‘Crime on Canvas’ Invades Life Is Beautiful 2016

This year may go down in history as the one in which Life Is Beautiful grew up. One of the main reasons is the Crime on Canvas group art exhibition inside the former Western Hotel, curated by husband-and-wife team Jay Nailor and MiShell Modern. You might not have come to LIB to look at artwork, but this show may well turn out to be one of the most memorable parts of the weekend.

Although their names may not be well known in Las Vegas, the couple cast a long shadow in Palm Springs, CA, where they were central players in the formation of Modernism Week. They also founded the influential M Modern Gallery and, most recently, the Shag galleries in Palm Springs (2010) and West Hollywood (2015). In Vegas, they’ve had another gallery space in the Arts Factory (back in 2006) and quietly collaborated over the last several years with Life Is Beautiful Chief Experience Officer Ryan Doherty on a number of restaurant and bar concepts notable for their art elements—including Downtown’s Commonwealth/Laundry Room, Park on Fremont, and Itsy Bitsy Ramen & Whisky, as well as Whist, Due & Proper, Boulevard Cocktail Company, and the Wendoh Media offices.

While LIB has always had some form of gallery exhibition, Crime on Canvas (the name resurrected from Vegas’ late rock & culture mag Racket) promises to be different, featuring no fewer than 90 nationally prominent artists, together for the first—and maybe only—time, each offering a new original piece. In addition to well-known names like Shag, Shepard Fairey and Camille Rose Garcia, people may want to look out for works by Incubus’ Brandon Boyd, the Replacements’ Chris Mars, Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three, and a name rock fans may have heard, Frances Bean Cobain.

Nailor spoke to Insomniac to explain why Crime on Canvas is a can’t-miss show.

Jay, you and Michelle started off in vintage furniture and mid-century modern properties in Palm Springs. What’s your background with fine art?
We don’t propose to know anything about art; MiShell and I just react to what we like. In 2003, the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation brought me on board, and they’d had Shag design a cover for a Desert Polynesia Tribute Journal the year before. I naively thought, “I’ll do this guy a favor and commission him to do a bunch of paintings”—and found out we were like number 70 on his waiting list. After we got him to do a print for the Palm Springs Preservation Foundation, we asked if we opened a gallery, would he show with us? We started with that and had a huge show, almost $100k in sales. Last year, we opened our second Shag store in West Hollywood and purchased his brother’s publishing company, Shagmart.

You are more of a gallery curator, but this exhibition feels like it will be closer to a pop-up museum show. Is that fair to say?
This is more like a pop-up exhibition; it’s curated, though. We just did what we wanted to do—100 percent independence. It’s really a curator’s choice; these are all artists I really like, with strong visual appeal. It’s almost kind of old-school—these are all painters. We don’t have any digital artists. This is more of a passion project, the potential of exposing up to 40,000 people a day to this art. The whole thing is to get people started collecting.

How did you put the show together?
Ryan [Doherty] approached us four months ago, which isn’t a lot of time in the art world. Getting artists to commit with a few months’ notice is really hard—usually they are committed two years out—but our relationships helped. It got me to reconnect with all the artists I’ve dealt with over the years, and then some.

This is an awful lot of contemporary artists in one place. Is it fair to say an exhibition like this is pretty rare these days?
Ninety artists, each showing one new artwork and some rare prints. Within this genre, there are a lot of exclusive gallery agreements in the Los Angeles area and New York. But because it’s in Las Vegas, we’ve been able to avoid a lot of politics and get all these artists to participate. As far as a festival, you probably couldn’t do this at South by Southwest or Coachella, but having the festival set up within 18 city blocks means we can have a nice, built-in space like the Western Hotel to use.

What do you expect or hope for people to take away from the show?
One of my fundamental motivations to going into art is that it makes everybody happy. Nobody needs artwork; they choose to collect. I think it’s going to be very visually stimulating for people who aren’t art collectors. The thing that was most exciting for us when we did our first show in Vegas was seeing the people who didn’t even know this stuff existed. Their reaction seeing the art for the first time is a pretty cool feeling. And watching people validate what you collect, that’s more exciting for me than even seeing our top customer buy a piece. It’s really cool to see that… I think people in Las Vegas haven’t been exposed to this level of art.

What about the local Las Vegas art scene—have you connected with that?
This is to highlight what I hope local artists can aspire to, but there are some local artists included: Jerry Misko, Amy Sol, Casey Weldon, Gillean Clark and Giovanni Morales. Juan Muniz has the potential to break out.

Anyone you couldn’t get that you wish you had?
Tim Bavington—he’s also local to Las Vegas. He’s a great artist.

Something to look forward to next year!

Crime on Canvas will host an open-house artist reception from 4–6pm on Saturday, September 24. Most of the artists are expected to attend.