More information about Atomic Open House in Beatty: Is it open to the public?

Whitney Lynn was born on an Air Force Base in Arizona, which has influenced much of her career, the artist said.

“A lot of my early work was looking at overlaps between military and civilian landscapes and where they get messy,” Lynn told the Pahrump Valley Times. “Because I think there can be an idea that a military base, there’s this tight perimeter around it, but there’s all kinds of things that spill out into those civilian spaces.”

When Lynn first had the opportunity for her recent project, which later became Atomic Open House, she knew the Silver State was the place for it, but the artist specifically wanted to create something along Highway 95, eventually deciding on Beatty.

“I had done a residency at the Neon Museum in Las Vegas in 2016. When I did that residency … that was the first time that I had learned about the Nevada Test Site,” Lynn explained. “I was just so shocked, I had no idea that this testing had occurred in Nevada. So I think it had been in the back of my mind for a decade.”

Atomic Open House consists of two main components related to the Nevada Test Site’s 1950s history: a flat surface trompe-l’œil facade replica that appears to be three-dimensional of the Apple-2 houses, colonial-style homes built to assess how a typical American dwelling might withstand a nuclear explosion, and VIP viewing benches, where military, government offices, the press and invited observers watched the detonations.

“I think both objects are really about creating public images of nuclear testing,” Lynn said. “They’re also directly connected to just witnessing and spectatorship.”

The three-year project was developed through Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum’s artist fellowship, which supports creatives as they grow their practices across new scales, communities, materials and places. The nonprofit organization, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, is a contemporary art museum that produces site-specific pieces that live in the public realm, instead of being limited by permanent stationary structure.

“Their mission is to create artworks that are outside of traditional venues,” Lynn elaborated. “That’s something that’s really exciting to me, to get an audience that might not go into a traditional museum or gallery space, but then also to think about creating an artwork that has a really close connection to the location where it’s sited. So I started thinking about roadside attractions as this kind of unexpected encounter.”

Atomic Open House, available to see for a minimum of one year, is located at 311 Main St. in Beatty, is free and open to the public from sunrise to sunset. A self-guided experience, visitors to Atomic Open House are asked to respect the artwork, wildlife, surrounding landscape and local community.

“Atomic Open House creates an accessible entry point into the history and continuing consequences of decades of nuclear testing in Nevada which are omnipresent and difficult to grasp the magnitude of,” Black Cube Executive Director and Chief Curator Cortney Lane Stell said in a statement. “By making spectatorship part of the artwork, Whitney asks us to consider not only what nuclear testing made visible, but also what it concealed—and how those histories continue to shape the public perceptions around us.”

For more information about Atomic Open House and how to support the artwork’s future through donations, visit atomicopenhouse.blackcube.art.

To learn more about Whitney Lynn and her work, visit whitneylynn.com.

Further information about Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum can be found at blackcube.art.

Contact reporter Elijah Dulay at edulay@pvtimes.com