If You’re Looking for the Best Southwest Landscape Art, Become a Gamer
Exquisitely detailed and experimental depictions of the Southwest abound in today's video games—so why aren't they considered landscape art?
July 10, 2025
Essay
Texas Artist Michael Tracy Channeled the Violence and Transcendence of the Borderlands
Late artist Michael Tracy hit the Texas border village of San Ygnacio like a "cyclone." His creative aggression melded with an empathic awareness of his adopted home.
May 29, 2025
To Fill Jagged Gaps in the History of Native Slavery, These Artists Use Their Bodies
New Mexico's UNBOUND performance project builds on historical research about Indigenous slavery through intuitive "deep listening" between artists, ancestors, and community.
May 20, 2025
Through Barbed Wire: Amarillo’s Invisible, and Hypervisible, Monuments
Hallie Ayres follows the barbed wire strand to contrast the hypervisibility of Cadillac Ranch, the secrecy of Pantex, and the site-specificity of Combine City.
April 29, 2025
Anthropology Museums Are Returning Some Objects, But What About the Ones They Keep?
To address misleading historical photos of the Navajo Nation, Albuquerque's Maxwell Museum of Anthropology tapped Diné collaborators to fill in the gaps.
April 22, 2025
Time Zero: How Radical Artistic Interventions Are Exposing the Nuclearized World
Time Zero podcast producer Sean J Patrick Carney on art and the nuclearized world, from the hyperlocal of the Trinity site to the planetary effects of nuclearism.
March 11, 2025
Guest Juror Jaime Herrell Introduces The Hyperlocal
In Southwest Contemporary Vol. 11: The Hyperlocal, curator and guest juror Jaime Herrell explores how the artworks in this issue transform personal experiences into universal connections.
March 07, 2025
EssayNew MexicoVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Center of the Universe: Agency and Ecology in a 77-Degree October
Bruce Nauman’s Center of the Universe on the campus of the University of New Mexico inspires a personal ritual and creative essay that asks us to reconnect to the environment and ourselves.
March 07, 2025
EssayUtahVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
The Neon Guardian of Ogden: A Familial Origin Story
How a lost-and-found neon dragon on Ogden's main drag shaped one family's mythology—and captured a community's heart.
March 07, 2025
EssayNew MexicoVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Rolling into the Here-and-Now with Jesse Littlebird’s Petrolglyph
Jesse Littlebird’s Petrolglyph moves in place, expanding horizons on the future of New Mexican lowriding and American car culture through Indigenous art.
March 07, 2025
Beautiful Corners: A Road Trip to Witness Larry Bell’s First Cube, and His Last
Artist Jon Revett makes a pilgrimage to see his mentor Larry Bell's career retrospective in Phoenix, and view what the Light and Space master calls his last cube in Taos.
January 30, 2025
Denver Collective’s Four-Hour Karaoke Marathons Have a Message For the Art World: Get Over Yourself
Bucking the solemn tone of much performance art, Right on Time collective's sweaty, cyclical extravaganzas herald a roaring late-2020s vibe.
January 07, 2025
Fires Fires
"Fires Fires" is a personal essay by Caitlin Lorraine Johnson about the effect of global uncertainty on the small scale of a life.
September 06, 2024
EssayTexasVol. 10 Radical Futures
Farewell to Giants: The Uncertain Futures of Two Crumbling Land Art Works
Jon Revett compares and contrasts two monumental works of art, Amarillo Ramp and Cadillac Ranch, and discusses their possible futures.
September 06, 2024
Accidental Utopia: An Introduction to Radical Futures
In Southwest Contemporary Vol. 10: Radical Futures, curator and conceptual artist Ian Breidenbach ruminates on creative agency and utopian praxis as the guest juror for this issue.
September 06, 2024
Queer Horticulture: Getting Entangled in JD Pluecker’s Artistic Root System
In this chosen family history from Texas, Xan Murphy asks, “If you’re the only queer person in your family, who will teach you to survive?”
July 12, 2024
Essay2024 New Mexico Field GuideNew Mexico
Watch Zozobra Burn for the 100th Time
August 2024 will usher in one hundred years of setting Zozobra ablaze—a ceremony of fire, redemption, and the incineration of Santa Fe’s gloom.
May 24, 2024
Reaching for the Light: Daniel Hawkins’s Wild West Dream of a Desert Lighthouse
Daniel Hawkins's surreal, fifty-foot Desert Lighthouse is a glowing, perplexing beacon in the desolate Mojave Desert, on the site of ecological catastrophe.
May 21, 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
EssayNew MexicoSITE Santa Fe Young Curators
Navigating Mental Health Through Creative Channels: How Art Influences Our Mental Health
Young Curator Sofia Garcia reflects on the ways expressive art serves as a powerful channel for emotional release, stress, and anxiety.
March 27, 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
EssayUtahVol. 9 Living Histories
A Fluid History Set in Stones, Springs, and Rivers
In this essay, nicholas b jacobsen braids together ongoing histories of Mormon and U.S. settler colonialism and genocide against Nuwu and Diné peoples at Pipe Spring National Monument and Lake Powell.
March 01, 2024
Twin Tracks
Aleina Grace Edwards considers the ways science, religion, and climate change run together in the Dinosaur Capital of Texas.
March 01, 2024
EssayTexasVol. 9 Living Histories
Ancestral threads, a writer’s journey
Anne Elise Urrutia reflects on how exploring and writing about her Mexican family history adds to a broader understanding of a vibrant cultural heritage.
March 01, 2024
If Autumn Knight is Here: Nothing Less
Autumn Knight’s multimedia work at the Visual Arts Center connects video, vinyl drawing, lecture, and performance to challenge audiences to re-think their ideas about disappointment, doing nothing, and sounding.
February 29, 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
Leslie Martinez Shifts the Personal and Political in The Fault of Formation
Dallas-based Leslie Martinez’s first New York solo show, The Fault of Formation at MoMA PS1, addresses political binaries and cultural survival.
February 14, 2024
Pillar: No More Mud in Our Eyes
Andrés Mario de Varona remembers and honors the life of Aaron Martin Garcia, also known as Pillar, and reveals the powerful human condition of strangers becoming friends, brothers, and teachers.
January 17, 2024
EssayCollectivity + CollaborationSouthwest
Hyperlink’s Creative Rollercoaster Embraces the Whirlwind of Interconnected Artistry
Hyperlink, a nebulous artist collective with projects in Denver, Chicago, and at a uranium mine ghost town in Wyoming, is a proven testament to the power of collectivity and collaboration.
December 13, 2023
The Crestone Ziggurat: An Idiosyncratic Monument Among an Epic Landscape
Crestone Ziggurat, once a private sanctuary for meditation, is a peculiar monument nestled along the edge of the San Luis Valley and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southeast Colorado.
December 06, 2023
