Inside Southwest ContemporarySouthwest
Call for Visions: Tell Us What the Future Will Bring
Southwest Contemporary is entreating its readers to stop, take a moment, and imagine what a new world could hold.
April 25, 2024
The Desert’s Living Skin: A Collaborative Effort to Bring Biocrust Into the Museum
The Biocrust Project reveals the importance of protecting the desert’s biocrust in the face of climate change in an immersive collaboration between art and science.
April 25, 2024
Wading in the Shallows: The Conundrum of Cj Hendry’s Public Pool
Cj Hendry's Public Pool delights some and confounds others, as it celebrates Las Vegas pool party culture while ignoring serious realities of PVC manufacturing, drought, and the wealth divide.
April 19, 2024
How a Creative Couple in Arizona is Exploring South Phoenix History Through Photography and Poetry
Photographer Maria Nancy Thomas and poet Rashaad Thomas, a creative couple based in South Phoenix, are using their work to explore a region brimming with the histories of marginalized communities.
April 18, 2024
Andrew Alba’s New Works at Material Expose the Pain We Inherit
In a world replete with ecological catastrophe and political turmoil, the customarily inward Andrew Alba channels calamities into catharsis for his exhibition of new works at Material.
April 09, 2024
How Commemorations to the Disenfranchised Have Forced a Reckoning with Utah’s History and Present
The narratives of the many racial and ethnic minorities whose experiences have indelibly shaped both Utah and American history deserve recognition and reckoning.
March 29, 2024
Dimensions Variable with Mixed Results: Sarah Sze Brings Together Technology and Nature at the Nasher
Sarah Sze at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas is proof the affair between an artist and museum doesn’t always result in marriage.
March 28, 2024
SITE Santa Fe Young CuratorsNew Mexico
SITE Santa Fe’s Young Curators Work with Southwest Contemporary to Offer Their Critical Perspectives on Art
Southwest Contemporary teamed up with SITE Santa Fe to produce a series of articles written by high school students taking part in their 2023-24 Young Curators program.
March 27, 2024
EssayNew MexicoSITE Santa Fe Young Curators
What is the Young Curators Program at SITE Santa Fe?
Hanbi Park, one of SITE Santa Fe’s Young Curators, reflects on the program which tasks high schoolers with curating an exhibition from start to finish.
March 27, 2024
InterviewNew MexicoSITE Santa Fe Young Curators
Interview with Nana: Carol Lujan and Her Experience as a Native Artist
Young Curator Tara Lujan-Baker interviews her grandmother, Carol Lujan (Navajo), a clay and glass artist based in New Mexico and Arizona.
March 27, 2024
ReviewNew MexicoSITE Santa Fe Young Curators
Indigenous Futurisms in Shadow and Light
At the Vladem Contemporary, artists use light and color to express Indigenous Futurisms in their current exhibition Shadow and Light. Young Curator Ainsley Drinkard reviews.
March 27, 2024
Phoenix Artist and Curator Clottee Hammons Highlights Black History, Art, and Culture
Clottee Hammons, the Phoenix artist, curator, and knowledge-keeper who leads Emancipation Arts, has spent decades elevating Black history, arts, and culture while combatting historical and contemporary racism in Arizona.
March 22, 2024
Belonging: Contemporary Native Ceramics from the Southern Plains Speaks to Both Ancestors and Future Generations
Belonging: Contemporary Native Ceramics from the Southern Plains brings together works by seven artists that range from ceramic vessels to monumental sculptures to installations that radiate outward in space.
March 19, 2024
The Trail Ahead… How Artist Brian Norwood Helped Shape the Identity of Jal, New Mexico
Brian Norwood's sculpture The Trail Ahead..., erected in 2000, has created an identity for the small oil-and-gas town of Jal, New Mexico, much as the town created him.
March 15, 2024
Bill Gilbert’s Recent Ceramics: Clay as Earth, Form, and Function
Bill Gilbert’s ceramic works at the Anne Cooper Occasional Gallery share with us his relationship with the land and the “appendages” we employ in our experience of the world.
March 14, 2024
Jennie Kiessling’s New Paintings Chronicle the War in Gaza, Day by Day
The Project Space of the Wright Contemporary features Jennie Kiessling’s compassionate offerings of diaristic abstract paintings, each referencing a night of war in Gaza.
March 12, 2024
Recollections of Juan Manuel Rena Niño, Juárez Portrait Painter
Patrick Kikut reflects on meeting and engaging with Juárez portrait painter, Juan Manuel Rena Niño in the early 2000s. Kikut exhibited his portraits at No Man’s Land Gallery in 2004.
March 08, 2024
An Essential Retrospective of Hopi Artist Duwawisioma at Tucson’s Andrew Smith Gallery
Duwawisioma’s (Victor Masayesva Jr.) retrospective exhibition Màatakuyma at Andrew Smith Gallery in Tucson solidifies the Hopi artist’s importance in contemporary photographic and Indigenous artistic discourse.
March 05, 2024
Emptiness is the Mirage of the New Frontier in ann haeyoung’s Exhibition terra nullius
Roswell artist-in-residence ann haeyoung confronts the geopolitics of emptiness in terra nullius at the Roswell Museum.
February 26, 2024
Landscape, Body, Identity: Laura Aguilar at Phoenix Art Museum
Landscapes and large bodies featured in the Laura Aguilar: Nudes in Nature exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona illuminate the artist’s explorations of gender, race, identity, and community.
February 19, 2024
The Tucson Art Scene Impresses with its People Power
Tucson, Arizona is home to an incredible community of creative people. Southwest Contemporary visited in November 2023 to discover the local art scene.
February 16, 2024
Signals From Beyond: Wands and Sounds from Late Composer Jerry Hunt
Jerry Hunt was an oddball avant-gardist who conducted an international career from rural Texas. A collection of his work and ephemera are briefly on view in Lubbock.
February 13, 2024
Will You Break Your Silence and Scream? Nicholas Galanin Wants to Know
In Interference Patterns at SITE Santa Fe, Nicholas Galanin (Lingít/Unangax̂) stokes rage and reckoning with the dark history and continuing legacies of settler-colonialism.
December 21, 2023
Southwest Contemporary Gift Guide 2023
Seeking tips on artist-made gifts? Are you trying to find Southwest-inspired stocking stuffers? Want to shop locally and support area artists and artisans? Read the Southwest Contemporary Gift Guide 2023!
December 05, 2023
Bringing It All Back Home Marks Patrick Kikut’s Return to Santa Fe
Bringing It All Back Home reveals that Patrick Kikut is an unsentimental explorer of the West, manifesting an intrepid curiosity and respect for the land through which he moves.
November 29, 2023
Of Venom, Virility, and Vulnerability: José Villalobos at Big Medium in Austin
José Villalobos’s exhibition Fuertes y Firmas at Big Medium in Austin defiantly extracts beauty from brutality.
November 27, 2023
Crafting Resistance Slays the Binaries Separating Art and Craft
Curated by Erin Joyce, the small-scale exhibition at ASU Art Museum posits big questions about art and craft, resistance and identity.
November 17, 2023
Donna Zarbin-Byrne’s Like Water from a Rock Reimagines Landscapes Against Grief
Donna Zarbin-Byrne’s solo exhibition at Arts Fort Worth immerses viewers in fantastical representations of ecosystems from Texas and Hawai’i in the wake of climate crisis.
November 14, 2023
Light, Life, and Color: Tiny Tree by Kelly Lynn Jones at The Pit, Palm Springs
Tiny Tree, Kelly Lynn Jones’s second solo exhibition with The Pit in Palm Springs, celebrates the harmony of the natural world, bringing light and texture into focus.
November 07, 2023
Breaking the “Buckskin Ceiling”: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Memory Map
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith provokes conversations about Indigenous peoples and transforms the contemporary art canon with her long-overdue career retrospective.
November 03, 2023
