Las Vegas artist Suzanne Hackett-Morgan paints "Lady Desert: The Venus of Nevada" on Saturday. The artwork, created in 1992 by Belgian artist Hugo Heyrman, is located in the Goldwell Open Air Museum near Rhyolite. Photos by Ralph Fountain. Tourists inspect Belgian artist Albert Szukalski's 1984 reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper." Volunteers plan to restore the work, which is one of seven at the Goldwell Open Air Museum. Volunteers begin their restoration of Lady Desert on Saturday. Click image for enlargement.

RHYOLITE -- On a hillside above a sun-bleached swath of the Amargosa Valley, Las Vegas artist and gallery owner Marty Walsh stood near the top of 16-foot ladder and scrubbed soapy water on a giant pair of cinder-block breasts.

"It's spa day for the painted lady," said fellow artist Anita Getzler, as she held the ladder for Walsh.

And so it went during Saturday's Pink Lady Paint Party, an all-woman volunteer event designed to spruce up the largest of seven sculptures that make up the Goldwell Open Air Museum, about 115 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

After her bath, Lady Desert got the first of two fresh coats of Sinclair latex house paint -- bright pink for her skin, yellow for her hair, red for the pedestal on which she kneels.

"We're using the original mix from 13 years ago," said Las Vegas artist Suzanne Hackett-Morgan, who organized the paint party.

To reach the sculpture's rectangular, blond locks -- the ones on her head, anyway -- Hackett-Morgan had to climb the ladder, shimmy out onto Lady Desert's shoulder and lean into the wind with a paintbrush.

Back on the ground, volunteer Amy Noel sang a few bars of the Commodore's "Brick House" as she held the ladder.

The volunteers, all wearing pink bandanas, planned to spend the night in the nearby town of Beatty and finish their work today.

The new layers of paint will help keep out moisture that can dissolve the cinder blocks over time.

Hackett-Morgan and her husband, Charles Morgan, lead the nonprofit board that looks after the sculpture collection.

She said she only invited women to the Pink Lady Paint Party for a reason: "We just didn't think it was appropriate for a bunch of men to be crawling all over her."

The pink lady's full name is "Lady Desert: The Venus of Nevada." She was created in 1992 by Hugo Heyrman, a Belgian artist who specializes in two-dimensional work, much of it made on computers.

Hence Lady Desert's boxy appearance. "She's pixelated," Hackett-Morgan said.

Actually, the two-story nude looks like a large and voluptuous set of Legos. She kneels at the western edge of the museum, which covers almost 8 acres just down the hill from the ghost town of Rhyolite.

Belgian artist Albert Szukalski launched the collection in 1984, when he chose the site for his life-size reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" with hollow, ghostly figures grouped as Jesus and his apostles are in the original.

Other prominent Belgian artists later added their own creations to the desert landscape, including a carved, winged woman atop a wooden pillar and a 24-foot-tall, rusted steel rendering of a prospector and a penguin.

That piece was created in 1994 by arguably the collection's most famous artist, Fred Bervoets. "He's knighted in Belgium," Hackett-Morgan said.

The prospector in the sculpture is early Death Valley miner Shorty Harris. The penguin is said to be Bervoets himself, who felt as out of place as a flightless Antarctic bird during his time in the Nevada desert.

The artwork at the museum is generally unmarked, just the way Szukalski intended. "Albert meant it to be an uninterpreted experience. He wanted it to be peculiar and mysterious," Hackett-Morgan said.

Paint party volunteer Terry Reyna of Las Vegas had never been to Goldwell before Saturday. When she saw Lady Desert for the first time, she said, "I felt like she owned it, like she owned the area."

Hackett-Morgan and her husband first stumbled onto the collection near Rhyolite in 1994, while cataloging outdoor artwork across Southern Nevada as part of the national "Save Our Sculpture!" project.

At the time, she didn't know who the artists were or how long the sculptures had been there, but she knew she was looking at something special. She needed just four words to describe it in her journal: "I hit the jackpot."

When she found out who was behind it and why, the collection took on new meaning for her.

"This was a pretty profound reaction to the surroundings. It was the European sensibility coming into communion with Beatty, Nevada, with this Western landscape," she said, adding with a laugh, "It started becoming, you know, the stuff that grad students like."

The paint party was a small undertaking compared with what the museum board has planned next year. "This is cool: We're going to be redoing 'The Last Supper,' " Hackett-Morgan said.

Over the course of about a month, the 13 ghosts will be carefully removed and taken elsewhere for repairs, while trained volunteers build a new platform, or plinth, for Szukalski's biblical scene.

In the process, the sculpture will regain one of its signature features -- a horizontal strip of red light that the artist installed to represent the table where Jesus dined with his disciples. This time, though, Szukalski's fragile strip of neon will be replaced with something sturdier, Hackett-Morgan said.

The work is expected to take a month or more to renovate and cost about $40,000.

Also next year, museum caretakers hope to turn the entire museum site into a wireless Internet hot spot, where people with laptop computers or Web-ready cell phones will be able to download audio files describing the artwork and its surroundings.

"It's kind of like having a companion with you," Hackett-Morgan said. "Good old satellite Internet."

At the same time, visitors will be able to download and hear slightly more esoteric material -- original pieces, commissioned by the museum board, "that are only going to be relevant to you if you're there," she said.

All of the renovations at the museum are being made under the guidance of Andrea Morse, head conservator for the Sculpture Conservation Studio in Los Angeles.

Morse made her first -- and so far only -- trip to see Lady Desert in person two years ago. She said she was shocked to find such an unusual piece in a place like that.

"I call her Lego lady," Morse said. "It just shows how creativity can be found anywhere."

As for the museum as a whole, Morse said: "The pieces are in excellent condition for the environment they are in. It's amazing that they've lasted as long as they have."

Not even Szukalski, who died in 2000, expected his desert creations to out-live him.

"These ghosts, 'The Last Supper' -- Albert thought they would last two years," Hackett-Morgan said. "Here it is 21 years later."

And with the proper care, the sculptures should survive for decades to come, Morse said. "I think the intent is for them to be there forever. If Rhyolite's still there, (the sculptures) should be, too."