For Southwest Contemporary‘s Obsession issue, we asked arts leaders in our community about their current art obsessions.
What is your current art OBSESSION?
For Southwest Contemporary Vol 12: Obsession, we wanted to know: what are you digging into in this moment? What rabbit holes are you going down? What has taken hold of your mind and won’t let go? Here are some of the current art obsessions spinning through the minds of the curators and artists in our community.
“I am obsessed with Gustave Baumann. I can’t wait to see the major retrospective at the New Mexico Museum of Art. I love his puppets!”
—Cecilia Alemani, curator, 12th SITE Santa Fe International
“Museums stumbling over their pre-2025 commitments, eg. the AIC retitling the Caillebotte show from Painting Men to Painting His World.”
—Chad Alligood, curator + board president, Voices in Contemporary Art
“After many years of focusing on Currents, I’ve returned to my studio—absorbed by the tension between image and technique.”
—Mariannah Amster, cultural worker, Currents Art & Technology
“Audio tech, pie, screech owls, free speech, bamboo, carpenter’s levels, wheatpaste recipes, and how close to park cars for a drive-in movie.”
—Matthew Chase-Daniel, artist + curator, Axle Contemporary
“Sci-fi & fantasy for alt ways of seeing the times—on book 5 of Earthsea & thinking of Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s mechatronics, showing at MOCA soon.”
—Laura Copelin, deputy director + lead curator, MOCA Tucson
“Latin American artists who experimented with TVs—utilizing them as objects, creating video, and/or depicting them—during the 1980s.”
—Raphael Fonseca, curator, Denver Art Museum
“Conveying the importance of micro and macro relationships, using repetitive, tiny marks to create larger shapes on even larger works.”
—Nancy Good, artist
“Lately, in a tech-obsessed age, I’m drawn to work rooted in material—objects that carry weight and speak to memory, place, and lineage.”
—Jaime Herrell, curator
“That art profoundly matters, that it is a realm that celebrates discussion and dissensus, embracing the productive possibilities of failure.”
—Lisa Le Feuvre, executive director, Holt/Smithson Foundation
“Celia Álvarez Muñoz.”
—María Elena Ortiz, curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
“For a while now I have been fantasizing about the development of an Art and Technology program based on the original Black Mountain [College] model.”
—Frank Ragano, executive director, Currents Art & Technology
“I am obsessed with art that centers joy and celebrates the process of making something by hand.”
—Djamila Ricciardi, art historian
“Beth Krensky makes magical keys out of detritus and antique skeleton keys. If you had a key that could open anything, what would it unlock?”
—Jorge Rojas, artist, curator, gallerist
“Wallpaper! Immersive and transformative, I’d cover one wall in every room—floor to ceiling—with prints by my favorite artists if I could.”
—Marisa Sage, director, NMSU Art Museum
“Pedagogy of weather / Long horizons of deep time / Ongoing intersection with more-than-human knowledge / Outward facing perspectives—not selfies.”
—Chris Taylor, director, Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech
“Linocut block printer/activist Carlos Barberena.”
—Chip Thomas, artist
“Black-and-white photography, old road signage, the Boston Tea Party, Navajo taboos, nautical monuments, and making the perfect martini.”
—Anna Tsouhlarakis, artist + educator, CU Boulder
“Alice’s rabbit leads with anxiety & time obsession. I wonder how art can lead toward deeper reflection, empathy, & resourcefulness.”
—Jerry Wellman, artist + curator, Axle Contemporary
