Jan 17
Internationally renowned Oaxacan artist Carlomagno Pedro Martínez uses folk iconography to restage moments of Mexican history in barro negro (black clay) at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont.
Jan 05
Artists in The Dirty South at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston work with materials and subject matter that reflect a century-long tradition of regional dialogue between Black visual art and music.
Dec 28
Southwest Contemporary’s favorite exhibition reviews of 2021, from Ed Ruscha in Oklahoma City and Hong Hong in Houston to group shows in Albuquerque and Tempe, Arizona.
Dec 15
Ciara Elle Bryant’s installation Server: Love Ta, Love Ta Love Ya at McKinney Avenue Contemporary collages photographs to create a visual bibliography while building a physical space for Black representation.
Dec 13
Oscar Muñoz: Invisibilia takes an in-depth look at fifty years of works that highlight the Latin American artist’s compelling examination of life’s fleeting moments via multiple artistic processes and media.
Dec 06
Gaku Tsutaja: Enola’s Head at UTEP’s Rubin Center recreates the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima—and tells a different history of the victims and survivors of nuclear warfare.
Nov 30
In Poetic Justice at the New Mexico Museum of Art, the social impacts and artistic contributions of Judith F. Baca, Mildred Howard, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith are on display.
Nov 23
AH’-WAH-NEE brings together Indigenous women artists throughout the Southwest for an exhibition about feminine Indigeneity at Donna Beam Gallery at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Nov 19
Amid the escalating climate crisis, a dozen artists explore the impacts of human activity on the natural world during the Anthropocene era in Temporary in Nature at Lisa Sette Gallery.
Nov 15
The 2021 Texas Biennial explores cross-sections of identity and project optimism in A New Landscape, A Possible Horizon across five venues in San Antonio and Houston.
Nov 10
Dawolu Jabari's large-scale drawings in Lessons from Above: Constellation Quilts at Galveston Artist Residency embed Black history, mythology, and folklore into the fabric of the cosmos.
Nov 05
Robert Burnier's exhibition Song Cycle at David B. Smith Gallery in Denver features small acrylic-on-aluminum wall sculptures folded into aesthetically and conceptually compelling shapes.
Nov 04
The San Antonio Museum of Art celebrates its fortieth anniversary with an exhibition showcasing the global and chronological breadth of its permanent collection.
Oct 29
ReviewArizonaVol. 4 Winter 2021
The artists in Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration explore the relationship between visual culture and imprisonment at the Arizona State University Art Museum.
Oct 29
San Antonio artist Michael Menchaca’s Artpace exhibition, The 1836 Project, is an immersive video installation employing poppy animation to take aim at “the colonial fantasies of the Texas creation myth.”
Oct 29
ReviewArizonaVol. 4 Winter 2021
A retrospective of German-American female photographer Marion Palfi at the Phoenix Art Museum, the first major exhibition since her 1978 death, places her towards the top of social research photographers.
Oct 29
Source Material, an exhibition at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver, features eight photographic projects that engage with archival imagery.
Oct 29
Vol. 4 Winter 2021New MexicoReview
Maja Ruznic’s exhibition In the Sliver of the Sun at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos was reminiscent of a dream state, a loose and subdued world of imagination, distant memories, and notions of home and family.
Oct 29
ReviewColoradoVol. 4 Winter 2021
Armor, a group exhibition at the Center for Visual Art in Denver, explored physical and metaphorical barriers in the art-making process.
Oct 29
ReviewNew MexicoVol. 4 Winter 2021
Hung Liu’s Sanctuary at Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe illuminated and paid respect to the renowned artist and her moving works.
Oct 18
Mimi O Chun: It’s all cake at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art magnifies societal ills and amplifies women’s issues through soft materials.
Oct 15
Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum in Arizona explores the Visionary Arts movement with exhibitions featuring Alex Grey and Allyson Grey plus several contemporary artists based in and beyond the Southwest.
Oct 13
Peggy McGivern’s retrospective at Taos Art Museum at Fechin Studio enters dreamscapes and everyday scenes, tracing forty years and more than seventy-five works by the Taos artist.
Oct 12
Matthew Bourbon: Hive at the Fort Worth Community Art Center challenges us to settle our buzzing brains through bold color, composition, and paint-manipulation strategies.
Oct 04
The photography exhibition Rania Matar: SHE at Obscura Gallery centers female complexity and empowerment.
Sep 29
Hunt Slonem: Curiouser and Curiouser at K Contemporary in Denver features 200 pieces from the New York artist's career—including his signature bunnies.
Sep 23
The McNay Art Museum celebrates San Antonio food culture with The Art of SA Eats, an exhibition combining poppy depictions of sweets and recreations of old-school restaurants and signage.
Sep 22
At the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, worldwide Indigenous artists render the effects of uranium mining and nuclear bomb testing on their lands and people.
Sep 17
Thais Mather: Western Blue at Santa Fe’s form & concept ponders the comprehensive characteristics of the color blue in a cunning display of sculptural installations, micro-pointillist drawings, watercolors, and holograms.
Sep 13
Gulf Coast Anthropocene, the latest exhibition at Project Row Houses in Houston, features works that stray from traditional narratives of the climate crisis to center the Black and brown communities most at risk.
Sep 08
In Balancing Cultures at Foto Forum Santa Fe, Jerry Takigawa reckons with family history and trauma, and finds beauty in the process.
Sep 06
In the tiny town of Fort Garland, Colorado, Unsilenced: Indigenous Enslavement in Southern Colorado by Chip Thomas (the artist known as jetsonorama) spotlights uncomfortable and paramount histories of Indigenous captivity.
Aug 23
Jami Porter Lara’s Terms and Conditions offers a space for uncomfortable conversations around identity, womanhood, and whiteness.
Aug 11
Talia Pura’s two-in-one review recounts Santa Fe Classic Theater’s As You Like It at Santa Fe Botanical Garden and New Mexico Actors Lab’s The Lifespan of a Fact at the new Lab Theater.
Aug 03
Patrick Marold: The Windmill Project at Ent Center for the Arts in Colorado Springs firmly lands on contingency, environment, and illumination.
Jul 30
ArizonaReviewVol. 3 Inhale Exhale
Voice-Over: Zineb Sedira centers the revolutionary power of culture while amplifying the complexities of history, identity, memory, and resistance.
Jul 30
ArizonaReviewVol. 3 Inhale Exhale
Si'alik Hiosik / Morning Blossom, a mural by Thomas "Breeze" Marcus and Miles MacGregor, depicts a young girl from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in downtown Phoenix.
Jul 30
New MexicoReviewVol. 3 Inhale Exhale
Breath Taking at the New Mexico Museum of Art examines breath from social, scientific, and metaphysical frameworks.
Jul 30
TexasReviewVol. 3 Inhale Exhale
In Imminent Archive, George Bolster and Dong Kyu Kim exhibit exquisite textile works that examine time, displacement, and the human search for home.
Jul 30
ReviewTexasVol. 3 Inhale Exhale
Bradley Kerl: Balm evokes a sense of calm and reminds us that life sometimes contains something of the sublime, as long as we keep looking for it.
Jul 21
A large-scale collaboration between Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger, both long invested in community-sourced artmaking, takes the spotlight in Each/Other at the Denver Art Museum.
Jul 20
Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group: 1938-1945 at the Albuquerque Museum surveys the New Mexico group that dove deep into abstract painting to create pathways to spiritual enlightenment.
Jul 14
Dust Specks on the Sea: Contemporary Sculpture from the French Caribbean & Haiti at 516 Arts, a rare exhibition for the Southwest region, explores Caribbean identity in the face of colonization
