Senga Nengudi: Topologies
Topologies, Senga Nengudi’s retrospective currently on view at the Denver Art Museum, acts as a call-to-action: for marginalized bodies and beings to be seen in the world.
Topologies, Senga Nengudi’s retrospective currently on view at the Denver Art Museum, acts as a call-to-action: for marginalized bodies and beings to be seen in the world. By Joshua Ware
The Family Room exhibition at form & concept in Santa Fe, NM offers a much-needed sanctuary from the new global reality. By Angie Rizzo
Luis Jiménez: Motion and Emotion shows how the artist looked at the story of the American West through a Chicano perspective. By Asuri Ramanujan Krittika
OKLA, Ed Ruscha’s first solo exhibition in his home state Oklahoma, is more than just a homecoming parade for the artist, who is still making work at eighty-three years old. By Lyndsay Knecht
A look at iconic printmaker José Guadalupe Posada and Albuquerque Museum's current exhibition of his work. By Asuri Ramanujan Krittika
Elemental, Teresita Fernández's mid-career survey at Phoenix Art Museum elevates the intersections of history, culture, and materiality. By Lynn Trimble
Diego Rodriguez-Warner’s recent exhibition Horror Vacui offers a look beyond the immediate disarray and confusion in which we find ourselves. By Joshua Ware
The virtual-reality installation Carne y Arena, the brainchild of acclaimed director Alejandro G. Iñárritu, is an unforgettable twenty minutes of walking in migrants’ shoes at the U.S.-Mexico border. By Deborah Ross
Larger Than Memory includes works made by Indigenous artists from North America in the first two decades of this century. By Rembrandt Quiballo
The new Charlene Teters exhibition at Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe challenges border policies in a time of mass migration. By Caroline Picard
Esphyr Slobodkina: Six Decades of Groundbreaking Painting, Collage, and Sculpture at the LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe is a window into twentieth-century abstract art by one of the movement’s early pioneers, Esphyr Slobodkina, a versatile and prolific New York artist. A cofounder of the American Abstract Artists group, she translated the concepts of European Modernism into American idiom. By Alejandro López
Indelible Ink displays pieces by nine multigenerational Native American printmaking women whose artwork stuns with originality, beauty, and color, while also illustrating the historical trauma that impacts Native people today. By Steve Jansen
Yōkai: Ghosts & Demons of Japan at the Museum of International Folk Art spotlights the Japanese folk art tradition of yōkai, which depicts paranormal beings such as ghosts, demons, and monsters in a variety of settings, ranging from traditional kabuki theater to Pokémon anime. By Steve Jansen
The provocative work of Francesca Woodman, an art photographer who took her life at only twenty-two, takes on new dimensions in Portrait of a Reputation, an exhibition at MCA Denver that combines Woodman’s experimental work from the late 1970s with candid photos of the artist by her friend, George Lange. By Deborah Ross
Chinati's special exhibition is like a conversation between Donald Judd and Barnett Newman, with work from both artists on view. By Briana Olson
We, The Masses: Here, the men—drawn in mind-blowing detail on palimpsest-free surfaces—engage in unhinged activity, ranging from gnawing on tree bark to fighting with one another. Some men hug en masse: they seem to know that O’Neil is about to hit the go button on the apocalypse... By Steve Jansen
Zahra Marwan’s exhibition at the Sanitary Tortilla Factory in Albuquerque pairs exquisite poetry with her illustrations, paintings on paper. By Asuri Ramanujan Krittika
The thirty-five featured artists have opted to use the disarming power of humor, parody, and satire to counter, transcend, and transform the oppression they have suffered. By Alejandro López
Martínez-Díaz is a visual artist who uses photography, video, design, and installation to create conceptual work focused on the hyper normalization of violence in Northern Mexican society. By Isadora Stowe
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's most recent installation Border Turner in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez brings voice and person to the forefront. By Daisy Quezada
Labor: Motherhood and Art in 2020 in NMSU’s new art building fills its elegant spaces with imposing artwork, mostly photographs and installation work.These exhibitions put a spotlight on the idea of motherhood as a powerful but almost invisible force in life. By Asuri Ramanujan Krittika
Di Wae Powa: They Came Back, an exhibition which opened in the fall of 2019 at the Poeh Cultural Center, in partnership with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), is a step towards reconciling a muddy and violent history of colonialism in the Southwest. By Lillia McEnaney
Artist Sharbani Das Gupta's In/Sight, on view at the Roswell Museum and Art Center, examines current environmental and cultural conundrums and asks the viewer to do the same. By Joy Miller
Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful examines the results of trauma in people’s lives in this Pulitzer Prize-winning drama at Santa Fe's Teatro Paraguas. By Talia Pura
From the vast archives of Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum comes Elemental, an eye-catching exhibition that organizes Still’s work around images conjured by the elements: earth, air, water, fire, and æther. By Deborah Ross
Scott Johnson’s solo show, Fissure, at the Center for Contemporary Arts is a rich smorgasbord of textures, light, and reflections, culminating in a crescendo of visual experience. By Clayton Porter
In Nari Ward: We the People at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Harlem-based mixed-media artist subtly yet powerfully confronts America’s sordid legacy of racism and discrimination as well as overall American identity in his show of sculptural pieces constructed from discarded materials. By Steve Jansen
Organized by the Phoenix Art Museum, Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is a comprehensive survey of the obscure American modernist painter, who actively worked for decades to invent abstraction in the West. By Shane Tolbert
In Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande, twenty-three New Mexico artists challenge themselves and visitors to 516 Arts to confront the fragmentation of the ecosystem on which the river, the bosque, and innumerable lifeforms—humans included—depend. By Briana Olson
The exhibition, H. Joe Waldrum: Retrospective, at Rio Bravo Fine Art is a first-of-its-kind overview of works from the H. Joe Waldrum Trust, which inherited a majority of his pieces after his estate closed in 2014. The exhibition, curated by Eduardo Alicea-Moreno—director and president of Rio Bravo Fine Art, the Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, gallery Waldrum founded shortly before his unexpected death in 2003—showcases the depth and breadth of Waldrum’s high-volume career. By Steve Jansen
IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts showcases its student printmakers from the ‘60s and ‘70s in their explorations of form and psyche. By Asuri Ramanujan Krittika
From the moment Shandien LaRance (Hopi) dances out onto the runway, threading her legs into and out of and through her five hoops, the sixth annual Indian Market Haute Couture Fashion Show feels as much a ceremony as a runway show. By Briana Olson
Globular figures seem to wiggle, tumble, float, or crawl across pieces of thick, white paper. Two particularly large sheets of paper cascade down from the ceiling at the center of the gallery. Sometimes they’re partially covered by a layer of clear film. About thirty smaller iterations occupy the walls. Here and there: a curled hand wearing what could be an elbow-length glove; firm, flexed ballet feet; sturdy legs in the air; and extra-long legs with powerful thighs... By Marcus Civin
To Survive on This Shore is the product of five years of research and travel across the U.S. The show pairs Dugan’s photographic portraits with Fabbre’s interviews with transgender and gender-nonconforming adults, all aged fifty or older. I’m drawn immediately to Duchess Milan, 69, Los Angeles, CA (2017). “I just know I’m me,” begins the text beside the photo. “I identify as Duchess.” By Briana Olson
Sashiko greets me as I enter the gallery for Shizu Saldamando’s show, held at SMOCA as part of southwestNET’s series showcasing mid-career Mexican and U.S. artists from the Southwest. Hushed and intimate, each work seems to demand all of one’s attention, a bid made more poignant by Saldamando’s insistence on portraying friends and family and, according to the wall text, “refus[ing] any notions of subjugation” in the artist-subject relationship. A multifaceted artist of Mexican American and Japanese American heritage, Saldamando focuses on “often-overlooked communities of color: punks, queers, activists, and artists.” By Aviva Dove-Viebahn
Rapheal Begay is a Diné photographer and curator from Window Rock, Arizona, (the capital of the Navajo Nation) currently showing his work at Trapdoor Projects, near downtown Albuquerque. The medium is photography, but the methods are strikingly conceptual, requiring viewers to finish the work in their minds. His work evokes memories of family, as well as harshly beautiful landscapes and the animals who populate them—especially sheep—in the Navajo Nation. By Asuri Ramanujan Krittika
New Mexico Dance Project is a newcomer powerhouse on the Santa Fe dance scene. Husband and wife team Erik Sampson and Scarlett Wynne founded the company in New Mexico six months ago. Since then, they have been teaching workshops for students, creating new works nonstop, and performing with the intention to become an integrated part of the community. By Tamara Johnson
Catchers helps us see into the past and, through the past, to recognize those we ignore in the present. By Jonah Winn-Lenetsky
"What Endures is, and is not, a question. It’s not incidental that I’m focused on the elemental details of my surroundings, that I want to take apart the anthropogenic landscape, break it down into its simplest ingredients. This act is central to Nina Elder’s process—and to the subjects of the featured work, which spans from 2011 to the present." By Briana Olson
Denver artist Jonathan Saiz believes in the value of shock and surprise, as evidenced in two overlapping solo exhibitions. One is #WhatisUtopia, in which ten thousand miniature squares come together in a mosaic-like column given its own space at the Denver Art Museum. The second exhibition, at K Contemporary, is darker in tone, shocking you to attention with foreboding images. By Deborah Ross
"Several unfinished works in the show are naturally among the most heartbreaking. Unfinished . . . is a rare capsule of work created at the intersection of talent and years of great development. There is an adolescent fearlessness in these paintings, and Stewart allows viewers to see the remarkable efforts of a young artist making use of her rapidly expanding world. Unlike most eighteen-year-olds, the perspective Stewart applied to her work made magical use of a young life evidencing wisdom beyond her years." By Kate Wood
Mira Burack’s artwork on view at 516 Arts in Albuquerque evokes themes of rest, comfort, and home—with a dark underside. By Robin Babb
Thirty miles north of Ciudad Juárez, at an immigrant detention center in Chaparral, New Mexico, Johana Medina Leon, transgendered and from El Salvador, complains of chest pains. Days later, and a day after James Drake’s opening, Que Linda La Brisa, Leon dies on a hospital bed at Del Sol Medical Center in El Paso, Texas. By Shane Tolbert
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