Mick Sheldon: Still Lifes for Cowpokes

CCAI Courthouse Gallery [map]
885 East Musser Street
Carson City

Opening Reception: Friday, September 16, 5 - 7pm

The Capital City Arts Initiative opens Mick Sheldon’s exhibition, Still Lifes for Cowpokes at the CCAI Courthouse Gallery on Friday, September 16 with a reception for the artist from 5 - 7pm. The exhibition and reception are free and the public is cordially invited.

The exhibition features still life paintings by artist Mick Sheldon, a Reno native and UNR alum. Still life paintings with commonplace objects as subjects are an art tradition that goes back millennia. This exhibition’s paintings grew out of an assignment the artist gave to his students and to himself as well: paint a still life. “The gourds, the skulls, the thick rope, the student-made lopsided pots and bottles, the cactus, the bullet-riddled cans, the broken glass, and especially the cloth kept tumbling around and over each other” revealed themselves to be players in the rodeos and cowboy western movies he remembered from his youth: skulls as the cowboys, cacti as the pine trees, desk lamps as the light source.

Sheldon earned a MFA degree in painting from the University of California at Davis in 1992. After working a series of “dead end jobs,” he started teaching at two schools and a prison back in the late eighties. In 2004, he began teaching as a full-time professor at American River College where he is now tenured and serves as Director of the James Kaneko Gallery. Sheldon lives with his wife in Yolo, California.

CCAI has commissioned Phoebe Finch to write the exhibition essay for Still Lifes for Cowpokes. Ms. Finch is a senior at UNR studying both art history and Spanish.

[Mick Sheldon painting: Last Out of the Rodeo, oil on linen, 2009]