Sunlight pours through Rita Deanin Abbey’s monumental "Wall of Creation," scattering blues, golds and desert tones across the gallery walls. As the first notes of music rise into the room, the glass-like surface seems almost to breathe, with color shifting gently with rhythm and light responding to sound. There are moments in art when the boundaries between disciplines quietly dissolve.
In a city that has mastered the art of reinvention, memory is crucial in defining the future, a fragile thing. Las Vegas is often described through spectacle — neon glare, desert heat, chance and excess — but beneath its mythos lies a quieter, more enduring story. It is a story written not only in architecture and entertainment but in faces, gestures, storefronts, celebrations and ordinary moments that once passed unnoticed. Few institutions have been as central to preserving this lived history as Cashman Photo.
From her early days as a self-taught musician to becoming a celebrated television host and producer, Laura McKenzie has left an indelible mark on the travel television genre and the cultural fabric of Hollywood. Throughout her career, she has demonstrated creativity, adaptability and a deep commitment to giving back — both on screen and in her community.
Leaders in Training, known as LIT, is a community-based nonprofit rooted in East Las Vegas and dedicated to developing youth leadership while strengthening local communities through education and empowerment. Founded in 2012 in response to the needs expressed by students and families, the Las Vegas-based college access and leadership development organization serves first-generation students across Southern Nevada.
Grace does not arrive cleanly. It does not announce itself or ask permission. It rarely looks like virtue when it first appears. More often, grace shows up hungry, frightened, inconvenient — trailing behind you on a walk, perched on borrowed wings or waiting quietly to see whether you will notice at all.
Most people almost never meet the villain in an economic story. They don't shake its hand, see its face or shout at it directly. Yet every person in America has spent the last five years living with it, staring it down every day in grocery aisles, at gas stations and inside their mortgage bills. That villain has a name: inflation.
The THIRD Street project in Las Vegas, billed as the city's first multi-venue, multidisciplinary arts and media incubator, has signed a 31-year lease to secure its future at 814 S. 3rd St. Originally built as a multi-screen cinema complex — formerly known as the Eclipse Theaters, Art Houz Theaters and Downtown Cinemas — THIRD Street is now ground zero for a spectacular new home for the arts.
I have never seen - nor heard - so many young (jazz) hands clapping with such appreciation as I did during Jazz Outreach Initiative’s (JOI) “Jazz for Young People” Concerts at Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center! Over three thousand enthusiastic students from the Clark County School District were bussed in to experience two back-to-back performances with the acclaimed Jazz Vegas Orchestra and world-renowned saxophonist and vocalist Camille Thurman. She definitely answered this year’s theme, “Who is Ella Fitzgerald?” and then some.
As The Composers Showcase of Las Vegas approaches its 20th anniversary, the milestone feels less like a measure of time and more like a testament to conviction. What began as an after-hours gathering of writers and performers took shape in a city celebrated for spectacle, yet quietly lacking space for original voices. From those early evenings grew an enduring institution, sustained by creative risk, shared belief and the courage to bring new work into the open.
A full house is always a promising sign, but what unfolded during "Broadway Reimagined: A Chamber Music Tribute" at the Rita Deanin Abbey Art Museum was something rarer. The room was so completely captivated that time itself seemed to suspend. From the first notes to the final cadence, the audience was wholly with the performers, so engaged and emotionally tethered that one sensed a collective reluctance for the afternoon to end.
