Some years ago, Tokyo-born painter and graphic artist Koichi Sato came to the U.S. for the first time. He landed in LA and almost immediately hopped on a Greyhound bus for New York City. Gallerist Stefania Bortolami, whose Artist/City project comes to Las Vegas this month, got the story from him one day in passing, including a twist in the tale.

“[Sato said the bus trip] stopped in a few places, ‘and the place where I stopped the longest was Las Vegas, because I like to gamble and because Las Vegas was a very big part of my vision of America,’” Bortolami recalls. “And he was actually spending a lot of time at [Vegas’] Greyhound bus station, because he had no money; allegedly, he might even have slept there at one point.”

That was all Bortolami needed to hear. She wanted to include Sato in the Artist/City series—an “experimental programming initiative” that matches accomplished artists to cities that have relevance to their work, through pop-up showings in unexpected venues. To give a few examples, previous Artist/City iterations have matched environmental artist Ann Veronica Janssens with a series of old Baltimore movie houses, sculptor Paul Pfeiffer with the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., and mixed-media artist Eric Wesley with an abandoned Taco Bell in St. Louis. The art is always in direct conversation to the venue, and the show stays in place longer than a traditional gallery show, to allow the artists to go beyond the limits of their established practices.