Apr 07
Salt Lake City artist Mitsu Salmon explores issues of racism, environmentalism, and sexuality. Her performance-based approach to a multi-disciplinary practice crafts an immersive experience between artist and viewer.
Apr 05
Galveston, Texas artist Nick Barbee uses the process of abstraction in recounting American history and personal experiences in his paintings, sculpture, and installation.
Mar 24
UMOCA’s artist-in-residence program in Salt Lake City provides studio space and exhibition opportunities for Utah artists while enriching the local arts community.
Mar 08
Benjamin Timpson hand-cuts delicate pieces of ethically-sourced butterfly wings to create meticulous and moving portraits that explore trauma and healing while raising awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Mar 03
The September 11 attacks and monthly visits with Agnes Martin continue to inform the gridwork of artist Pard Morrison, whose Denver installation Course comments on drought conditions in the Southwest.
Feb 25
Studio VisitColoradoVol. 5 Collectivity + Collaboration
Michael Gadlin, an artist and the executive director of PlatteForum in Denver, talks about the influence relationships and community have had on his creative practice.
Feb 25
Studio VisitTexasVol. 5 Collectivity + Collaboration
Houston-based artist and graphic designer Phillip Pyle, II upholds a tradition of collaboration in the historic Third Ward neighborhood.
Feb 23
Political organizer and artist Szu-Han Ho of Albuquerque builds coalitions and breaks down institutionalized barriers.
Feb 22
Laredo, Texas native Angelica Raquel Martínez continues her familial legacy of storytelling in works on paper and textile installations.
Feb 15
Sanders, Arizona-based Jared Tso (Diné), who teaches aspiring ceramicists and makes pottery from the road, is a rising star in the world of Indigenous pottery.
Jan 31
Albuquerque-based artist Jennifer Nehrbass paints the nature of landscapes to challenge ideas of what is real.
Jan 18
Denver artist Sammy Seung-Min Lee engages paper through unique and distinct processes in creating wall pieces, architectural installations, artist books, and performances.
Jan 07
Arizona artist Laura Spalding Best creates oil paintings on found objects, exploring the intersection of natural and built environments while confronting the impacts of climate change on the desert Southwest.
Dec 27
A handy roundup of Southwest Contemporary's studio visits with Southwest artists in 2021.
Dec 21
In our latest studio visit, Dallas-based painter Jay Chung addresses climate change and challenges perceptions of the human figure.
Dec 09
Colorado artist Terry Maker investigates the potential of discardable items—papers, markers, straws, even candy—by transforming them, through arduous processing, into ethereal yet witty wall reliefs and other objects.
Nov 03
Denver-based artist Trey Duvall explores futility and absurdity as they relate to objects through installation, video, performance, and sculpture.
Oct 29
Studio VisitColoradoVol. 4 Winter 2021
Denver artist Suchitra Mattai challenges Western traditions of painting through her use of culturally specific materials that are informed by the South Asian diaspora.
Oct 29
Studio VisitUtahVol. 4 Winter 2021
New work by Jaclyn Wright explores the contentious space of the Utah desert and how the ideology of ‘rugged individualism’ has visually manifested itself.
Oct 29
Studio VisitArizonaVol. 4 Winter 2021
Raised in the borderlands, Phoenix-based artist Diana Calderón uses materials from Mexico and the U.S. to investigate her ancestral roots and immigrant experience while exploring both physical and spiritual borders.
Oct 26
Oswaldo Maciá, a Santa Fe- and London-based artist, utilizes the unconventional media of smells and sound to provoke questions about coexistence, human borders, and migration.
Oct 21
Malena Barnhart, a Tempe-based artist who uses quirky materials like children’s stickers and party favors, looks for new ways to explore the serial obsessions that drive her creative practice.
Sep 09
“Let me be the conduit:” Jeffrey Wentworth Stevens, a Denver-based jack of most trades and label boss of Multidim Records, talks cassette releases and trading a Snickers for flyer design.
Aug 25
Artist Derrick Velasquez, who is represented by Robischon Gallery and runs Yes Ma’am and Friend of a Friend, is a key pillar in Denver's gallery and DIY scenes.
Mar 26
Nora Wendl applies diverse talents to equally diverse examinations of place, of being a woman moving through the world, and the “poetics of inhabiting things.” Her recent cycles of work examine the Farnsworth House in Illinois—an iconic glass and steel International-Style house.
Dec 01
Lynch makes hand-built, smoke-fired vessels, some as large as five feet tall, others small enough to fit in the hand. Her color palette is minimal and plays the whiteness of the clay against the deep graphite blacks achieved by saggar firing, a process that sometimes also deposits hues of blue and brown. Her work is simple to describe but is not necessarily easy to talk about...
Oct 01
Erin Mickelson’s book-based artwork plays with translation, in every sense of the word. In LIMINAL betwixt/between, her series of work displayed in form & concept’s Superscript show in 2018, text is translated to sound, sound to image, and image fed into an algorithm, chopped up, and assembled into new images. Her collaborating artists are Twitter bots and long-dead authors, and her process a visible part of the product. In everything she makes, there’s a degree of absurdity and flux: how many times can you translate something and still call it the same thing?
Aug 28
The tone of my studio visit with Santa Fe artist Ted Larsen was set early when he declared that he would likely be both circumspect and like a blowtorch when talking about his thoughts on his studio practice, life, and work. Now fifty-five, the trained painter has been showing his art since before he graduated college. By the time he was twenty-two, he had already exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, making big strides early on in a career that has now spanned decades.
Jul 26
Dorielle Caimi’s paintings have been described as absurd, humorous, truthful, and empowered. Those adjectives adequately describe Dorielle the painter, too, though I would add that she is extremely funny, smart as a whip, and masterful in her execution and rendering of the female figure. Both articulate and open in speaking about her work, Dorielle effectively integrates her emotional and physical experiences into her studio practice. Balancing expressive and brutally honest portrayals of the female form with jarring pop-surrealist color, animal characters, and cartoonish elements, she offers viewers something vibrant and complex.
Jun 26
Visiting Stuart Arends’s studio was no quick jaunt. We drove one and a half hours from Santa Fe to Willard, New Mexico, past the town, further down the highway, and just before a specified mile marker where we were to rendez-vous with the artist at an unmarked wire gate...
May 24
Paula Wilson and Mike Lagg live in Carrizozo, New Mexico, a town of about nine hundred residents, located north of White Sands. Paula, who arrived there ten years ago by way of Chicago and New York, and Mike, who settled in the area over thirty years ago, are mainstays of the art community in the region...
Apr 26
Grace Rosario Perkins describes a drawing she had made years ago, taking Black Flag’s Family Man album and replacing Raymond Pettibon’s violent imagery with a repeated series of pencil drawings of women. She then filled out the liner notes with her mother’s name...
Mar 27
Harmony Hammond is lying on the floor beneath one of her paintings, craning her neck within inches of the canvas. “I’m doing edges,” she tells me. I first heard of Hammond when I came across the catalogue for Out West, a 1999 show...
Jun 01
the micro- and the macrocosmic. Having recently opened the show Drawing, Reading, and Counting at Arthur Roger Gallery in New Orleans (May 7 – June 18, 2016), the Texas-born, Santa […]
Nov 27
"Before, I was taught to paint in a traditional, old-school style in Oklahoma. But Santa Fe wasn’t into that. There was lots of activism back then. It was the four hundred year mark of Columbus in the Americas, and there was a certain kind of American Indian Movement (AIM) echo in response. That was my first eye-opener..."
Oct 30
Aaron Honyumptewa imbues his katsina carvings with the traditional ethos of the Hopi people combined with an undercurrent of...
Oct 01
In Karsten Creightney’s painting studio at Sanitary Tortilla Factory in downtown Albuquerque, there is a massive pile of paper scraps: richly colored vintage advertisements, newspaper clippings, blown-out images torn to bits, an array of textures, colors, and weights. This is the stuff of dreams...
Aug 28
It’s not hard to understand why Brandon Maldonado’s paintings are in high demand...
Jul 30
Early in her artistic career, Daisy Quezada came across a real-life scene with all the power of an omen. She and her mother had ventured to their old house in Jalisco, Mexico, which was long abandoned.
Jun 29
As Raychael Stine guided us to her studio on the fringes of the University of New Mexico campus, where she has been an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing for the past five years, I realized that all my questions were actually the same question: Why dogs?
Jun 01
“This rock formation is forty million years old.” Shane Tolbert is guiding me through a narrow passage whose walls contain countless miniscule pebbles and stones—remnants of a mudslide caused by a rush of prehistoric water that cut through the area around the Colorado...
May 01
Spending a morning with Gloria Graham in her drawing studio is like being in the world's most inspiring chemistry class. She speaks with sheer awe about the structures and movements of molecular particles, telling personal anecdotes about carbon and silicon, acting out the effects...
Apr 01
In Colette Hosmer’s living room, a bookcase contains shelves full of jars of turtle bones, porcupine quills, dead insects, and other sundry specimens the artist has collected from the natural world. Having long informed her sculpture practice, these specimens now inspire a...
