Jul 26
Borna Sammak’s exhibition america, nice place at Dallas Contemporary conceptually and materially questions popular American archetypes and the redundancies of cultural consumerism.
Jul 21
In Forgotten Artifacts at Core Contemporary, Las Vegas artists, Las Vegas artists show cast-metal sculptures evoking a landscape without humans.
Jul 12
Joey Fauerso: Wait For It at NMSU Art Museum embeds poignant metaphors in basic, somber forms to question what happens when stability is off-kilter.
Jun 22
At Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, Brook-Lynne Clark finds signs of her life on the Blackland Prairie in Big Tex is Burning, which tracks her relationship with embedded histories of Dallas.
Jun 17
In Plein Air at MOCA Tucson, artists challenge norms in paintings, installations, and video works that confront the white gaze that privileges colonizer culture and systems of oppression.
Jun 06
The exhibition Somos Southwest at Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum delivers a muted homage to the Chicano Arts Movement, primarily through works by Arizona and California artists.
May 09
Jae Ko’s artworks at Robischon Gallery in Denver address the Southwest’s drought conditions and the rise of water speculation in the futures market.
May 04
A debut solo exhibition by Albuquerque artist and muralist Nani Chacon (Diné, Chicana) celebrates Indigeneity through storytelling and design.
Apr 18
David Rios Ferreira and Denae Shanidiin collaborate in a multimedia exhibition at UMFA featuring portals to connect us to lost loved ones and heal communal pain.
Apr 06
Indigenous artist Brad Kahlhamer explores nomadic existence and hybrid identity in Swap Meet exhibition at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
Mar 31
In So That We May Fear Not at Finch Lane, photographer Jesse Meredith documents an American militia group and illustrates contradictory narratives of maleness and patriotism.
Mar 22
As war, climate change, and COVID-19 dominate the headlines, Phoenix Art Museum presents Breaking Up, an exhibition featuring women artists exploring fragmentation on personal and global scales.
Mar 16
Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) melds Indigenous patterns, materials, and symbolism with modernist archetypes in Speaking To Relatives at MCA Denver.
Mar 15
Sara Hubbs’s exhibition Soft shoulder at Everybody gallery in Tucson pays homage to the inseparability of art and life.
Feb 25
ReviewColoradoVol. 5 Collectivity + Collaboration
Facing shortages of his usual materials, Colorado artist Emilio Lobato turned to rubber sheets, household tacks, and porcelain strips. The outcome is work that is surprisingly multifaceted.
Feb 25
ReviewNew MexicoVol. 5 Collectivity + Collaboration
Cara Despain’s exhibition In Memoriam: Carbon Paintings at Utah’s Kimball Art Center confronted the pressing environmental and moral calamities of the American West.
Feb 25
ReviewArizonaVol. 5 Collectivity + Collaboration
A Tucson exhibition highlights Latinx women collaborating in the borderlands, creating an ode to shared power and place that nourishes brown bodies.
Feb 25
ReviewNew MexicoVol. 5 Collectivity + Collaboration
Counter Mapping, a group show of local, national, and international creatives at 516 Arts in Albuquerque, attempted to reclaim stories and ties to place for underheard populations, with mixed results.
Feb 25
ReviewTexasVol. 5 Collectivity + Collaboration
At The Contemporary Austin’s Crit Group Reunion, a generic and disjointed overview muted the spirit of what’s happening now in the city.
Feb 18
Taiko Chandler’s Denver Botanic Gardens exhibition provides a powerful framework for how to think differently about the world around us.
Feb 14
Josephine Halvorson: Contemporary Voices at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe offers an intimate view of the Abiquiú desert.
Feb 09
Roswell, New Mexico artist-in-residence Marie Alarcón explores the revolutionary potential of the end of the world in her solo exhibition Relocations.
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.
