Catch these must-see art exhibitions across the Southwest for winter 2024-25, featuring Richard Avedon, Nancy Hemenway Barton, Charles Ross, and more.
Winter in the Southwest is marked by extremes: bright, temperate mornings fit for snowshoeing paired with icy evenings straight out of Jack London’s Call of the Wild. (That is, unless you’re in Arizona, where the weather is mild and the art season is at its wild height.) The region’s art community is equally erratic this year, launching exhibitions that offer shelter from the nation’s coalescing storms—or match their ferocity.
From a nostalgia trip with Richard Avedon to a displaced international biennial, here are eleven essential winter exhibitions in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah.
Arizona Art Exhibitions
Poetry Maps
November 17, 2024–October 27, 2025
Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff
While visual arts-poetry matchups are not necessarily new, the Museum of Northern Arizona found a genuinely charming way to activate not only artworks in their collection, but also unique locations around the local landscape. Beginning with a selection of paintings depicting area landmarks, the museum then invited community members to write poems inspired by these artistic representations of the land. You can also experience the project entirely online.
Richard Avedon: Among Creatives
December 6, 2024–May 25, 2025
Phoenix Art Museum
Who doesn’t love a Richard Avedon (1923-2004) exhibition? The influential photographer’s work spanned genres, but it’s his era-defining fashion photography and celebrity portraiture that continue to pull audiences. Among Creatives highlights his portraits of fellow artists, actors, writers, and more.
David Kimball Anderson: Light | Touch
December 7, 2024–January 5, 2025
studio light | space, Tucson
David Kimball Anderson’s diminutive, delicate series Heat Points and Nutrient Points draw from the artist’s personal experiences of sensuous touch and acupuncture. These spare compositions and his chakric color palette channel the precise energies of these healing modalities and invoke something like a deep, tension-releasing breath.
Colorado Art Exhibitions
Confluence of Nature: Nancy Hemenway Barton
February 16–October 8, 2025
Denver Art Museum
Nancy Hemenway Barton (1920-2008) was a Maine-based fiber and fabric artist who experimented with frequently monumental tapestry installations beginning in the mid-1960s during a move to Bolivia. Having studied Latin American and Indigeous textile arts, she coined her constructions as “bayetage,” a blending of natural flower dyes, bayeta, and collage techniques. The DAM will mount a survey of her large-scale works, contributing to the discourse about an artist who, while she achieved recognition and success, still remains underrecognized.
Debra Smith: Seeking Balance
November, 14, 2024–January 11, 2025
Nick Ryan Gallery, Boulder
Nick Ryan Gallery opened in Boulder in May of 2024 and has built a fresh roster of notable local and regional artists, including Bruce Price, Emilio Lobato, and Lydia Farrell. Debra Smith is a Kansas City-based artist who transforms vintage textiles into geometric constructions. Though minimalist and contemporary in their approach, her works never lose their warmth, thanks to soft silk textures and her combinations of covetable retro patterns. I’d love to know her supplier.
New Mexico Art Exhibitions
Charles Ross: Mansions of the Zodiac
March 15–September 7, 2025
Harwood Museum of Art, Taos
Charles Ross, a giant of minimalism and land art based in New Mexico and New York, is nearing completion of Star Axis, a major earthwork Ross began work on in 1976. Star Axis is supposedly slated for completion in 2026 (we’ve heard such promises before). The Harwood Museum of Art will consider the artist’s long career in the run-up to that momentous occasion with Mansions of the Zodiac, a show “celebrating critical moments” in the artist’s seventy-year career. Of particular interest, the museum will publicly mount the eponymous series, a cycle of star-map paintings created in the 1970s and thus dating to the same years as Star Axis’s conception, for the first time.
Miracula
December 5, 2024–January 11, 2025
Electra Gallery, Santa Fe
Electra Gallery (stylized as Electr∆) specializes in work exploring metaphysics, spirituality, and mysticism. Their current exhibition, Miracula, perfectly suits the winter season with all of its promise of change and blessings of renewal. This small, short group exhibition features wondrous objects and images for dark days and, as prices are affordable, for holiday gifting.
Texas Art Exhibitions
Rasquachismo: 35 years of a Chicano Sensibility
December 19, 2024–March 16, 2025
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio
Rasquachismo was coined by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, a scholar of Latinx art and culture who says the rasquache ethos or sensibility is characterized as “a sort of good taste of bad taste.” Inaugural curator of Latinx art Mia Lopez’s first exhibition for the McNay Art Museum centers San Antonio as a “nexus of all things rasquache,” including works by Chicanx and Latinx artists in the museum’s collection and works by contemporary artists based in San Antonio and beyond. The exhibition will also include themes of domesticana, a feminist response to the rasquache aesthetic.
Lezley Saar: Saudade
November 9, 2024–February 8, 2025
Various Small Fires, Dallas
In Saudade, Lezley Saar’s enchanting portraits memorialize women of the Afro-Portuguese diaspora. Adorned with flowers, plants, animals, and other symbolic elements, each portrait depicts a woman from a country previously colonized by Portugal, from well- to lesser-known historical figures. Saar invokes saudade, a longing or nostalgia for something absent, to contemplate forced migration and displacement.
Nasher Public: Frances Bagley: Shangri-La
November 1, 2024–February 2, 2025
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
Longtime Dallas-based artist Frances Bagley’s installation at the Nasher Sculpture Center engages in a kind of art-historical uncanny valley. Female forms that recall classical marble sculptures are actually made of cast and carved industrial spray foam. A large-format photograph presents another sculpture in life-size through the doors of the artist’s studio—as though viewers could reach through the frame to a there-not-there space. And architectural frames reinforce heightened awareness of the constructed environment.
Utah Art Exhibitions
Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale
November 22, 2024–February 22, 2025
UMOCA
Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists) launched the first Ghetto Biennale in 2009, inviting Haitian and international artists from around the world to make work with the artist collective around their neighborhood of the Grand Rue in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The cross-generational collective is composed of “majority-class” (lower class) artists working under difficult economic and political circumstances. The community has hosted the event every two years until 2024, when the Haitian rendition of the biennial was first moved, and then canceled, due to political instability and civil unrest throughout the country, making the exhibition at UMOCA an important and singular opportunity to learn about Haitian art and culture.
