These Amazing Art Cars of Arizona Are a True Form of Public Art
Massive mutant vehicles, novelty art cars, and custom lowriders—meet some of the makers devoted to this elaborate and often underappreciated art form.
August 06, 2026
Mary Ellen Carroll’s Power Plays and Trickster Antics Are All That (And a Bag of Chips)
From flipping houses to crashing cars, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People presents a forty-year survey of playful and provocative artworks by Mary Ellen Carroll.
July 23, 2026
Editor’s Picks: Southwest Contemporary’s Summer 2026 Exhibition Guide
As the nation marks 250 years this July, SWC arts editor Natalie Hegert picks thirty-two exhibitions that offer an antidote to the flag-waving displays of patriotism.
June 29, 2026
What Can We Learn From Artists Using Data As Material, Before the AI Age?
Run the Code explores technological obsolescence, interactivity, and the limits of software as an artmaking tool, revealing a data-driven approach to conceptual art.
June 18, 2026
Field Report2026 New Mexico Field GuideNew Mexico
Field Report: Gallup, New Mexico
New Mexico’s “Carbon City” celebrates Native arts and traditions, vibrant galleries, and public art, carving its own path beneath the tourist economy’s glare.
May 22, 2026
From the Editor2026 New Mexico Field Guide
From the Editors: New Mexico Field Guide 2026-27
This edition of the New Mexico Field Guide is an invitation to take in a dynamic year of New Mexico arts programming—and then experience it in motion.
May 22, 2026
Feature2026 New Mexico Field GuideNew Mexico
Meow Wolf Opened the House of Eternal Return 10 Years Ago, and Has Been Expanding Ever Since
Meow Wolf’s first interactive installation celebrates its tenth anniversary, marking an era of staggering growth and expansion, with even more to come.
May 22, 2026
Looking Into the Time Horizon, There’s Doom and Gloom… But Also Hope
Into the Time Horizon, the largest exhibition ever mounted at the Nevada Museum of Art, addresses the accelerating climate crisis and ways we might combat it.
May 19, 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
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
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
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
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
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
The Office of Collecting and Design Leaves Las Vegas to Become a Roving Museum
Founder of the Office of Collecting and Design Jessica Oreck talks about the museum’s move into a trailer, her collecting origins, and how she meets her community on the road.
March 31, 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
Arrows on the Quanah Parker Trail
The “largest art installation in the world” covers the land in Texas once shared by bison, Comanche, and their horses. As a memorial, it represents but does little to repair.
March 20, 2026
Field ReportColoradoTravelVol. 13 The Road
Field Report: Colorado Springs
Colorado’s “second city” has a rich and historic art scene, often overshadowed by the city’s contemporary connections to sports, tech, and the military.
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
On the Road: Guest Juror Aurora Tang
In Southwest Contemporary Vol. 13: The Road, guest juror Aurora Tang reflects on the featured artists' works in terms of movement, progress, and possibility.
March 20, 2026
ArtistsNew MexicoVol. 13 The Road
The Road: Carmen Selam
For artist Carmen Selam, the road represents freedom, but also displacement. Her practice explores that tension using materials and imagery that speak to contemporary Indigenous experience.
March 20, 2026
A First Glimpse of Into the Time Horizon, the Future-Forward, Evolving Exhibition Unfolding Over Time
Artwork by Maya Lin and Ernesto Neto soft launch Into the Time Horizon at the Nevada Museum of Art, examining local and global environmental concerns.
March 20, 2026
Inside Southwest ContemporarySouthwestThe Road
Ghost Roads: How AI Almost Infiltrated the Editorial Process at Southwest Contemporary
Our call for pitches for “The Road” was regurgitated back to us by AI writers around the world. We almost fell for one of them.
March 17, 2026
Peripheral Vision: Abby Flanagan Decenters the Visual in an Exhibition that Feels Truly Ecological
How can art plumb the depths of an aquifer? Abby Flanagan’s exhibition design in To Move Through Stone activates the peripheries to visualize the intangible flows of an ecological system.
March 12, 2026
Lossy Listening: In Defense of Defect and Instability in Itinerant Artmaking
How do we survive distortion in a militarized landscape? Jennifer Seas reflects on land art, lossless technology, and itinerant art practices that respond to the unstable conditions of real life.
February 26, 2026
Adama Delphine Fawundu Brings the Congo (and Beyond) into Conversation with Salt Lake
Adama Delphine Fawundu submerses herself into the Great Salt Lake, activates the UMFA’s African collection, and brings the region into a global dialogue around decolonization.
February 19, 2026
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
Abstraction, Accumulation, and Activism: Three Artists Confront the Dangers of Extraction
In Shifting Topographies, three artists’ varied approaches find common ground in exposing the deadly threat of extractive industries.
November 26, 2025
Bless Me, Cecilia: What Happens When a Star Curator Arrives in Santa Fe?
Cecilia Alemani rolled out an exhibition like no other in Santa Fe—its visionary weirdness will hit everyone a bit different.
November 20, 2025
Tongue Firmly in Cheek, Safwat Saleem’s Unrequited Love Institute Counters the “Otherness” at the Heart of Xenophobia
Safwat Saleem uses satire to share his experiences as an immigrant father living with cultural assimilation and loss in the 2024 Arizona Artist Awards exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum.
November 06, 2025
