Catch these must-see spring art exhibitions across the Southwest, featuring artistic time travelers Kent Monkman, Jorge Rojas, Lynn Hershman Leeson, and more.
“Blending contemporary and historical periods is a very Indigenous way of thinking,” Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation) told The Believer in 2022. “It’s the collapsing of past, present, and future into one time, which is all time.”
Monkman’s monumental painting The Deluge (2019), which appears in his forthcoming solo exhibition at Denver Art Museum, sets the tone for this season’s must-see exhibitions across the Southwest. These shows challenge linear time by revealing continuities between past and present—and then imagining alternate futures.
Arizona Art Exhibitions
Bob Haozous: A Retrospective View
April 4–November 30, 2025
Heard Museum, Phoenix
Bob Haozous once said, “Why shouldn’t an honest self-portrait be the foundation of contemporary Indian art?” This survey unites over seventy-five artworks spanning six decades of the Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache artist’s career. The octogenarian often layers razor-sharp satire and irony atop sincere (and sometimes even poignant) explorations of urgent social issues, from the commodification of Indigenous art to environmental collapse.
California Art Exhibitions
Guadalupe Rosales: Tzahualli
March 29–August 31, 2025
Palm Springs Art Museum
Guadalupe Rosales acts as an artist and archivist, surfacing “so many things that people have a really hard time sharing.” Tzahualli: Mi memoria en tu reflejo features a vivid interplay of archival ephemera, sculpture, photography, and sound, rewriting dominant narratives surrounding Chicano youth subcultures of 1990s Los Angeles.
Colorado Art Exhibitions
Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors
April 20–August 17, 2025
Denver Art Museum
The U.S. finally gets its first major survey of First Nations artist Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation). Featuring forty-one monumental works—including his iconic mistikôsiwak diptych, in the collection of the Met—this exhibition enlists Monkman’s gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, to confront colonial histories with humor and grandeur.
The Future is Present, the Harbinger is Home
May 23–August 24, 2025
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver
This group exhibition brings selections from Prospect.6, New Orleans’s celebrated international triennial, to Denver for the first time. Framing New Orleans as both a harbinger of climate catastrophe and a model of communal resilience, it includes over sixty newly commissioned artworks by eighteen artists.
Nevada Art Exhibitions
Lynn Hershman Leeson: Of Humans, Cyborgs, and AI
February 8–September 7, 2025
Nevada Museum of Art, Reno
New media artist Lynn Hershman Leeson has always been ahead of her time: early in her career, she stated that her audience hadn’t been born yet. In this exhibition of recent video works, she furthers her interrogation of technological inevitability, identity fluidity, and power structures embedded in data-driven systems.
New Mexico Art Exhibitions
Kite and Wíhaŋble S’a Center: Dreaming with AI
March 21–July 13, 2025
IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe
Blending Lakȟóta knowledge systems with artificial intelligence, Dr. Suzanne Kite (Oglála Lakȟóta) envisions technology as a living, relational force rather than an abstract tool. In immersive installations of light, sound, and rare earth materials often used in computers—which she calls “not inanimate objects” but beings with spirit—Kite links ancestral wisdom to digital futures.
Light, Space, and the Shape of Time
April 5–July 20, 2025
Albuquerque Museum
Tracing the legacy of the Light and Space movement from its 1960s California roots to the present-day Southwest, this exhibition features pioneers like Robert Irwin and Helen Pashgian alongside new voices pushing the boundaries of optical and material physics. The show highlights New Mexico’s role as both a muse and a laboratory for artistic experimentation.
Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts
April 5–July 25, 2025
New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe
Maine-based artist Marsden Hartley sought out inspiration across continents, interweaving memories of many different places in a modernist mode. Featuring over forty works spanning thirty-six years—along with postcards and Hartley’s well-worn suitcase—this exhibition offers intimate windows into the artist’s lifelong wanderlust, including Schiff (1915), a landmark painting rarely shown in the U.S.
Oklahoma Art Exhibitions
Drift///Hold
February 20–April 18, 2025
Central Standard, Tulsa
Bringing together artists with Oklahoma ties like Yatika Fields (Osage, Muscogee, Cherokee), Le’Andra LeSeur, and Nathan Young (Delaware Tribe of Indians), Drift///Hold explores movement and transformation through installation, sound, and performance. Water emerges as a central motif—as a force of migration and site of grounding—positioning Oklahoma as a space of fluid reinvention.
Texas Art Exhibitions
Marisol: A Retrospective
February 23–July 25, 2025
Dallas Museum of Art
Once a world-famous figure of the 1960s Pop Art movement, Venezuelan American sculptor Marisol Escobar—known simply as Marisol—faded into obscurity within a decade. This internationally touring retrospective, the most comprehensive ever assembled, reexamines her visionary sculptures and incisive cultural critiques from the 1950s to the early 2000s.
Jorge Rojas: Coyotek
February 28–July 23, 2025
El Paso Museum of Art
Multidisciplinary artist Jorge Rojas explores borders—both physical and conceptual—through performance, installation, and digital intervention. Coyotek, a fusion of “coyote” and “technology,” reflects his deep engagement with mestizaje and the politics of human movement.
Michael Tracy: The Elegy of Distance
March 1–July 27, 2025
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio
In a full-circle moment, the McNay Art Museum—home to Michael Tracy’s first museum show in 1971—now hosts the last exhibition he was planning before his recent death at age eighty. The Elegy of Distance features immersive floor-to-ceiling paintings and an original soundscape by composer Omar Zubair.
Utah Art Exhibitions
2025 NCECA Annual: True and Real
March 7–May 31, 2025
Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City
As technological and societal shifts blur the boundaries between artifice and reality, True and Real explores the enduring power of ceramics to express our humanity. Featuring works by forty artists, this exhibition is part of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts’s 59th annual conference.
In Search of Ourselves: Soviet Art and the Shared Human Spirit
June 18, 2025–May, 2028
Springville Museum of Art
Landing at a strange new moment in Russian-American relations, In Search of Ourselves probes the Springville Museum’s vast collection of Soviet and Russian art for social and cultural bridges between “us” and “them.”
