The Smith Center to remain closed this year – Video
 
The Smith Center to remain closed this year – Video

The Smith Center’s CEO Myron Martin talks about the indefinite closure amid the COVID-19 pandemic, how the community can help during this time and what they hope to accomplish before reopening again in the future. (Renee Summerour/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Marjorie Barrick Museum to reopen – Video
 
Marjorie Barrick Museum to reopen – Video

Alisha Kerlin, executive director of the Marjorie Barrick Museum, describes the exhibits “Kept to Myself” and “Excerpts” featured at the UNLV museum in Las Vegas on Monday, Aug. 10, 2020. The museum is to reopen on Aug. 17,2020 by appointment only. (Elizabeth Brumley/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

New art installations in Downtown Las Vegas alley
 
New art installations in Downtown Las Vegas alley

The dT Alley Community Coalition unveiled a creative corridor of murals and interactive exhibits in Downtown Las Vegas. (Rachel Aston/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Banksy exhibit opens in Las Vegas
 
Banksy exhibit opens in Las Vegas

“Banksy: Genius or Vandal?” at Immersion Vegas in Fashion Show mall in Las Vegas. The collection of more than 70 original works by the street artist will be on display through April 5. (K.M. Cannon/Las Vegas Review-Journal) @KMCannonPhoto

Seven Magic Tires
 
Seven Magic Tires

“Seven Magic Tires,” created by Las Vegas artists Justin Favela and Ramiro Gomez, substitutes piles of tires for hefty boulders to recreate the scale model. (Mat Luschek / Review-Journal)

Seven Magic Mountains briefly loses its color
 
Seven Magic Mountains briefly loses its color

Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone’s Seven Magic Mountains art installation received a base coat of white as part of a restoration project to repaint the boulders. (MIchael Quine/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Neon Museum gets OK to expand
 
Neon Museum gets OK to expand

The Las Vegas City Council voted today to allow the Neon Museum to expand into the empty Reed Whipple Cultural Arts Center. (Mat Luschek / Las Vegas Review Journal)

Inside Life is Beautiful
 
Inside Life is Beautiful

Craig Asher Nyman explains how Life is Beautiful festival is booked and talks about this year’s line-up. (Jason Bracelin/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Tattoo’d America Pops Up In Vegas
 
Tattoo’d America Pops Up In Vegas

Tattoo’d America, a new pop-up attraction on the Linq Promenade, had their grand opening Friday. The attraction is dedicate to the culture of tattoos. (Mat Luschek / Review-Journal)

The Dark Arts Market
 
The Dark Arts Market

The Dark Arts Market is a place “for underground kids to come be seen, perform and sell their art work,” according to curator Erin Emre. Open once every three months, the market was hosted this month by the Cornish Pasty Factory in the Downtown Arts District. (Mat Luschek/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Art Box Surprise With Susan Tosches-deneau
 
Art Box Surprise With Susan Tosches-deneau

Susan Tosches-Deneau, an artist and business woman from the southwest valley, explains her art subscription service Art Box Surprise, and shows off some of the artwork from Las Vegas artists that is available through the service. (Madelyn Reese/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Vegas Stripped: Save Me
 
Vegas Stripped: Save Me

Tom “Cruise” is known more as his graffiti name “save me.” At one point he was homeless in the Pacific Northwest, being arrested for tagging trains and walls, but also painting model trains to make money. This trend of painting model trains among graffiti artists is growing in California, where there are even art gallery shows for model trains, but has yet to take hold in Las Vegas. As a legal alternative, it doesn’t halt artists from painting real trains but monetizes their hobby. Some artists take a photo of the real train they painted, then paint the same work on a model train. Like an architect executing his plan, Tom says.

Today he has been commissioned to paint murals, in the Arts District and for the Linq hotel. His life is in far better shape. He has a full time job so he doesn’t have to rely on graffiti for money. But where he is at now, he gives all credit to graffiti, both the good and bad things. The community of artists he met supported him when he was homeless and pushed him to develop his creativity.

Vegas Stripped: Balancing Chaos with Art
 
Vegas Stripped: Balancing Chaos with Art

Between the ages of eight and 14, Clarice Tara lived under an umbrella of mental abuse from her mother’s boyfriend. At 14, she left to live with her father, whose abuse of drugs drove Clarice to forms of self-abuse herself.

After marrying at 20, her husband joined the army, and they moved to Texas. But after his return from a tour in Iraq, he became verbally and physically abusive. Cutting away from him, she set out to find some semblance of peace.

She apprenticed at a tattoo shop for 6 months, where a resident tattoo artist had her sit at a desk and draw human portraits over and over. During that time it became clear she wanted to do art for life.

She credits the Las Vegas art community for allowing her to thrive and grow as an artist.

“This art community seems to be elevating each other instead of there being this competition,” she says.

This fall is her second year at UNLV where she is working on her Bachelor’s in Fine Arts. Her main project is a series of portraits called “The Weight”. She arranges for friends to meet with her, talk about a time in their life when they felt a heaviness from suffering, and then asks them to pose in a way that they feel best shows where they are mentally at in handling the weight of the situation. She then photographs them, and later draws their portrait with pencil or colored pencil.

She recently began putting the portraits on mirrors. “The viewer is just as important if not more important than the artwork itself,” she says. It was important that viewers see the subjects in these drawings as experiencing a “weight” that she believes is universal. Her greatest goal is to connect viewers to that idea and receive some level of peace from that camaraderie.

“We all suffer alone but we’re not alone in that suffering,” she says. “Instead of dwelling on that heaviness, I had to see it as something as this is going to lift me up this is going to give me strength.”

The heaviness, she says, is usually circumstantial, and when you get through it, it becomes a source of strength. In the meantime, connecting with others assuages the pain.

You can find her work on Facebook at “The Art of Tara” and on Instagram @claricetara. Beginning in December an exhibit of her work will be displayed at Jana’s RedRoom in the Arts Factory in Las Vegas.

Vegas Stripped: Radically Superb
 
Vegas Stripped: Radically Superb

Marcus Henderson, Anthony Burnett, Rashawn Young, and Latazsha Reese make up the group BARS, or “Brothers Are Radically Superb”. They combine turfing, bone breaking, popping, and anything that inspires them to put on a improv-based theatrical show of raw self-expression.