Arts, culture making big impact as part of Carson City rebranding

Now in its fourth year of a major re-branding effort, the Carson City Culture and Tourism Authority (CCCTA) has begun making arts and culture a major thrust in its marketing campaign to visitors, Executive Director Joel Dunn said.

"We as a community took a step in becoming a community that celebrates and invests in public art through the use of room tax," he said. "We increased the room tax one percent, which gave us an opportunity to set those policies and procedures in place, re-energized all of our great art groups within the community."

The first, though, was to hire someone to manage all of the arts and culture improvements planned for the community.

That's where CCCTA Arts and Culture Coordinator Mark Salinas comes in.

Salinas was brought on board almost a year ago to promote, develop and maintain the arts and culture component of the Carson City re-branding effort, Dunn said.

"We can't jump into this without somebody who can manage that process, and that's what Mark has provided," Dunn said.

In the nearly 11 months since he's been on the job, Salinas has been busy, steadily adding to Carson City's art and culture scene.

"We've seen some fabulous projects coming in," Dunn said. "There are so many great pieces throughout the community, and an overwhelming sense of public art."

Salinas was appointed in July to the statewide Nevada Arts Council by Gov. Brian Sandoval, the first time in three decades that a Carson City representative has served on the 50 year-old board.

"Having representation on the Nevada Arts Council is a huge benefit to Carson City," Dunn said.

Since assuming his duties last October, Salinas said he has successfully wrote a National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) grant for $20,000 to produce a literary campaign.

It's the city's first NEA grant, he said.

"It's a literary grant that I wrote with the Carson City Library and the (Nevada) State Museum as partners called 'The Big Read,' which challenges communities to make month-long programming based around pre-selected novels," Salinas said.

For this campaign, Salinas said he selected the novel "True Grit," because its old west time period is familiar to much of the 19th Century history in and around Carson City.

The campaign launches next May and will run until June 2018, Salinas said.

"We are the only organization in the state to be awarded that NEA grant," Salinas said. "It's been eight years since any organization in Nevada was awarded that."

Work begins on "The Big Read" this November, he said, almost immediately following Nevada Day.

"We'll be wrangling in over 35 small businesses, organizations, schools, nonprofits and have it be a community-wide thing," Salinas said. "There's going to be a lot of fantastic displays throughout the city that take the themes and the characters throughout the (True Grit) book, and redevelop new imagination on how these themes can produce activities throughout the city that tie into what we already have; that brings new awareness and spur reading."

Salinas said he will also be organizing a new event called Carson Biennial this fall, funded by a grant from the Nevada Department of Tourism and Cultural Affairs.

The new event, held Oct. 27 on the state holiday, will showcase arts and culture exhibits from throughout Nevada.

"It's a cross-section of arts and culture across the state, showing the diversity of artists that we have, the diversity of what they create, and the diversity of where they are from," Salinas said. "We're bringing in artists from Eureka, Las Vegas, Washoe Valley and elsewhere in all sorts of media for a one night only juxtaposition of creativity that's found in Carson City."

Held from 8 p.m. to midnight on Nevada Day observed, the ticketed event is slated to become a source of funding for public art in Carson City, Salinas said.

This includes a series of artistic bicycle racks placed around town, he said.

As many as 25 artistic racks are planned throughout the course of the project, Salinas said, with the first five expected to be finished and installed by the end of this year.

"We just sent out the first five contracts to our artists, who will be designing site specific artistic bike racks located along the downtown corridor," he said.

"Fabricated in Mound House, the five that were selected are from Northern Nevada."

Salinas said the artistic bike racks will serve as more than art. They will also be projects that emphasize the bicycle culture being promoted in Carson City.

"It would really generate a lot of awareness for Carson City as a bikeable community, but also as an artistic one full of culture," he said.

The racks will be produced and installed over time, Salinas said, as funding allows.

They will span across the entire Carson City community, too, not just downtown.

"We have on our horizon another 20-25 bike racks, but it's an ongoing process to where we will probably do five at a time," he said. "That will be another project that runs through the next fiscal year."

Dunn said bike racks are produced in partnership with the Consolidated Municipality of Carson City as well as primary sponsor Muscle Powered.

But before all of this will come the introduction of Carson City's first large-scale public art sculpture, Salinas said.

The piece, entitled "The Mind of DaVinci," is a 20-foot long by seven-foot wide sculpture created by Carson City artist Michelle Riley, who displayed the piece on the Playa at last year's Burning Man event and most recently in front of the University of Nevada, Reno library.

"It's a figurative head of Leonardo DaVinci partially submerged in the ground," Salinas said. "We've identified the outside of the Community Center as the perfect place for this as we are going to develop STEM, STEAM Days and DaVinci Days based around that, and located across the street from the library."

Riley's sculpture will be featured during this year's Nevada Day Parade, traveling down Carson Street atop a flat bed.

Its unveiling will also be part of the Carson Biennial event at the Carson City Community Center that night.

What Salinas and the CCCTA are doing for Carson City's arts and culture scene fits nicely in with the 2017 Nevada Day Parade "arts and entertainment" theme.

"It all ties in with that," Salinas said. "We're also trying to up the element of creativity within the parade itself — costumes, floats, pageantries — and our local Carson City Arts Coalition has spearheaded a giant campaign of hand painting about 80 paper parasols that they are going to have in the parade."

Two Burning Man founders will be parade dignitaries and grand marshal, he said.

Although there are plenty of projects planned or in the works over the next fiscal year or so, they are really just laying the groundwork of what is still to come, Dunn said.

"Ten years from now, we're going to just be a great community with so many different opportunities whether or your interests are arts, culture, history, or outdoor recreation," he said. "That's the brand that Carson City celebrates now."

These elements, Dunn said, have long been present in the Nevada state capital. But they haven't always had the support to flourish.

"It's nothing new. It's what we've always had," he said. "But one thing we haven't had was the funding mechanism to put all of that into place. Having an opportunity to use tax revenues generated by visitors to our community to invest in that public art is the perfect way."

Salinas said he is focused on transforming Carson City into the arts and cultural center for Nevada.

"What I'm trying to do is use Carson City as the capital to be the cohesion of creativity throughout the state," he said. "We've planted a lot of seeds, so we are eager to see those grow."