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Artist Lily Reeves Believes Neon is Magic—Can She Convert the Rest of Us?
Neon nearly died at the altar of the LED revolution. Phoenix-based artist Lily Reeves is working to resurrect it, with literal witchcraft.
May 14, 2026
Forthcoming Nevada Museum is a Refuge for Endangered Species: Vegas and Reno’s Neon Signs
When Will Durham realized Nevada's iconic neon signs were going dark, he started collecting them. Decades later he's opening The Light Circus Nevada Neon Museum in Reno.
May 13, 2026
The Arizona Biennial 2026 Opens at TMA, Mapping the State’s Creative Range
Arizona Biennial 2026, juried by BAMPFA's Julie Rodrigues Widholm, opens May 22 with thirty-one artists working across the state. On view through September 27.
May 13, 2026
New Mexico Artist Residencies: So Enchanting, You Might Get Entrapped
Is New Mexico the Land of Enchantment or the "Land of Entrapment"? Apply for one of these eighteen artist and writer residencies, and you're bound to find out.
May 12, 2026
Big Art, Hidden Vault, and More Tales from a Storied Strip of New Mexico Highway
From movie scenes to Scientology symbols, Jon Revett reflects on thirty-five years of traveling on the Conchas Highway, in a landscape of shifting cultural narratives.
May 08, 2026
Beloved and Imperiled Christian Folk-Art Relic Salvation Mountain Gets a California Retrospective
A biographical show fortifies the legacy of visionary artist Leonard Knight in Ocotillo, California. If only his rainbow-hued magnum opus were as sturdy.
May 07, 2026
(Re)sounding: Two Reasons to Head to Park City This Summer
This summer Kimball Art Center gives art lovers two reasons to make the trip: the return of the Kimball Arts Festival in August, and their most immersive exhibition yet, (Re)sounding.
May 05, 2026
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Forthcoming Nevada Museum is a Refuge for Endangered Species: Vegas and Reno’s Neon Signs
When Will Durham realized Nevada's iconic neon signs were going dark, he started collecting them. Decades later he's opening The Light Circus Nevada Neon Museum in Reno.
May 13, 2026
Beloved and Imperiled Christian Folk-Art Relic Salvation Mountain Gets a California Retrospective
A biographical show fortifies the legacy of visionary artist Leonard Knight in Ocotillo, California. If only his rainbow-hued magnum opus were as sturdy.
May 07, 2026
Southwest Art News: May 2026
IAIA fights another proposed federal funding elimination, Acoma Pueblo challenges AI data center developer, and more top Southwest art news for May 2026.
May 01, 2026
César Chávez Allegations Trigger Artwork Removals—and Concerns of Cultural Erasure
Before a recent fall from grace, Chávez was a rare Latino hero in Southwest public art. Now, arts leaders are asking how to de-center an icon without obscuring entire histories.
April 30, 2026
How Clowning Around is Cultivating a Small-Town Avant-Garde Scene in Moab, Utah
Ephemeral Collective's roving performance festival in Moab holds lessons in pooling resources to shape a tiny counterculture.
April 23, 2026
Can International Art Star Olafur Eliasson Provoke Urgency to Restore Great Salt Lake?
After decades of decline and political inaction at Great Salt Lake, Olafur Eliasson flies in with a temporary public art project. Can this art-world Hail Mary provoke positive change?
April 16, 2026
New Mural Guidelines in Phoenix May Support Local Artists—or Restrict Them
As Phoenix overhauls its mural directives, local artists are weighing how more structure could professionalize—or narrow—the field.
April 14, 2026
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The Arizona Biennial 2026 Opens at TMA, Mapping the State’s Creative Range
Arizona Biennial 2026, juried by BAMPFA's Julie Rodrigues Widholm, opens May 22 with thirty-one artists working across the state. On view through September 27.
May 13, 2026
(Re)sounding: Two Reasons to Head to Park City This Summer
This summer Kimball Art Center gives art lovers two reasons to make the trip: the return of the Kimball Arts Festival in August, and their most immersive exhibition yet, (Re)sounding.
May 05, 2026
Jessi Cross’s Flow of Wildlife Releases A River of Creatures in the Santa Fe Railyard Park
Santa Fe–based artist Jessi Cross brings woodcut prints of roadrunners, bobcats, and more to Flow of Wildlife, a public mural at Railyard Park.
April 27, 2026
Artists
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Artist Lily Reeves Believes Neon is Magic—Can She Convert the Rest of Us?
Neon nearly died at the altar of the LED revolution. Phoenix-based artist Lily Reeves is working to resurrect it, with literal witchcraft.
May 14, 2026
Mother-Daughter Show in Arizona Surveys the Melding—and Mitosis—of Artistic Inheritance
In their first-ever joint show in Scottsdale, Beth Ames Swartz and her daughter Julianne Swartz draw from shared esoteric knowledge to astonishingly varied ends.
April 28, 2026
“I Was Told I Couldn’t Do That”: Jody Folwell’s Endless Pueblo Pottery Revolution
In the 1980s, Pueblo artist Jody Folwell jolted Santa Fe Indian Market with political ceramics. Amid her retrospective, she's already pushing toward the next sharp statement.
April 07, 2026
FeatureNew MexicoVol. 13 The Road
Evidence, Epistle, and the Evolutionary: A Response to the Works of Johannes Barfield
Poet Laura Neal discovers new roads in the collected works of Albuquerque-based artist Johannes Barfield exploring alternative states of being and imagining in Black culture.
March 20, 2026
Studio VisitNew MexicoVol. 13 The Road
Willie Lambert: Road Dog
Route 66 survives in fragments. In a handmade atlas, Willie Lambert pieces New Mexico's 500-mile stretch back together.
March 20, 2026
Studio VisitArizonaVol. 13 The Road
Alanna Airitam: Black Diamonds
Working in her Tucson, Arizona studio, artist Alanna Airitam counters cultural erasure with a photographic series highlighting the Chosen Few, the nation’s first racially integrated outlaw motorcycle club.
March 20, 2026
ArtistsNew MexicoVol. 13 The Road
The Road: Moira Garcia
An older name for New Mexico anchors Moira Garcia’s mixed-media mapping of Nahua migration, cosmology, and return.
March 20, 2026
Exhibitions
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The Arizona Biennial 2026 Opens at TMA, Mapping the State’s Creative Range
Arizona Biennial 2026, juried by BAMPFA's Julie Rodrigues Widholm, opens May 22 with thirty-one artists working across the state. On view through September 27.
May 13, 2026
Sable Elyse Smith Unwinds the Clock on Race, Power, and the Carceral Machine
With disarming, familiar objects like coloring books and furniture, Sable Elyse Smith’s Clockwork at The Contemporary Austin exposes how race and the carceral system shape identity.
May 05, 2026
What Do You Get When Two Cows and a Conceptual Art Icon Walk Into a Tucson Gallery?
Clever conceit or curatorial cop-out? In Cassidy Araiza / Robert Barry / Jocko Weyland, experiment and open-endedness might be the objective.
April 21, 2026
The Context of Humanness: Yes &… at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art Wants Proof of Life
Yes &..., curated by Tobias Fike and Donald Fodness, advocates for human ingenuity in the face of AI ascendance. But is that a sufficient curatorial framework?
April 02, 2026
Editor’s Picks: Southwest Contemporary’s Spring 2026 Exhibition Guide
Looking for a spiritual awakening this spring? Arts editor Natalie Hegert traces a visionary and esoteric throughline among thirty-seven of this season’s top exhibitions.
March 27, 2026
What Does Migration Look Like Outside Anti-Immigrant Crisis Narratives?
Tierras Reimaginadas: Migration at ASU Art Museum centers immigrant voices and reimagines migration across species, cultures, geographies, and time.
March 26, 2026
Suburban Phoenix is a Vortex and Mirror in Eric Fischl’s Sprawling Retrospective
Phoenix Art Museum presents forty paintings by Eric Fischl, a New Yorker who seems magnetically drawn to the Valley of the Sun—in all its joy and strangeness.
March 20, 2026
In Print
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Tether
Through a tethered balloon camera, Anika Todd surveys Nevada's intertwined histories of speed, surveillance, and war.
March 20, 2026
Loneliness and Longing on Paco’s Trails
An archeologist seeks the carvings of a 20th-century sheepherder, tracing stories of lust and loss across a threatened landscape.
March 20, 2026
FeatureNew MexicoVol. 13 The Road
Return of the Buffalo
On a road trip across the former rangelands of the American bison, Cannupa Hanska Luger envisions a new monument.
March 20, 2026
FeatureSouthwestVol. 13 The Road
Marfas Everywhere
A million-dollar gambit in New Mexico is one of many small-town projects chasing the fabled success of Marfa, Texas. Can it actually be replicated?
March 20, 2026
FeatureNew MexicoVol. 13 The Road
Evidence, Epistle, and the Evolutionary: A Response to the Works of Johannes Barfield
Poet Laura Neal discovers new roads in the collected works of Albuquerque-based artist Johannes Barfield exploring alternative states of being and imagining in Black culture.
March 20, 2026
Heaven, Hell, and H-E-B: Archeological Artistic Strategies Excavate Complicated Pasts, Presents, and Futures
Wagon tracks of the doomed Donner Party, detritus of present-day migration, football stadiums as future ruins—Sean J. Patrick Carney traces archeological strategies invoking the Southwest’s complicated past, present, and futures.
March 20, 2026
From the EditorVol. 13 The Road
From the Editors: Southwest Contemporary Vol. 13 — The Road
Southwest Contemporary: The Road reconstitutes even the busiest Southwest arteries as byways that tether far-flung places and people.
March 20, 2026
Obsession
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Real or Replica? On an Obsessive Quest to Immortalize a Forgotten Artist, a Writer Confronts Himself
He was a Marlboro Man from Moab who sold his art to celebrities in Los Angeles, before dying of AIDS. Why did no one have any record of his art?
February 10, 2026
Places Planted in the Mind: Jorge Ruiz Brings Together Cross-Border Towns, in Miniature
Jorge Ruiz intertwines Tucson and Nogales in his exhibition at Arizona's Mini Time Machine Museum of Miniatures. His "imperfect" process is grueling.
October 28, 2025
An Artist Who Paints the Landscape of the Brain
After five brain surgeries, Dallas-based Alicia Parham paints neurologically informed, otherworldly compositions in resilience.
September 25, 2025
Obsession at the Museum: Unpacking Alexander Girard’s Gargantuan Santa Fe Exhibition
In a single 1978 acquisition, the Museum of International Folk Art grew by 100,000 objects—and effectively adopted their fervent and eccentric collector.
September 16, 2025
FeatureNevadaVol. 12 Obsession
Empires of Dirt: Michael Heizer’s City
Michael Heizer’s City prompts considerations of obsession, scale, and legacy through the lens of land, labor, and the weight of inherited ambition.
September 05, 2025
FeatureNew MexicoVol. 12 Obsession
Material Monogamy: Three Creators Find Their Prima Materia
Three New Mexico–based artists—c marquez, Susan York, and Judy Tuwaletstiwa—reflect on their relationship with the material that has defined their practice.
September 05, 2025
The Medium is their Message: Compulsion and Identity in Zion
Artists Stephanie Leitch, Angela Ellsworth, and Nancy Rivera use materially obsessive processes to reflect on the mythos of Utah.
September 05, 2025
