The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is proud to present Between Two Terms, a series of satirical installations by Las Vegas artist Ali Fathollahi. Fathollahi’s artworks, which will change several times during the run of the show, take a sharply humorous look at the frailty and hubris of public communication. 

As a multilingual Iranian American, the artist is attuned to the gaps between languages and the ways in which words can be exploited to reward, bewilder, or harm different groups of listeners. He knows that it can be hard to see the reality that lies behind the messages we hear. Between Two Terms looks critically at the discrepancies between statements and actions. 

Fathollahi’s interest in conversation is present in his title, which intentionally echoes Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, a parodic internet talk show that turns conventional celebrity interviews into surreal ordeals. Like Galifianakis, he enjoys subverting the viewer’s expectations with unexpected jokes. Between Two Terms can also be seen as a continuation of an installation the artist created in 2023 for the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art’s Emotional Show. There, he devised a concise illustration of miscommunication by positioning two fans so that they blew hot or cold air at one another—a visual summary of two speakers who cannot bring themselves to hear or absorb the other person’s perspective. 

Between Two Terms continues his practice of asking viewers to think about serious issues with playful and deliberate wit. 

Ali Fathollahi is a Las Vegas artist who works in performance, installation, and assemblage. Born in Iran, he received a MFA in Illustration/Fine Arts from Azad University in Tehran and co-founded an educational center for visual art and design named The Paper Wings before moving to the United States where he obtained a second MFA from UNLV. His work has been exhibited in Iran, Turkey, and the United States.

Between Two Terms will be on view in the Window Gallery of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art from October 23, 2026–May 22, 2027. A reception will take place during the UNLV Art Walk event on October 23, 5–9 p.m. The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is open from Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. It is closed on state and federal holidays. Entry is free.

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art’s Bus to Barrick field trip program is supported by UNLV's Office of Government and Community Engagement and Howard Watts III. 

The campus has some metered parking spots available for visitors. Parking in staff, student, and visitor spots is free on Saturday and Sunday and after 1 p.m. on Fridays. 

The building is equipped with automatic doors. Visitors will not need to navigate stairs, ramps, or escalators. RTC ADA Paratransit Stop 7 is located outside the Museum’s north entry doors. Contact the Museum (702-895-3381 or barrick.museum@unlv.edu) if we can help you with other types of accommodation.

K-12 and NSHE educators who want to bring classes to the exhibition should contact Zida Wang, Manager of Museum Community Engagement and Outreach, at zida.wang@unlv.edu 

Our Bus to Barrick field trip program brings over 1,000 K-12 students to the Museum every semester. Educators who want to participate in Bus to Barrick should contact the Museum before the start of the relevant semester. To support Bus to Barrick or other aspects of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, please go to our donation page: https://impact.unlv.edu/campaign/808654/donate

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is proud to present Facing Change: Mexican Masking Today. Combining contemporary artworks with a curated selection of twentieth-century Mexican masks, this exhibition looks at the complex forms that masking takes across the Mexican diaspora. 

 

Masking—an act that creates a fluid interplay of new personas and chosen faces—has been a consistent presence in Mexican communities from precolonial times to the present. Masks have been used to express identity and opinions, resist oppression, celebrate spirituality, connect societies together, complicate binary interpretations of culture, and alter the shape of popular entertainment. The evolution of masks does not move in a direct line; rather it recurs and transforms as people search for new ways to negotiate their sense of self and their community identity in defiance of the forces that try to negate them. 

The exhibition was curated with a team of collaborators that included specialists in history, art history, and anthropology. The Museum’s Executive Director, Alisha Kerlin, celebrates the network that came together as the exhibition was being created. “We believe that university museums can bridge academic collaboration and community outreach, and will continue to look for partners who believe in what we are doing.”

Facing Change “looks at masking beyond objects, positioning masks as ever-changing tools of art that continuously help Mexican communities to embody our past, negotiate changes we face, and even put forward ideas about our futures” according to Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection and Exhibitions Manager Higino Abrajano. The exhibition examines popular forms of Mexican masking, such as lucha libre wrestlers and payasos (clowns), and asks how diaspora artists have used these masks as a language that enables them to talk about personal thoughts and feelings in public spaces. 

Artists

The artists include Marcel Alcalá, Azul, Judy Baca, Jesús Barraza, Haide Calle, Melanie Cervantes, Federico Cuatlacuatl, Karla Diaz, Carlos Donjuan, geo, Lourdes Grobet, Joel Hernandez, Mari Hernandez, Graciela Iturbide, Brian Martinez, Narsiso Martinez, Brian McNamara, Josiah O’Balles, Luis A. Reyes, Griselda Rosas, Javier Sanchez. Facing Change includes texts from several of our exhibition partners, Dr. Jorge Galindo, Dr. Iván Sandoval-Cervantes, and Dr. Miriam Melton-Villanueva.

Schedule

Facing Change: Mexican Masking Today will be on view in the East Gallery of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art from October 23, 2026–May 22, 2027. A reception will take place during the UNLV Art Walk event on October 23, 5–9 p.m. The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is open from Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. It is closed on state and federal holidays. Entry is free.

Partners and Supporters

This exhibition was created in partnership with Dr. Jorge Galindo, Dr. Emmanuel Ortega, Dr. Vincent Perez, Dr. Iván Sandoval-Cervantes, Irma Varela, Dr. Miriam Melton-Villanueva, the UNLV Latinx Faculty and Staff Alliance, and the Consulate of Mexico in Las Vegas. We thank our partners for their generous help in translating the exhibition texts. 

Facing Change is supported by the following areas of UNLV: the College of Fine Arts, the Latinx Faculty and Staff Alliance, the Office of Information Technology, and the Office of Government and Community Engagement. The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art’s Bus to Barrick field trip program is supported by UNLV's Office of Government and Community Engagement, UNLV’s College of Fine Arts Alumni Association, and Howard Watts III. 

Accessibility 

Exhibition texts are presented in English and Spanish. 

The campus has some metered parking spots available for visitors. Parking in staff, student, and visitor spots is free on Saturday and Sunday and after 1 p.m. on Fridays. 

The building is equipped with automatic doors. Visitors will not need to navigate stairs, ramps, or escalators. RTC ADA Paratransit Stop 7 is located outside the Museum’s north entry doors. Contact the Museum (702-895-3381 or barrick.museum@unlv.edu) if we can help you with other types of accommodation.

Class visits

K-12 and NSHE educators who want to bring classes to the exhibition should contact Zida Wang, Manager of Museum Community Engagement and Outreach, at zida.wang@unlv.edu 

Our Bus to Barrick field trip program brings over 1,000 K-12 students to the Museum every semester. Educators who want to participate in Bus to Barrick should contact the Museum before the start of the relevant semester. To support Bus to Barrick or other aspects of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, please go to our donation page: https://impact.unlv.edu/campaign/808654/donate

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Al combinar obras de arte contemporáneo con una selección curada de máscaras mexicanas del siglo XX, esta exposición examina las complejas formas que adopta el uso de las máscaras en la diáspora mexicana.

El uso de máscaras —un acto que genera una interacción fluida entre nuevas personalidades y rostros elegidos— ha sido una constante en las comunidades mexicanas desde la época prehispánica hasta la actualidad. Estas se han empleado para expresar identidad y opiniones, resistir la opresión, celebrar la espiritualidad, vincular a las sociedades, cuestionar las interpretaciones culturales binarias y transformar el entretenimiento popular. La evolución de las máscaras no sigue una línea recta; más bien, se repite y se transforma a medida que las personas buscan nuevas formas de definir su identidad individual y comunitaria frente a las fuerzas que intentan negarlas. Con Encarando los cambios, exploramos manifestaciones populares del uso de máscaras en México —como las de los luchadores de lucha libre y los payasos— y cómo los artistas de la diáspora han utilizado estas máscaras como un lenguaje que les permite expresar pensamientos y sentimientos personales en espacios públicos.

Artistas
Marcel Alcalá, Azul, Judy Baca, Jesús Barraza, Haide Calle, Melanie Cervantes, Federico Cuatlacuatl, Karla Diaz, Carlos Donjuan, geo, Lourdes Grobet, Joel Hernandez, Mari Hernandez, Graciela Iturbide, Brian Martinez, Narsiso Martinez, Brian McNamara, Josiah O’Balles, Luis A. Reyes, Griselda Rosas, and Javier Sanchez.

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is proud to present Ingress, a photopoetry exhibition that brings together street photography from Iran and translations of classical Persian poetry in a layered encounter between image and verse, tracing women’s embodiment across public space and literary memory.

Sasan N. Chegini has photographed women in public spaces before and after the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom) uprising in 2022. Woman, Life, Freedom is one of the most significant women-led civil rights movements in Iran’s recent history. It was sparked by the death of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, a young Iranian woman, in morality police custody following an alleged hijab violation.

While formal systems of control remain largely in place, with no meaningful reforms to civil and human rights, Chegini’s photographs from before and after the uprising reveal a visibly transformed cityscape. Women move through streets, sidewalks, and crowded public spaces, simply going about their daily lives. Yet under surveillance and state pressure, these ordinary acts of presence carry a different weight.

In Iran, where the camera has long been used to police and criminalize women, these photographs are anything but ordinary street images. Made quickly and under risk, they carry the urgency of their conditions, turning everyday moments into acts of presence and witness. Describing his process, Chegini writes, “I walk, draw close to people, raise the camera for the briefest moment possible, and release the shutter. Usually, the photograph is ready before I am able to compose my thoughts.”

In Iranian culture, poetry holds a central place, with classical verse living in cultural memory, rituals, and everyday speech. Drawing on this living tradition, the exhibition’s curator, Maryam Ala Amjadi, has placed Chegini’s photographs alongside verses she has selected and translated from a millennium of Persian literature that invoke the female body. Together, image and poem deepen the idea of the body as a site of encounter, struggle, and desire within Iranian cultural memory and lived experience.

The title Ingress draws from classical Persian poetry, where hair appears as a threshold, an entry point, and a site of rupture. Here, hair becomes a charged metaphor for the female body in public space, not as the sole site of struggle, but as a visible point through which broader questions of women’s and human rights come into view. Through image and verse, Ingress situates contemporary Iranian women within literary and lived histories of negotiating agency, visibility, and public presence.

Schedule

Ingress: a Photopoetry Exhibition will be on view in the WorkShop Gallery of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art from October 23, 2026–May 22, 2027. A reception will take place during the UNLV Art Walk event on October 23, 5–9 p.m. The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is open from Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. when exhibitions are open. It is closed on state and federal holidays. Entry is free. This exhibition is co-sponsored by Black Mountain Institute. 

The Bus to Barrick field trip program is supported by Howard Watts III and UNLV's Office of Government and Community Engagement.



About Sasan N. Chegini

Sasan N. Chegini is an Iranian photographer and translator whose work documents Iran’s sociocultural landscape. His photographs have been exhibited at Avay-e Honar Gallery (Tehran, Iran). They have been published alongside investigative articles in the Tehran Times Daily and in the Polish art and literary journal eleWator. Alongside his photography, Chegini has translated news, literary, and cultural writing for Persian-language publications and is the translator of two books.

About Maryam Ala Amjadi

Maryam Ala Amjadi is an Iranian writer, translator, and researcher. She is the author of two poetry collections, a poetry chapbook, and the translator of a selection of Raymond Carver’s poems into Persian. She won the ‘Young Generation Poet’ Prize in the inaugural Yinchuan International Poetry Festival in China and was a writer-in-residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her debut short story, “The Ice Seller of Hell,” won the 2024 Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award and was published in Meridians (Duke University Press). Ala Amjadi was previously a writer for the Tehran Times Daily, where she founded and wrote a weekly page dedicated to Iran’s sociocultural nuances. In 2017, she earned a joint PhD in interdisciplinary literary studies as an Erasmus Mundus fellow from the universities of Kent (UK) and Porto (Portugal). Her poems and translations of contemporary Iranian poets have been anthologized internationally, and her poetry has been translated into multiple languages. Her most recent book, Where Is the Mouth of That Word? (Selected Poems) was published by Poetrywala in 2022. Ala Amjadi is currently a City of Asylum Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. Ingress is her first curation.

The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is proud to present More, an exhibition of new artworks by Las Vegas artist Krystal Ramirez. Working with large-scale textile sculpture, puzzles, and historical photography, Ramirez considers the value of protest and proposes that interruptions to our accustomed ways of thinking can keep us anchored in reality. 

Drawing on her family’s Culinary Union background, she populates quilt-like grids with words found in historical protest photographs from UNLV Special Collections and Archives. Her use of Tyvek—a tough material typically used in construction—reinforces the connection between her goals as an artist and a family history of blue-collar labor.

“The conceptual fabric of Ramirez's work resides in her understanding of protest as process: a means of overturning the utopian, ahistorical foundations of artistic abstraction and transforming them into a poetic declaration of anger and a call to action,” says Dr. Emmanuel Ortega, Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She “reminds us that there can be no creative path forward without a rigorous reckoning with history and its enduring impact on contemporary society.”

Her grids refer back to the nested squares that the German American artist Josef Albers (1888-1976) used to test the effectiveness of small changes between different combinations of colors. Ramirez, a Mexican American artist, points out that Albers was inspired by the shapes in the precolonial architecture he saw while visiting Mexico. Her geometric systems are both a cultural inheritance and an art-historical tool. 

By treating words and letters like decorative elements that can be moved around in a colorful network, Ramirez creates what she calls “analog glitches” that invite viewers to pay conscious attention to the act of reading. Her work is a protest against contemporary A.I. technologies that tempt us to believe that the acquisition of knowledge is simple and quick. 

More will be on view in the West Gallery of the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art from October 23, 2026–May 22, 2027. A reception will take place during the UNLV Art Walk event on October 23, 5–9 p.m. The Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art is open from Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. when exhibitions are open. It is closed on state and federal holidays. Entry is free.

About Krystal Ramirez

Krystal Ramirez is a Las Vegas artist who creates communal spaces of reverence that highlight local histories of migration and blue-collar labor. Her work embraces the instability of written language, inviting viewers into a realm of constant reevaluation where words and letters become a physical manifestation of experiences often lost in translation. Her practice spans a variety of media, including photography, painting, installation, sculpture, and fiber arts. Ramirez received her BFA in Studio Art from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a Master of Fine Arts in Art Practice from Stanford University. Her work has been shown in museums and galleries throughout the United States, including the Nevada Museum of Art (Reno, NV), NMSU Art Museum (Las Cruces, NM), SOMArts (San Francisco, CA), and Gallery 400 (Chicago,IL).

This exhibition was created in collaboration with Dr. Emmanuel Ortega and UNLV Special Collections and Archives. Our Bus to Barrick field trip program is supported by the UNLV Office of Government and Community Engagement and Howard Watts III.

The campus has some metered parking spots available for visitors. Parking in staff, student, and visitor spots is free on Saturday and Sunday and after 1 p.m. on Fridays. 

The building is equipped with automatic doors. Visitors do not need to navigate stairs, ramps, or escalators. RTC ADA Paratransit Stop 7 is located outside the Museum’s north entry doors. Contact the Museum (702-895-3381 or barrick.museum@unlv.edu) if we can help you with other types of accommodation.

K-12 and NSHE educators who want to bring classes to the exhibition should contact Zida Wang, Manager of Museum Community Engagement and Outreach, at zida.wang@unlv.edu 

Our Bus to Barrick field trip program brings over 1,000 K-12 students to the Museum every semester. To support Bus to Barrick or other aspects of the exhibition, please contact Alisha Kerlin at alisha.kerlin@unlv.edu or 702-895-1402.