Western Nevada College exhibit ‘Always Lost’ on display at Legislature

Nevada’s legislative building is a fitting place for an art and humanities exhibit honoring war dead, Carson City Mayor Robert Crowell and state Senate Majority Leader Michael Roberson said Monday.

Their remarks were among those by dignitaries marking the second time for the exhibit at the building where the Nevada Assembly and Senate meet. The ceremony kicked off the second time it graces the structure in Carson City. The first time there was in 2013. The exhibit, put together by Western Nevada College faculty and students, is called “ALWAYS LOST: A meditation on War.”

“There is no place more fitting to display ‘Always Lost’ than this building — this building where every two years our elected representatives meet to chart the course of our state, where laws are made and budgets determined, where grand arguments take place in civil tones,” said Crowell, a Navy veteran of the Vietnam era conflict. “Indeed, this building and the work that goes on here is really the hallmark of a free society.”

He said the young men and women whose faces appear on the “Wall of the Dead” fought and died for that society, a society that they will, “unfortunately, never have the opportunity to experience again.”

The touring exhibit is on display in the second floor atrium of the legislative building through April 22, a continuation of the tour that has been around the state and nation. The exhibit includes Pulitzer Prize winning Iraq war combat photography, original poetry and stories by Nevada writers, and the Wall of the Dead that displays photographs and names of U.S. military Iraq and Afghanistan casualties since Sept. 11, 2001.

Roberson, whose remarks preceded the mayor’s, made similar points by saying there is no better location in Nevada for the exhibit to be displayed for the public. He said the art and humanities exhibit commemorates fallen warriors in “a meaningful and appropriate way.”

Assembly Speaker John Hambrick and Caleb Cage, an Iraq veteran and the executive director of the Nevada Office of Veterans Affairs, also spoke at the Monday morning ceremony.

“It says something about our state and how we never, never, never forget,” said Hambrick.

Cage said the WNC project is an exhibit which, by traveling on tour around both the state and nation, amounts to an extraordinary way of honoring war dead.

“Every time I take a look at it, I’m moved,” said Cage.