Online Nevada Encyclopedia

Jim McCormick

Hildegard Herz

Hildegard Herz was from a prominent Reno family, and a founding member of the influential Latimer Art Club. She was a prolific watercolorist who often went on sketching trips with fellow Reno artists. Herz’s numerous excursions abroad also served as an inspiration for her paintings, and for presentations to cultural groups in the community. 

Helen Hortense Lee Deffebach

While Lee Deffebach (1928-2005) is usually identified as a Utah artist, her ties to the former mining town, and now artist’s colony of Tuscarora, Nevada, some fifty miles northwest of Elko, were strong. Deffebach, a three-season resident of Salt Lake City, is considered by many Utah artists and critics to be the first significant female modern artist in the state. Her long time commitment to abstract painting is reflected in the energetic brushwork with which she delivered broad vibrant passages of color to her canvases.   

Grafton Brown: Lithography

Grafton Tyler Brown (1841-1918) was born of free parentage in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In all likelihood, he had the distinction of being the first professional African-American artist to venture into Nevada.

Elwood Decker

Elwood Decker (1903-1992) arrived at Fort Churchill sixty-six years after it had been abandoned and all of its salvageable materials removed. Fort Churchill was a hastily constructed military post near the banks of the Carson River in western Nevada (then western Utah Territory), intended to protect local citizens and emigrants traveling west following the Pyramid Lake War of 1860.

Edwin Deakin

Edwin Deakin (1838-1923) was born in Sheffield, England, and immigrated to America in 1856. He lived in Chicago where, for a time, he earned his living painting commissioned portraits of Civil War heroes. In 1870, he moved west to San Francisco and established his home and studio. Deakin's paintings, in the Romantic landscape tradition, created iconic images of the Sierra Nevada, especially the Lake Tahoe Basin.

Edward W. Yates

After accepting an offer to join the faculty of the Department of Art at the University of Nevada (UNR) in 1952, Edward W. Yates left his native Oklahoma and, for the next seventeen years, offered instruction in a variety of disciplines including sculpture, jewelry, and art history.

Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder

Chief Rolling Mountain Thunder (1920-1989) was a Creek tribal name that Oklahoma-born Frank Van Zant adopted after he arrived in Nevada in 1968. In the years that followed, Chief Thunder and many kindred spirits worked to create Thunder Mountain, a mixed-media collection of buildings and sculpture along a stretch of Interstate 80 between Lovelock and Winnemucca, Nevada.

Will James: The Artist

Will James lived like a character in one of his own novels. The Canadian-born cowboy, writer, and artist came to Nevada in 1914. Soon after, he got caught in a rustling scheme and spent time in prison; he used the solitude of jail to sharpen his skills at drawing scenes depicting life on the ranch.

Arthur V. Buel - Biography of a Nevada Caricaturist

Arthur V. Buel (1877-1952) has been described as Nevada's most prolific editorial cartoonist. His long newspaper career started in the mining towns of the Yukon Territory and took him to Tonopah, Nevada, where he honed his distinctive approach to the art of caricature. In 1922, Buel moved to California where he spent the next 24 years working for the McClatchy-owned Sacramento Bee and Fresno Bee.

William Vaughn Howard

It is not difficult to locate William Vaughn Howard (1921-1986) along the spectrum of art movements in the United States when he joined the faculty of the University of Nevada, Reno art department in 1963. Abstract Expressionism still held sway over museums and galleries, both their collections and exhibits, and Howard held up Abstract Expressionism as the stylistic model in his classroom.

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