Modern Honesty: Wrestling with Maynard Dixon’s Selective Vision of the “Old West”
Cowboy cosplay, broken Spanish, and Indigenous erasure haunt Sagebrush and Solitude, Maynard Dixon's Western retrospective at the Nevada Museum of Art.
May 06, 2024
Review
Selling the Southwest Unpacks the Colonialist Mythology and Marketing of the Santa Fe Railroad
This Museum of Northern Arizona exhibition unpacks how the marketing efforts of the Santa Fe Railroad and Fred Harvey Company romanticized and exploited the artistry and culture of Indigenous people.
May 02, 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
Interrogating our Performative Impulses at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
In Performing Self at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, seven multidisciplinary artists expand the concept of performance art with works that are extremely personal, even courageous.
April 15, 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
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
ReviewNew MexicoSITE Santa Fe Young Curators
The Beauty of Folk Art in Multiple Visions: A Common Bond
Young Curator Sara Barrionuevo visits Alexander Girard’s renowned collection of folk art at the Museum of International Folk Art and finds both value and disappointments.
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
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
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
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
ReviewNevadaVol. 9 Living Histories
Now With More Feeling: The Emotional Show at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art
The Emotional Show's consideration of sentiment and inner sensation has become pronounced in relevance following the terrifying December 6 shooting on the UNLV campus.
March 01, 2024
ReviewArizonaVol. 9 Living Histories
Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Retrospective Mines an Archeology of Memory in Phoenix
Amalia Mesa-Bains, renowned for altar-style installations that helped bring Chicana art into the mainstream, recently had a retrospective exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum.
March 01, 2024
ReviewNew MexicoVol. 9 Living Histories
In Out West, Gay and Lesbian Artists are Recognized Within New Mexico’s Art History
Out West: Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Southwest 1900–1969 at the New Mexico Museum of Art collects work by and about queer artists working in New Mexico.
March 01, 2024
ReviewTexasVol. 9 Living Histories
2024 Border Biennial/Bienal Fronteriza at El Paso Museum of Art
The 2024 Border Biennial at El Paso Museum of Art explores how regional artists experience and interact with the Borderlands, and also acts as a barometer for area contemporary art.
March 01, 2024
ReviewUtahVol. 9 Living Histories
Shaping Landscapes: 150 Years of Photography in Utah
Shaping Landscapes illuminates the state's history, using photography as a platform for exploring technology, identity, and activism.
March 01, 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
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
Antoinette Cauley: I Do It for The Hood, Pt. 2 at Modified Arts
Antoinette Cauley creates expressive portraiture to bridge hyperlocal and global concerns in I Do It For The Hood, Pt. 2 in Phoenix.
January 16, 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
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
Mythopoetica at the Palm Springs Art Museum Delves into the Symbols and Stories of the Desert
Mythopoetica: Symbols and Stories at the Palm Springs Art Museum fuses past and present to imagine a future for the inland Southern California region.
October 30, 2023
No Longer a Hypothetical: If the Sky Were Orange: Art in the Time of Climate Change
If the Sky Were Orange: Art in the Time of Climate Change looks at global warming with a right brain/left brain lineup of scientists, journalists, and artists.
October 24, 2023
Ellen Berkenblit’s In Motion Expresses the Magic of Mark Making
Ellen Berkenblit’s exhibition In Motion at Tamarind Institute surveys the New York-based artist’s continuing collaboration with the renowned lithography workshop in Albuquerque.
October 09, 2023
A Greater Utah Surveys the Artistic Output of an Entire State
While many of the figures in UMOCA’s A Greater Utah are familiar, the ambitious scope of the project allows for new perspectives outside of the state’s metropolitan center.
September 28, 2023
