Showgirl-turned-painter Terry Ritter is immortalizing Las Vegas history at McCarran

By Kristen Peterson

Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012 | 6:41 p.m.

Artist Terry Ritter re-moved the furniture from her spacious living room and replaced it with three panels of a 50-foot canvas so she could create a painting that still says Las Vegas like nothing else can: leggy ladies.

Showgirls in ostrich feathers, jeweled neckwear and fan-shaped headpieces under stage lights, an entertainment image so deeply embedded in our history that high-tech architectural and cultural transformations of the Strip can’t erase it from the imagination of today’s tourist.

So noted officials at McCarran International Airport, who commissioned Ritter, a former showgirl-turned-painter, to create that indelible symbol of Las Vegas for its new terminal, opening in June.

Ritter, of course, is perfect for the job. She spent 20 years performing on the Strip and 30 years backstage painting the experience, garnering her the nickname “Renoir Ritter” by her entertainment industry pals.

When she retired from performing in 1993 her goal was to live out those memories on canvas. Unlike dancing, she says, “I don’t have to be onstage, and I don’t have to be a certain age to do it.”

Dusty, Ritter’s husband of 30 years, was an acrobat in Folies Bergere and he, too, appreciates the desire to capture those moments: “After shows started disappearing, we realized, ‘Hey, all this stuff’s going away,’ ” he says.

But at their house, those days live on. Nearly every room on the first floor includes paintings, framed and hung salon-style, of dancers and the different kind of magic Las Vegas once offered.

Ritter’s airport mural, “Folies in Flight,” features a 1983 number from the long-running Folies Bergère, written, choreographed and designed by producer Jerry Jackson, whose other productions Ritter performed in.

The 50-foot-long, 8-foot-high painting, now installed in an inset of the wall in the customs area at McCarran’s Terminal 3, shows smiling, lipsticked showgirls dressed (barely) in yellow and blue under golden stage lights. Six cutouts of dancers she painted will be placed before it, adding dimension. The piece is designed to capture the relationship of the women onstage.

“I know how it feels to be there and that expression of love,” Ritter says. “We play off each other, and we’re all one. You feel special; you bring joy to people.”

Dusty says they knew the mural would need to be special—something as “spectacular as the imagination of what Las Vegas is,” an idea shared by Rosemary Vassiliadis, Clark County deputy director of aviation, who says the airport art should offer an “appropriate sense of place.”

“Artwork that showcases local artists or depicts this area’s many diverse attractions is a great and effective way to let people know they’ve arrived in Las Vegas,” she says.

Other artists (six in all) are featured in the new terminal, including Peter Lik, whose large-scale color photographs capture Nevada’s natural landscape.

Ritter, who had never done anything as large as the airport mural, originally thought about creating a large giclee version of a smaller painting, but then decided the mural needed to be original. The self-taught painter spent three years working on it intermittently, adding textures and swooping strokes to create motion.

Ritter says she’s planning another mural, one that depicts the dancers of Jubilee!, and hopes to find a place in the Valley to hang it.

We hope so, too. Architectural structures, saved or imploded, and old photographs are used to capture the history of Las Vegas, and here’s Ritter, living in a quiet suburban neighborhood, a paragon of an era that still defines this city.