Sean Schumacher (b. 1986) retells stories through breadcrumbs, trailing hints about an ignored or forgotten past, the whispered half-truths of secrets and rumors, or fleeting narratives told through equally temporary means. Through copious research, unusual applications of everyday technologies, and added humor, he provides viewers a sense of the moments, places, and narratives that have been lost, or are simply going unnoticed around them.

Having grown up in Las Vegas before relocating to pursue a graduate degree, Schumacher’s most recent work explores these themes through his unique hometown—a place with a short history unpreserved, a built landscape repeatedly razed, and a population that has consisted for most of its history of long-term tourists shifting ever-further from any area with the slightest hint of age. Seeking an understanding of the city’s urban fabric as a whole through an investigation of maps, property surveys, and place names left displaced by the implosion of casinos and the abandonment of neighborhoods, he seeks an understanding of what being a local means when the person and the place are altered by distance and destruction, and what damage the ideals of the twentieth century’s disdain for the past had on its disposable locality.

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Sean Schumacher

50 scraps of Grant Hall

Number 13 of 50: "The best argument for forgetting the past is that it keeps repeating itself regardless"
The similarities between the university's budget clashes with Nevada governor Jim Gibbons bears eerie similarities to the 1967 budget crisis, when irate students lynched an effigy of Governor Paul Laxalt from this spot on the roof of Grant Hall.

Archie C. Grant Hall, the home of UNLV's art program, has spent much of its fifty years maligned and in disrepair, waiting for death; as longtime professor Mark Burns said, the building has been "two years away from demolition for the last twenty." Despite its checkered existence, Grant Hall is now the only structure remaining from the school's earliest years. 50 scraps of Grant Hall seeks to memorialize, celebrate, and denigrate the major and mundane truths and rumors of this history with plaques made of discarded paper attached to the places in the building where they, and the moment they represent, were found.

This project was produced in collaboration with Stephanie Potell.

Number 14 of 50: BFA Rumors
This stamp was placed next to the building's west staircase, an area frequently used by BFAs and other art students to wait for classes, smoke, and gossip. The scrap itself was found in the ivy beneath the stairs, which leads up to the BFA studios. Photo courtesy of Krystal Ramirez.
Number 19 of 50: "The asbestos floor and ceiling tiles are only considered to be dangerous if damaged"
Grant Hall's dilapidated state results from the belief of students, faculty, and campus facility management in the building's always-pending-but-never-underway demise. The project brought to light many heath and safety violations around the building—such as in the deteriorated tiles in the studio corridors—that led to a departmental cleanup and refurbishment effort.
Number 46 of 50: "This place will outlive us all"
The project recognized and attempted to integrate into prexisting grafitti and public art around the building.

50 scraps of Grant Hall was performed in conjunction with "I never wanted it to be this way, either", a birthday party installation & historical reinactment in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the ceremony to lay the cornerstone of Archie C. Grant Hall.

For more information on the works associated with that show, please visit the "I never wanted it to be this way, either" page.

Number 41 of 50: "The asbestos floor and ceiling tiles are only considered to be dangerous if damaged"
Number 22 of 50: Rumors of the BFA Class of 2009
Number 26 of 50: Clipping from the Rebel Yell on Grant Hall's opening, about what are now the BFA studios
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