Bello in an essay she’d written to explain the cribbed parts of her publisher-canceled debut novel. As far as disrepute goes, this was a personal issue. Bello had documented her mental health challenges at great length, and the additional stress of producing a novel led her down a path of ignominy.
By then, my fellow MFA candidates had already been checking out. Cubicles were empty. We looked forward to the pared-down Believer Festival, now called Wave In, not graduation. Some pushed their graduation to the summer. Others stopped calling Las Vegas home altogether. One MFA student moved around several countries in Eastern Europe that had permissive COVID protocols. On Webex or Zoom, we would listen to them order Mai Tais in a restaurant, unabashed.
I stayed put in Las Vegas because I loved the paradox of the city — always staying the same, but constantly changing. But as soon as I defended my thesis in April, I knew I wouldn’t commence. Instead of walking across a stage in mid-May, I was driving the pock-marked backroads of Jamaica in search of a beach. I stepped on the black sand with a pod of whales in the distance at the moment my name would have been mispronounced in the arena.
I enjoyed many parts of my MFA, but the initial experience, the hope, now feels empty, like it never happened. Or, if it did, it was in an alternate reality. What breaks me is the loss of the ever-expanding community of folks and institutions I expected would still be in Las Vegas long after I left. Gone from UNLV are The Believer, The Believer Festival, and the staff’s long-term mentoring. The cubicle huddles, where we would read our hastily written prose, braving hurt feelings to say keep this sentence; lose that quip. A few professors who were key in shaping my views on writing have also left. UNLV’s MFA was meant to build and nurture a writing community in Las Vegas. Given the program’s current state, I wonder if new applicants will decide not to apply. I hope not. I hope in a different timeline, where COVID doesn’t exist, people are still healthy and excited, and my cohort is sipping coffee while quoting obscure dead poets.
Photos and art: Sistas That Paint: courtesy LVCCLD; Phyllis Barber: courtesy Torrey House Press; essay art: Scott Lien
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