When Melissa Melero-Moose went on elementary- and middle-school field trips to the Nevada State Museum in Carson City in the 1970s and ’80s, she saw something that made her cringe every time: the Native Americans exhibit.
“It was naked mannequins. It was humiliating,” said Melero-Moose, who is a Northern Paiute enrolled with the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, as well as an abstract painter, and the co-founder and director of Great Basin Native Artists. “It’s typical of most museums from my mom’s era.”
Displays like that one tend to stay on view, she said, “until a community comes in and says, ‘You know, let’s have something that looks like we’re still alive. Let’s not have just these dusty baskets that portray us just as these artists who came from ancient times.’”
For a couple of decades now, Melero-Moose has been one of the region’s main drivers of these conversations. Before the Lilley Museum of Art opened at the University of Nevada, Reno, the director consulted with her about ways to showcase Indigenous artists. In 2015, she and Ben Aleck started Great Basin Native Artists, a group that makes sure work by Native artists from Nevada and neighboring states is exhibited and kept in the spotlight. In 2019, she donated GBNA’s growing archive—which contains files on each artist, exhibition posters, magazine articles and the like—to the Nevada Museum of Art, where she has since been a consultant and adviser for occasional projects.
By now, Melero-Moose is something of a one-woman “museum.” She curated the new exhibition, This Is Us: Contemporary Art From the Great Basin Native Artists, which opened late in November at the Nevada State Museum, asserting artists’ individual styles, stories and identities. The show includes dozens of paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, basketry, beadwork and works in other mediums. It’s a beautiful selection—a far cry from the exhibit that embarrassed her as a kid. And there’s a surprising detail that you won’t learn about in the wall text: All but a few pieces are from Melero-Moose’s own collection…