A self-described high priestess of photorealism, Las Vegas Artist Lolita Develay is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

-Welcome to Nevada Week In Person.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon.

She says her artwork is a response to her life environment.

That environment as a child was the Mojave Desert, and Los Angeles is where she trained in realism for work in advertising and graphic design, and in Las Vegas is where she became the first female of African American Heritage to graduate with a Master's in Fine Art from UNLV's Studio Arts program.

Lolita Develay, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

(Lolilta Develay) Thank you for having me.

-So right now you have a solo exhibition, High Roller Blooms at Nuwu Art Gallery, that is there until April 25.

Let's start with that and how that exhibition is a response to your life environment.

So I live here in Las Vegas now.

And the High Roller Blooms are from a series of pictures I took at the-- in the high-limit rooms in the Strips on the casino.

-Really?

-The casinos on the Strip, the other way around.

Yeah, so like, and a lot of the casinos, they put out these, like, lavish arrangements of flowers in their, in their high-limit room.

I used to hang out at The Cosmopolitan quite a bit.

And those, the ones in this show are specifically from the two high-limit rooms at the Cosmopolitan.

-Okay.

So these are flowers that, that's the "bloom" part?

-Yes, yes.

-And I never would have guessed you had taken them from inside a casino, let alone the high-roller room, but now it all comes together.

And so then the description that is given of this exhibition is that it "explores the intersection of luxury in nature," and that "many pieces depict the delicate impermanence of flowers juxtaposed with the enduring allure of wealth."

That theme, "the allure of wealth," I believe, is present in some of your other works.

-It's true, yeah.

-So why is that?

Where does that stem from?

-Well, that just stems from what our-- what we like, as a society, have collectively agreed upon as our-- what we aspire towards.

You know, we live in a capitalist society, good, bad, or indifferent, you know, however you feel, but this is what we live in.

And collectively we aspire towards wealth.

And, you know, I mean, there's-- it can, it can be good, you know, it can be bad, but... -And is there a personal desire for wealth?

-Oh, absolutely.

I love the freedom that it, it brings.

And then I like, you know, I like beautiful things.

And when you obtain wealth, you're able to access those things.

And again, it's almost a social agreement that we have.

And, like, all of our values as a society wind up being a, an agreement between all of us collectively in one way or another.

You know, like whether we put in protest or whether we go along with what we already have established here.

-You say this so matter of fact.

I think some people might shy away from saying, Yes, I desire wealth and luxury.

-Oh, yeah.

And it's true, some people actually don't desire it, but I-- but in general, almost everybody in America, we're looking for that American Dream.

It's, it's what we're-- if you get middle class, sometimes that is, that's close enough, you know, but we all want to have more and more, and it's just part of what the environment we find ourselves born into, the paradigm that we're born into.

-I think it's especially unique in your situation, though, with what you were telling me ahead of this interview and your childhood.

You told me that you had a somewhat poor childhood?

-Oh, yeah, absolutely.

-And your parents, their perception of American society was-- you grew up in the Mojave Desert on a small farm.

Can you tell me just a little bit about that?

-So while I said I grew up poor, what I mean is, like, poor in terms of, like financial wealth.

But I had an extremely rich experiential childhood; so we didn't have a whole lot of money, but my parents, we had a, just a wealth of information and a wealth of exposure to what-- the environment that I was in, I wasn't exposed to a lot of the outside world, but what I was exposed to, like, my dad worked on cars, so it didn't matter if we were boys or girls, you know, my dad told us how to, you know, showed us different things while he was working on cars.

When he built our house, when he was building the house, he, you know, I, as a curious kid, you come up and ask a question like, you know, Daddy, why did you cut that corner like this?

And he's like, Oh, it's a Pythagorean theory.

You don't want to know that.

And it's like, I do.

And he's like, Well, it's A^2 + B^2.

And so, you know, so very much like that.

And so we had-- and then, you know, growing up on a farm, we grew the majority of our food on our farm.

We would eat our chickens, we would eat our our own pigs, and-- mostly our chickens.

And then we had all of, you know, fruits and vegetables.

We had fresh fruit.

We had fresh vegetables in the garden.

So we learned how to prune trees.

We learned how to do a lot of things that people would call off-grid today.

So we were off-grid back then, but it was not intentionally off-grid.

They're just-- the infrastructure had not even been built yet.

-But you did tell me that your father intentionally wanted to live away from where-- -Where he was maybe assigned to live or-- -Because of redlining?

-Yeah, because of redlining.

So he-- that was why we lived on this isolated farm is because my dad wanted to give us this rich experience of knowing things, knowing how to take care of ourselves in this environment.

But it didn't extend to outside of that five-acre farm that I grew up on.

I had no idea how the world really worked out there in, you know, I just, you know, I just didn't.

-And because of redlining, there were only certain parts of town where African Americans could buy property.

-Oh, absolutely.

-He didn't want any part of that.

And I think-- can you-- -He didn't want to be forced into that box.

He wanted to have as much autonomy over his life as he possibly could, you know, so that his choices were choices that he made, as opposed to someone else making them for him.

And so that's what, you know, having us on this farm.

And my mom, she was a migrant farm worker.

Growing up, my grandparents were migrant farm workers.

My parents are two different races.

My dad's black.

And I do that shortcut thing and just say my mom's Mexican.

It's, you know, both of them are racially a little more complex than that, but it's just easy to just shorthand it to black and Mexican.

And so they, you know, my mom didn't really have that exposure to the world, and so she didn't really push us in those directions to like, you know, Oh, you should be a doctor when you grow up, or you should be a lawyer, or you should go to college, or you should do any type of prescribed career.

So we were just, we weren't entirely weeds that way, but we were left to develop our own sensibilities and decide what we wanted to do with our lives, given the skills that our parents had given us.

And then, of course, we had to go to school.

So like all of the things we learned in school, too.

-My gosh, we only have five minutes left.

Last thing about your father, you told me he was a Tuskegee Airman.

-Absolutely, he was a Tuskegee Airman.

-And how did that impact you?

-It was I, you know, I didn't really understand what a Tuskegee Airman was growing up.

I grew up in the 60s, in the 1900s and 60s, and so they weren't exactly appreciated back then, because it, you know, just the world we lived in back then.

You know, paradigms have shifted, and they got lots of recognition.

But it impacted me just, in just having a dad who was super smart like my dad was.

And so just mostly that way.

-Okay.

What brought you to Las Vegas?

-What brought me to Las Vegas was we, my husband and I, were just sort of had enough of LA.

We have the opportunity to live wherever we want.

We thought about moving back to my hometown of Palmdale, Lancaster, Antelope Valley area, but then we looked and said, Oh, you know, Las Vegas is just only five hours away.

And so Las Vegas gave me that small town feel.

I know it's, it's big, but, I mean, but not compared to the megalopolis that Los Angeles all the way down to San Diego is.

So it's, you know, compared to where I was coming from in my life at that time, it was just back to that, you know, like a 2 million, kind of, person city, as opposed to like what LA is.

And so the-- just having that nice hometown feel, but then being able to go to the Strip and have that whole cosmopolitan feel that I'd gotten used to with all of my years of living in LA.

So it gave me the two things that were at my comfort level that what I think of as a smallish town and then that nice cosmopolitan feel of the Strip.

-Where you can go and you can take pictures of beautiful floral arrangements and turn them into large-scale pieces of art.

-Absolutely.

-I want to make sure we're able to show some of your work during this interview.

I want to bring up one of your exhibits, and that was American Woman.

-Okay.

-The description of it is, "It questions what it means to be visible in today's world and who is elevated to levels of importance through their depiction in Fine Art portraiture," Fine Art portraiture being a fancy word, I think, for the selfie, right?

-Yes.

Well, selfie or just, you know, but also, I chose the selfie, but Fine Art portraiture, just the tradition of portraiture, you know, all the way from Mona Lisa to what, you know, maybe Lucian Freud, and then even beyond we have, you know, people who are still contemporary, working in that, myself, for one.

I chose the selfie just because I find it a relevant-- -Very much so.

-Yeah.

-Right.

And I think that women looking at these pieces of your work can identify it in so many ways.

What did you identify with, with these women as a woman?

-So I identified with that moment of where-- so it was about the disappearing racial lines, but it was also I took these images from social media, which is why they're selfies, and we take these selfies because we're in this moment of we're really happy with the way we look.

We're happy with where we are in that moment.

So it's a-- it's that-- it's capturing that moment and then twisting the gaze, because most portraits, they're-- it's somebody looking out at you, and you're gonna have that perpetual stare.

Well, what I liked with the selfie is that these women, they're not looking out for other people's approval.

They put them on the internet, and, yeah, they'll get that approval, but in that moment, it's about, I've accepted myself.

This is, you know, this is that moment where I had hoped I would arrive someday.

And it's, you know, those moments are fleeting, but it's still just that you had that moment in life.

And that's what selfies are about, is projecting what you want the world to see about you.

And with-- what I like about the selfie pose is that you get a gaze that is never going to be returned.

-Wonderful explanation.

Thank you so much for sharing all of this insight.

Lolita Develay, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you so much.

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