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The quiet vastness of the desert creates an ideal setting to experience art, and for 40 years, the Goldwell Open Air Museum has stood as one of Nevada’s most captivating exhibits.
A 15-acre park located four miles west of Beatty just off State Route 374, the museum is known for its large-scale, surreal sculptures that emerge from the grounds of the Mojave Desert.
“It’s so quiet out here and that’s the magic at Goldwell,” says founder Suzanne Hackett-Morgan. “There’s nothing laid out for you to do, so you’re left there in this silence and that makes your creativity ignite.”
Over the years, artists have been drawn to Goldwell’s unconventional setting and contributed their works.
In 1984, Belgian artist Albert Szukalski installed The Last Supper, the sculpture that laid the foundation for the museum. One of the most iconic pieces, The Last Supper reinterprets Da Vinci’s famous painting, but with a twist—rather than the apostles, ghostly, shrouded figures crafted from plaster-soaked fabric and coated with fiberglass surround a ghost Jesus. Remarkably, the installation has withstood the test of time and harsh desert conditions.
Lady Desert: The Venus of Nevada
Dr. Hugo Heyrman’s towering Lady Desert: The Venus of Nevada, a 25-foot tall figure made of cinderblocks was installed in 1992. Its vibrant shades of pink, yellow and red once sharply contrasted its natural backdrop, but has since faded to beautiful pastel hues.
Also circa 1992, Dre Peeters’ Icara, a hand-carved sculpture inspired by the Greek myth of Icarus, depicts a winged woman looking to fly close to the sun.
In more recent years, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya’s 2021 sculpture Portone was permanently added to the park. Its nine 10-by-10-foot steel frames are posed in a mesmerizing formation that gives the impression of stepping into another dimension. Additionally, Keep Going, a semi-camouflaged, shadow-casting sculpture made by Michelle Graves, was added to the lineup in 2023.
How did the museum come to be? In 1994, the Nevada Arts Council asked Hackett-Morgan, who at the time was working for the Lied Discovery Children’s Museum, to be a project coordinator for Southern Nevada for a program preserving outdoor sculptures. She began surveying every community below U.S. Route 6 asking if there were sculptures in the surrounding areas.
“For the most part, people said no, except in Beatty,” she says. “Claudia Reidhead, she was the town historian at the time, said, ‘We got the ghosts; we got the big naked lady made out of cinder blocks; we got the thing made out of car parts.’ And I said, ‘I’m on my way.’”
What she found were contemporary folk art pieces with a high level of craft involved, whose quality inspired her and her husband Charles Morgan to track down the who, what and why behind the works. After piecing together the stories, the couple established the Goldwell Open Air Museum Foundation to preserve these desert sculptures and present them to the community. The nonprofit also offers artist residencies, workshops, fundraisers and events.
The museum hosted a three-day anniversary celebration this month, where Hackett-Morgan handed off a wooden staff carved by Szukalski to Graves, the new foundation president.
“As Goldwell … moves forward with a new and revitalized board of directors, our long-term goals are to continue the preservation of the permanent sculptures and the land they live on, and develop more varied self-sustaining educational and cultural programs as was stated in the original mission of the nonprofit written in 2000,” Graves says.
The board also plans to rebuild the wood plinth where The Last Supper sits in the spring, and is also developing a book from archived material.
As she looks to the museum’s future, Hackett-Morgan reflects on her and husband’s journey over the past 40 years. “We’ve raised our children. We raised our sculpture park. … We’re done; we’re old. It’s time for us to do our own artwork,” she says.
GOLDWELL OPEN AIR MUSEUM 1 Golden St., Beatty, goldwellmuseum.org. Free, 24/7.
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