Posted on: September 4, 2024, 03:23h.
Last updated on: September 4, 2024, 04:08h.
By the end of 2028, viewing priceless art in Las Vegas may no longer require walking past banks of slot machines.
On Wednesday, the Las Vegas City Council unanimously approved partnering with Elaine Wynn, and selling her 1.5 acres of land for “under market value,” to build the first world-class art museum Las Vegas has ever had outside the confines of a casino. Construction is expected to start by 2026.
The Las Vegas Museum of Art would occupy a new building in Symphony Park, the 5-acre arts hub in downtown Las Vegas that currently houses the Smith Center for the Performing Arts and the Discovery Children’s Museum.
The 90,000 square-foot project is expected to cost $200 million to build — most of which Wynn, the board chair and CEO of Wynn Resorts, has said she will raise via grants, gifts, sponsors and donations.
The museum has already received $5 million in seed funding from the Nevada state legislature.
Wynn sits on the board of the L.A. County Museum of Art, which, she says, has promised to loan her new museum pieces to display from its extensive/expensive collection. She, of course, is also the former wife of disgraced Wynn Resorts founder Steve Wynn, who for decades was Las Vegas’ preeminent patron of the fine arts.
Wynn and Roger Thomas, the retired former executive vice President of design for Wynn Resorts, attended Wednesday’s City Council meeting to cheerlead the project and announce its architect, Francis Kéré, who designed the Xylem Pavilion at Montana’s Tippet Rise Art Center, which opened in 2019.
According to Wynn, Kéré’s design for the museum will take inspiration from the Guardian Angel Cathedral, the Catholic church located northeast of Wynn Resorts’ Encore just off the Las Vegas Strip.
Red Ridge Development will be the developers on the project.
Lost Art
Las Vegas once had a public art museum that wasn’t located in the Bellagio or Wynn. But it wasn’t the kind that displayed Picassos, Warhols or Rothkos.
The Las Vegas Art Museum opened in 1974 out of the ashes of the Las Vegas Art League, in a ranch house at Lorenzi Park that was owned by the city of Las Vegas.
In the 1990s, the city converted the museum into a senior center and moved its collection — consisting of 200 pieces of mostly contemporary art by painters who aren’t household names — into a new building it shared with one of its libraries until 2009. That’s when the Las Vegas Art Museum finally closed, citing a recession-prompted lack of donations.
In 2012, the collection was moved to the newly renovated Barrick Museum of Art at UNLV. Its former space now functions as an art gallery for the Sahara West branch of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library.
In 2017, the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno announced plans to open a Las Vegas branch. But that $250M project was canceled in 2020 due to lack of funding.
