Queering Cowboy Culture with José Villalobos: It’s a Quick, Rough Ride
José Villalobos: Rough Rider at Arizona State University queers the traditional masculinity inherent in cowboy culture’s objects of desire.
May 08, 2025
Review
Hank Willis Thomas’s Pop Culture Platitudes Belong to an Alternate Timeline—Not the One We’re Living In
Hank Willis Thomas's LOVERULES offers a comprehensive survey of a decade's worth of artwork but flounders in our current political crisis.
May 02, 2025
In Tulsa, an Ambitious Exhibition Asks Us to Hold onto Our Roots, While Drifting Toward the Future
Drift///Hold is the ambitious inaugural exhibition of Central Standard in Tulsa with major new works by five compelling early-career artists.
April 11, 2025
ReviewUtahVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Arleene Correa Valencia Stitches Together Identity Through the Trauma of Immigration
Arleene Correa Valencia’s exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts reveals the indelible imprint of growing up as an undocumented migrant through personal writings, photographs, and textiles.
March 07, 2025
ReviewNew MexicoVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Adapted from a Podcast, Broken Boxes Materializes Artists’ Voices
Ten years of podcast guests contribute to this multimedia exhibition at Albuquerque Museum, foregrounding the playful possibilities of socially engaged art.
March 07, 2025
ReviewTexasVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Cowboy Cuts Close to Home, Deep in Cowboy Country
In Fort Worth—known as “Cowtown”—the exhibition Cowboy at the Amon Carter made waves by reimagining the mythology surrounding the American cowboy.
March 07, 2025
ReviewArizonaVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Not Much Is Indigenous About Indian Space Painting, but This Show Looks for Links
A group of white New York painters blended modernist and Native-inspired aesthetics. Space Makers at the Heard Museum pairs them with historical and contemporary Native artists.
March 07, 2025
ReviewColoradoVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Ugo Rondinone’s Aspen Show is a Decadent Confection that Knows its Audience
Ugo Rondinone, creator of Las Vegas’s Seven Magic Mountains, returns to the American West with more rainbows and a light touch.
March 07, 2025
Time Travel is the Easy Part: Erika Wanenmacher’s Solo Show at SITE Santa Fe
In what Time Travel feels like, sometimes, New Mexico–based artist Erika Wanenmacher's major solo exhibition at SITE Santa Fe, the artist collapses the distance between the mystical and the everyday.
January 21, 2025
Relax and Stay Alert: The Playful Incoherence of Tristram Lansdowne and Ryan Crowley
Wicked Wells and Window Wipeouts traps the viewer between a hard place and a sunken one—but its ambiguity offers a different kind of freedom.
January 09, 2025
Scripted Spaces Dissects the Mind Maze of the Las Vegas Casino, Down to Those Crazy Carpets
Las Vegas–raised painter eri king co-opts the persuasive powers of gambling hall interior design at Available Space Art Projects.
December 10, 2024
A Hundred Years On, Surrealism’s Desert Dreamworlds Continue to Inspire
The desert—in all of its arid, minimalist, color-block permutations—permeates this selection of Surrealist artworks.
November 19, 2024
Cybele Lyle Queers Desert Landscapes Through Portals, Lean-tos, and Constructed Architectures
Cybele Lyle attempts, in confounding and curious ways, to queer desert landscapes in her current installation Cybele Lyle: Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms.
October 17, 2024
An Aesthetic of Repugnance: A Review of Sam Grabowska’s Haptic Terrain
Sam Grabowska’s Haptic Terrain at Leon Gallery explores how our bodies, oftentimes in grotesque fashion, mutate in contemporary capitalist culture.
October 08, 2024
In Dario Robleto’s The Signal, Love is Imperative
Dario Robleto’s wide-ranging reach—in which the deepest interiors and most distant exteriors mix with popular culture and early analog media—is getting more articulate with each pass.
September 27, 2024
How Do We Remember? How Do We Forget? In Memory Explores Remembrance Through Body and Mind
In Memory presents the work of twenty-one artists who excavate the archives of remembrance to reveal how humans document, distort, and cling to the past.
September 17, 2024
A Double Prism Materializes on Canyon Road through REDHORN and When The Earth Was Young
At Smoke the Moon, two exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous artists consider histories of specific geographies and foster a dialogue countering today’s apocalyptic cynicism.
September 10, 2024
ReviewColoradoVol. 10 Radical Futures
Sweeping Aerials and Intimate Portraits Trace Industrial Damage in Fazal Sheikh’s Thirst / Exposure / In Place
Anchored by imagery from Bears Ears National Monument, Fazal Sheikh's exhibition at the Denver Art Museum explores the dichotomy of beauty and destruction in the Southwest.
September 06, 2024
ReviewTexasVol. 10 Radical Futures
Einar and Jamex de la Torre Sneak a Call to Action into Their Apocalyptic Party in Upward Mobility
The de la Torre Brothers deliver a feast for the eyes—and warnings for the future—in their witty and maximalist exhibition at McNay Art Museum.
September 06, 2024
ReviewArizonaVol. 10 Radical Futures
Feminist Theory and a Family Trucking Business Inform Fay Ray’s New Visions of the Borderlands in PORTALS
PORTALS at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson in Arizona features new works by California-based artist Fay Ray, who imagines radical futures in the Sonoran Desert and Southwest borderlands.
September 06, 2024
ReviewNew MexicoVol. 10 Radical Futures
Trying to See the Constellations for the Stars in Vladem Contemporary’s Dizzying Exhibition Off-Center
Off-Center at Vladem Contemporary is a three-decade survey of New Mexico art with myriad bright spots—but how are they connected?
September 06, 2024
ReviewUtahVol. 10 Radical Futures
Asserting the Humanity Behind Border Politics through Play and PDA at the Kimball Center
In the Shadow of the Wall at the Kimball Art Center offers poignant and playful perspectives on the border wall, beyond political controversy.
September 06, 2024
Is Teresita Fernández’s SITE Santa Fe Show with Robert Smithson a Duel—or an Act of Generosity?
Iconoclasm is a mercy in Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson, clearing the view of both conceptual artists and their groundbreaking legacies.
August 27, 2024
Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come: A Sweeping Saga of Everyday Objects in Austin’s Waterloo Park
Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler's colossal new video installation, Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come, dramatically explores the archeological record of Austin's Waller Creek.
August 20, 2024
Tina Mion Delves Deep Into Family Trauma While Broadening Her Oeuvre at Kouri + Corrao Gallery
Tina Mion ventures into unexplored territory in her exhibition Departures, through death spoon sculptures and paintings about her brother’s death.
August 13, 2024
Every Artwork is a Cat-and-Mouse Thriller in this Phoenix Exhibition of Eastern Bloc Artists
Even the propaganda is sabotaged in Multiple Realities, a Soviet spy novel of an exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum.
August 06, 2024
At SMoCA, Carolina Aranibar-Fernández Uses Soil, Sequins, and Blood to Explore the Impacts of Global Trade
California-based artist Carolina Aranibar-Fernández explores colonization, extraction, and exploitation in the Southwest in her exhibition Oleaje at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona.
July 30, 2024
Succumb to Defeat or Persevere: Lessons from Rejected Public Art Proposals at the Arvada Center
I Regret to Inform You: Rejected Public Art explores the process of applying to and proposing a public art project, while grappling with the ubiquity of rejection.
July 23, 2024
Feral with Possibility: Harry Fonseca’s Queer Coyote Takes Center Stage in Small but Resonant Exhibition at the Heard
In the first exhibition to explore Harry Fonseca’s expressions of “queerness” through his beloved character Coyote, queer-Indigenous performativity takes center stage.
July 16, 2024
In Biophilia, Nature is Exalted, But Does it Compel Connection?
"Biophilic design," which emulates the natural environment, is undoubtedly having a moment. So how does the Denver Art Museum’s latest design exhibition expand on this discourse?
July 05, 2024
