Opening: Convergence x Crossroads: Street Art from the Southwest

Convergence x Crossroads: Street Art from the Southwest
opening: Friday, June 7, 2024
on view: June 7, 2024–February 23, 2025

The National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC) is thrilled to welcome a new art exhibition that celebrates an art form that often goes under appreciated but acts as a great marker of place in so many communities: street art.

Opening Friday, June 7, 2024 at the NHCC Visual Art Museum, Convergence x Crossroads: Street Art from the Southwest highlights the beauty and ingenuity of the street art scenes across the American Southwest and in Northern Mexico. The exhibition explores the webs that connect graffiti art, murals, and practices of placemaking in predominantly Hispanic and Latinx neighborhoods through a collection of more than ninety individual works of art.

Often considered ‘outsider art,’ street art holds a unique and somewhat contested place in the art world. Many artists working in the medium began by tagging buildings and exploring graffiti and choose to remain anonymous and work in the dark of night as their works often go up in “illegal” locations. Because of that, many artists in the field have complicated relationships with museums and the nuance of their work has, at times, been overlooked. Convergence x Crossroads looks beyond the restraints of museums and related institutions, showing that at its core, street art is about skill and ingenuity, community accessibility, neighborhood reclamation, peer mentorship, and culture.

Convergence x Crossroads showcases a wide range of artwork from more than thirty artists who identify as Chicano/a/x, Latino/a/x, Indigenous, and Native American, working in New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, California, and Northern Mexico. The more than ninety pieces of art on display vary by medium, from canvas, to painted records, to the adorned hood of a Chevrolet Impala. A blacklight room will showcase a specific artwork from a unique perspective. The work shows the wide variety of mediums, perspectives, and styles that are part of the street art and mural movement in the Southwest.