Disturbances in the Field

We’re excited to announce that selections from the HDTS archive are currently being presented to the public in the exhibition Disturbances in the Field: Art in the High Desert from Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West to High Desert Test Sites, on view at the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment from July 3, 2021 through February 6, 2022. The exhibition looks back on two decades of HDTS programming and is accompanied by a selection of videos from the archive, screening in the museum’s theater during open hours.

In October 2017 a selection of the HDTS archive was first exhibited in an exhibition curated by Sohrab Mohebbi and Aram Moshayedi, An Ephemeral History of High Desert Test Sites: 2002-2015. It was through this exhibition and collaboration with Mohebbi and Moshayedi that the HDTS archive was developed further and grew into a significant collection. Our deepest thanks to them for their contributions.

Disturbances in the Field: Art in the High Desert from Andrea Zittel’s A-Z West to High Desert Test Sites is guest curated by Brooke Hodge. Currently an independent curator and writer, Hodge has held curatorial positions at Palm Springs Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as well as serving as Director of Exhibition and Publication Management at the Hammer Museum and Deputy Director at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Hodge has also been a member of the HDTS Board of Directors since 2019.

Artists whose HDTS projects are represented by archival material in Disturbances in the Field include:

Adrienne Adar, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Ellen Babcock, Katie Bachler, Julia Barbee, Bernd Behr, bodycity, Lea Cetera, Isalmi Ching, Kate Costello, Center for Tactical Magic, Greta Dana, dark:30 (Marisa Frantz, Jim Kanter, and Lisa Ward), Jeremy Deller, Brooks Dierdorff, Drew Dominick, Neil Doshi, Jim Drain, Shannon Ebner, Shari Elf, Stosh Fila, Christy Gast, Katie Grinnan, Wade Guyton, GWC, Investigators (Sean Patrick Carney, Daniel Glendening, and Michael Welsh), Ben Hagari, Mary Beth Heffernan, Naotaka Hiro, Bettina Hubby, Kristin Beinner James, Christopher James, Saskia Jorda, Mark Klassen, Joey Kotting, Aurora Kross, Joel Kyack, Fabrienne Lasserre, Marie Lorenz, Charlene Lui, Greg Martin, Aleksandra Mir, Joel Otterson, Michael Parker (with Alyse Emdur), Raymond Pettibon, Jack Pierson, Lisi Raskin, Ry Rocklen, Halsey Rodman, Andrew Rogers, Julia Scher, David Shrigley, Linda Sibio, Victor Sidy, Adam Silverman, Claude Collins Stracensky, Gabie Strong, Jesse Sugarmann, Matt Suplee, Austin Thomas, Mungo Thomson, Julie Tolentino, Kartz Ucci (with archival contributions from Abby Donovan), Roman Vasseur and Flora Wiegmann.

This exhibition celebrates the recent acquisition of the HDTS archive by the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment. Inclusion in this prestigious collection of materials is something we could not be more proud of. Their mission, “To be a global leader in supporting the practice, study, and awareness of creative interactions between people and their environments”, is one we feel perfectly aligned with. Our contextualization within the collection will provide a permanent metaphorical home for HDTS, in the company of so many other key archives. This was also an important opportunity to look back at our history and make it a cohesive and extensive one. Built on the archive exhibition curated by Sohrab Mohebbi and Aram Moshayedi presented as part of HDTS 2017, our collection of physical objects from the past twenty years—posters, zines, documentation, costumes, videos, sculptures, and other ephemera—represents the work of more than 150 artists and collectives, while our digital archive represents hundreds more. We are so grateful to all the artists who dug into their pasts to provide us with materials especially for this acquisition. So many magic HDTS moments could have been easily lost without this impetus to archive, and we’re thrilled they will be made available to researchers and the public for years to come.

Photos courtesy Nevada Museum of Art and Chris Holloman