It looks like the work of several different artists. Your eye positively insists that it’s the work of several different artists, namely a painter, a sculptor who worked in steel and bronze, and an adventurous, inventive maker who worked with such unlikely materials as fiberglass and polyester resin. Everything changes from one room to the next—the scale, the palette, even the mood.
But this is all the work of Rita Deanin Abbey (1930-2021), an artist, writer and UNLV instructor who made Las Vegas her home in 1964 and remained here through her death, at age 90, in March 2021. If you’ve been to the Summerlin Library, you’ve seen her angular steel sculpture “Spirit Tower,” but it only represents a fraction of what she could do.
The Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum, located in a residential neighborhood in the northwest Valley, embodies her legacy in multiple ways: Not only does it feature a broad-ranging variety of her works, spanning decades of restless creative endeavor, it’s situated directly adjacent to the studio where she conceived and created many of them. Because of this, the museum feels less like a collection of works than it does a visual biography of Abbey’s life in the desert, told in texture, color and shape.
“Crescent Cycle,” 1996, plexiglass relief
“She’s a phenomenon,” says Aaron Abbey, a member of the museum’s board of directors and one of Abbey’s two sons. (Her other son, Joshua, might be familiar to Weekly readers as the founder/director of the Las Vegas Jewish Film Festival.) “She had a very restless imagination, a very vivid imagination. And she was constantly exploring and pursuing new ideas and new media; she would often try completely new things that she had never tried before. That’s why what we have in the museum now is so varied.”
Even a quick, cursory look through the museum—it features some 200 of the artist’s works, only a fraction of the thousands she created in her lifetime—bears him out. Abbey reinterprets her interests and affinities—primarily the natural and spiritual realms, though those are far from the only things that fascinated her—in unexpected ways, rarely repeating a style or technique.
“Polarity,” a textured, matte black work crafted from fiberglass, cloth resin and wood, evokes a craggy, moonlit desert landscape as you’d see it from the air. “Hidden Pass” twists a massive steel plate into a 22-ton, multidimensional piece of desert topography. “Crescent Cycle” seemingly nods to Las Vegas’ showy built environment, with its vibrant colors and its pop-art shapes cut from plexiglass.
“She wanted to learn things, and she wanted to try things,” Aaron Abbey says, noting that when his mother grew particularly interested in one specific artistic discipline, “she wanted to develop and grow, even within that.” Often, he adds, she would work well into the late hours of the night, driven to discover and invent.
Rita Deanin Abbey’s art compels the viewer, by turns, to lean in and step back. She delighted in applying detail—look at the braided limbs of her bronze dancing sculptures, which Aaron Abbey aptly describes as “no mortal musculature”—but could also work at a mammoth scale: Two works on display here—“Bridge Mountain,” a five-panel painting that formerly hung in the lobby of UNLV’s Judy Bayley Theater, and “Wall of Creation,” the fiberglass and polyester resin piece that was formerly displayed at Vegas’ original Temple Beth Sholom—pretty much have an entire wing of the place to themselves. (Abbey created the latter piece in an airplane hangar, wearing a respirator mask to avoid breathing the toxic fumes from the heated resin.)
The Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum is an eye-popping introduction to an artist whose work deserves to be more widely appreciated, and hopefully soon will be as visitors begin to discover the space. But more than that, the museum is—and deserves to be—a pillar of Vegas pride. While teaching at UNLV, Abbey nurtured generations of local artists. And when she wasn’t doing that, looked at the landscape, people and mythmaking of our Valley, and created a bigger, more dreamlike place from it.
“If you’re not a museum person, I think this is a place that might make you become one, just to see what one person is capable of,” Aaron Abbey says. “It’s very inspiring to see what one person, this five-foot-four person can do with her determination and her curiosity and her talent.”
Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum 5850 N. Park St., ritadeaninabbeymuseum.org. Thursday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; by appointment only; $20.
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