NadaDada

NadaDada is a group of artists who came to prominence in 2007 with the first Dada Motel Exhibit centered at the historic El Cortez Hotel in Reno, Nevada. Like the Beat Generation, The Bloomsbury Set or the earlier Transcendentalism movement, the artists of NadaDada routinely portray in their work cultural circumstances that they helped to inspire. Common themes in their art include alienation, apocalypse, sexuality, absolute freedom, and revolution against the politics of art.

Though NadaDada finds meaning in the anti-bourgeois phenomena of Dadaism, which began in Switzerland during World War I, NadaDada represents an even further negation of the negation of Dada. NadaDada artists adhere to the credo that “the absurd holds no terror.”

NadaDada began in the fall of 2006 when a group of artists from Reno, Nevada started to discuss and organize an art exhibit with as little structure and as few rules as possible. The original intention of the exhibit was for artists to gather together in a series of seedy hotels and motels in Reno’s downtown district and turn each room into its own art exhibit.

Original founding members included Jeff Johnson, Chad Sorg, Dianna Sion, Ann O’Lear, Esther Dunaway, and Tova Ramos. Inspired in part by the anarchic spectacle of the Burning Man festival that occurs each year in the Blackrock Desert north of Reno, and in part by what was perceived as the confining bureaucracy of Reno’s yearly series of corporate-sponsored cultural events known as Reno Artown, the founders set out to create a collective artistic experience in which artists could participate regardless of discipline or medium and without competition or jurying.

According to the New York Times, the “Nadadada concept – ‘Get a Room, Make a Show’ – came from Jeff Johnson, 48, a custom neon artist who thought the city’s sparsity of art galleries could provide an opportunity for artists to show their work independently.”

The NadaDada concept gained momentum through www.Tribe.net, one of the oldest social networks on the internet. Tova Ramos created a Tribe site for Dada Motel in January of 2007 and by March of the same year several early NadaDada artists, including Chad Sorg, Dianna Sion, S.K. James and John Molezzo had begun to use the site as a visual art gallery and promotional vehicle, often posting images that incorporated elements of each other’s work along with the words, “Dada Motel.” Subsequently, Sorg, Sion and artist Trelaine Lewis and artist and art professor Dean Burton created blog networks on www.NadaDadaDingDong.net and www.Blogger.com to help draw notoriety to the event. Scores of NadaDada videos began to appear on www.Youtube.com as well, including a video series about the artists of NadaDada at www.YouTube.com/NadaDadaMotel. Soon, artists from as far away as Europe began to post similarly interactive art on behalf of NadaDada.

Since its inception in 2007, Dada Motel has evolved in name to “Nada Motel,” “NadaDada Motel” and then, simply, to “NadaDada.” By 2010, NadaDada had grown from a grass roots art movement started by a handful of northern Nevada artists to a collective of more than 350 artists from around the world. Although NadaDada lacks any central administration by design, NadaDada exhibits continue each year in June in Reno, Nevada and artists continue to work work together in a spirit of voluntary association, mutual aid, direct action and autonomy.

The New York Times helped to cement the spread and the fame of NadaDada when it reported, in 2009, that “Venice has its Bienale. Basel, Switzerland, has its Art Basel. And Reno has the NadaDada Motel, a jubilantly unpretentious art event…”

Aside from the yearly event, which remains centered in the heart of Reno, NadaDada artists have exhibited in museums and galleries outside of Reno, at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, and in virtual exhibits across the internet. NadaDada artists have created hundreds of videos and thousands of visual images in the name of NadaDada, and tens of thousands of people have seen their work.