I was invited to be a consignment artist at NAA in 2018 and I exhibited my art there until September, 2024. It was for me a delightful and safe place to exhibit and to volunteer, and I found my fellow artists to be kind and fair minded. Recently, however, the atmosphere changed and I experienced subjective treatment from one specific member of the Board of Directors and my art was relegated to spaces least accessible to the public. My questions and complaints were met with apathy and disregarded by this member and other Board members. Unfortunately, I'm not the only artist who has been treated as such in recent months.
Further, before I resigned I noticed a decrease in the quality of the art exhibited. Understanding that it's Carson City and no one expects to walk into a gallery the likes of which one might find in LA or New York City, the quality of much of the art displayed was remarkably low, lacking in both skill and originality. (That being said, there were always a few scattered pieces of an impressive quality created by truly gifted local artists but this was the exception rather than the rule.)
I can't now say with any certainty why either of these trends were happening but it seemed to me at the time that they were related and had something to do with being a member of the cliquey "in" crowd in NAA. I concluded that the art displayed and where it was displayed was based on who the artist was, who they sucked up to and/or who they pissed off rather than on its inherent quality. In the coming months I hope the new Board of Directors are willing to acknowledge and fix the obvious problems of pettiness and passive aggression in its ranks but, while that's happening I can't in good conscious recommend NAA.
A side note of little importance: Two of the three reviews posted prior to my review were posted by NAA members who chose not to identify themselves as such, not members of the general public who wandered into the gallery and were super impressed. read more