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.
April 07, 2022
Galveston, Texas artist Nick Barbee uses the process of abstraction in recounting American history and personal experiences in his paintings, sculpture, and installation.
April 05, 2022
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.
March 24, 2022
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.
March 08, 2022
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.
March 03, 2022
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.
February 25, 2022
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.
February 25, 2022
Political organizer and artist Szu-Han Ho of Albuquerque builds coalitions and breaks down institutionalized barriers.
February 23, 2022
Laredo, Texas native Angelica Raquel Martínez continues her familial legacy of storytelling in works on paper and textile installations.
February 22, 2022
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.
February 15, 2022
Albuquerque-based artist Jennifer Nehrbass paints the nature of landscapes to challenge ideas of what is real.
January 31, 2022
Denver artist Sammy Seung-Min Lee engages paper through unique and distinct processes in creating wall pieces, architectural installations, artist books, and performances.
January 18, 2022
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.
January 07, 2022
A handy roundup of Southwest Contemporary's studio visits with Southwest artists in 2021.
December 27, 2021
In our latest studio visit, Dallas-based painter Jay Chung addresses climate change and challenges perceptions of the human figure.
December 21, 2021
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.
December 09, 2021
Denver-based artist Trey Duvall explores futility and absurdity as they relate to objects through installation, video, performance, and sculpture.
November 03, 2021
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.
October 29, 2021
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.
October 29, 2021
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.
October 29, 2021
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.
October 26, 2021
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.
October 21, 2021
“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.
September 09, 2021
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.
August 25, 2021
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.
March 26, 2020
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...
December 01, 2019
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?
October 01, 2019
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.
August 28, 2019
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.
July 26, 2019
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...
June 26, 2019
