Exhibits focus on games and sky

Kimberley McGee

Friday, Feb. 22, 2002 | 9:35 a.m.

From dreamy photos of the sky, to dreams won on the ground, two exhibits at the West Las Vegas Arts Center celebrate Black History Month with images of art and history.

The skyscapes and other photographs of Henderson artist Helen Murphy, and the craps memorabilia collected by Mike Pertgen are on display through March 9.

Murphy began to look skyward for inspiration as a child growing up in New York.

"I was always fascinated by the sky, the cloud formations, the colors," Murphy said.

It wasn't until she moved to Las Vegas with her husband, Wilson, in 1989 that the 61-year-old began to photograph what she saw above.

"I've never seen colors anywhere else," Murphy said. "People say it's just the dirt in the atmosphere, but so what? The bottom line is its beautiful and strictly natural."

That is the overall theme within all her work, Murphy said.

While she has taken photos since she first received a Kodak Brownie camera at age 16, she didn't begin to present her photos to the public until last year.

"It never occurred to me, but someone said I should, and I did, and it's been wonderful," Murphy said. "It seemed a natural thing to do."

Her works include shots she's taken with her new Pentax Z camera during her daily walks near her Henderson home. She snaps photos of everyday objects in unordinary positions or locations.

"On one of my trips, there was this spoon, a piece of silverware in the desert," Murphy said. "I like to catch things like that. How did it get there?"

Her favorite photo in the 26-piece exhibit, "And Flights of Angels," features wispy clouds at sunset.

"I thought what I saw in the sky was what everybody saw like breathing, everybody did it," Murphy said. "I guess I see things no one else does."

Collector Mike Pertgen saw something four years ago in a late-1800s lithograph that he hadn't noticed in his decades of collecting gaming memorabilia.

The scene in the lithograph is of a group of smiling black men playing craps on the ground.

The find began an obsession with a segment of history that Pertgen had never known existed.

"I had been collecting gaming memorabilia when I came across that lithograph and I just stared at it for hours," Pertgen said. "These were black men. I realized craps was a black man's game first."

The 45-year-old floor manager at Terrible's Hotel & Casino casino began to research the game of craps. It was brought to the United States in the 1800s and was adopted by black men because it could be played anywhere.

"A pair of dice and a piece of ground was all they needed," Pertgen said.

It became their game and remained their game for 40 years, Pertgen said, until World War I when the soldiers in the trenches picked it up for the same reason.

Pertgen continues to collect all that he can find about the history of craps and of the black men who scraped together a friendly game on sidewalks and street corners.

"This is a piece of black history that was lost," Pertgen said. "I'd never heard of it or seen it."

With his extensive collection, Pertgen intends for that slice of history to not be overlooked so easily in the future.