BE HOME SOON: An Evening at the Rotunda Gallery

On the evening of August 27th, I attended the closing reception for BE HOME SOON at the Rotunda Gallery inside the Clark County Government Center. The room was full of Las Vegas artists – some familiar faces, some I was meeting for the first time – and all of us shared one thing in common. Not one of us was born here.

That was the premise of BE HOME SOON, an exhibition organized by the Clark County Public Arts Office and juried by Jennifer Kleven: a group show of artists who, like so much of this city, came from somewhere else and ended up calling Las Vegas home. I knew that going in. What I didn’t expect was how much it would shape the conversations.

When you ask an artist about their work, you usually hear about materials, or a technique, or an idea. That evening, almost every conversation turned toward where they came from. The story behind each piece was, in some quiet way, a story about leaving one place and arriving in another. You could see it in the work itself once you knew to look – a color that belonged to a different landscape, a memory carried into new material.

The range was the striking part. Photography, sculpture, painting, mixed media, work that was tender and work that was sharp, pieces about family and pieces about the desert itself. On the surface, none of it matched. And yet the show held together, because underneath the variety was the same current: the question of what makes a place home, answered a few dozen different ways. The curation deserves real credit for that – it would have been easy for a show this varied to feel like a group of strangers. Instead it felt like a conversation.

The reception itself was warm – live music, remarks from juror Jennifer Kleven, awards, and a room full of people happy to talk about their work. It was also, I learned, the first exhibition under the direction of the gallery’s new coordinator at the Public Arts Office, which made the evening feel like a beginning for more than just the artists.

My own piece, “What She Carried, Where She Stayed,” is a woman standing before the red rock, wrapped in a blanket of flowers – the colors of a place she has not finished leaving. I painted it as my own answer to the show’s question. Standing in that room, I realized everyone there had painted, photographed, or built their version of the same answer.

More than 20 moves brought me here. For a long time “home” felt like a place I was always about to find and never quite did. That evening, in a government building of all places, among people I’d just met and a few I already knew, it felt a little closer.

BE HOME SOON was on view at the Rotunda Gallery, Clark County Government Center, through August 27, 2026.