Southwest botanical gardens have reshaped their grounds as living museums for stunning—and challenging—contemporary art. Discover seven culture-filled desert oases.
July 03, 2025
Field Report2025 New Mexico Field GuideTravel
Your complete art guide to discover Las Cruces, New Mexico's hidden art scene, with local galleries, craft markets, outdoor adventures, and authentic dining.
May 23, 2025
Travel2025 New Mexico Field Guide
Cognition Enhancer in Santa Fe is a colorful public sculpture, molecular puzzle, and wild local legend all in one.
May 23, 2025
Travel2025 New Mexico Field Guide
Sol LeWitt's sculpture A Square, A Circle on the New Mexico State University campus is the famed Minimal and Conceptual artist's only outdoor, site-specific work in New Mexico.
May 23, 2025
Travel2025 New Mexico Field Guide
The Spencer Theater, with its soaring form echoing the surrounding mountains, exemplifies Antoine Predock’s design philosophy.
May 23, 2025
Travel2025 New Mexico Field Guide
The Couse-Sharp Historic Site invites visitors to step into the living legacy of Taos’s early art colony—and consider Taos Pueblo's influence on every brushstroke.
May 23, 2025
Travel2025 New Mexico Field Guide
The Scottish Rite Masonic Temple may be home to a private fraternity, but its ornate theater welcomes all.
May 23, 2025
Travel2025 New Mexico Field Guide
The Coronado Historic Site contains more than 2,000 years of history, pre-contact Puebloan murals, and impressive views of the Rio Grande and surrounding mountains.
May 23, 2025
Travel2025 New Mexico Field Guide
The folksy-but-formidable Deming Luna Mimbres Museum houses impressive collections, from Mimbres pottery to historical photographs.
May 23, 2025
Field ReportArizonaTravelVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Some of best art offerings in metro Phoenix happen off the beaten path. Here’s our eclectic Phoenix art guide.
March 07, 2025
Field Report2024 New Mexico Field GuideNew MexicoTravel
"Come for the aliens, stay for the art!" sums up the compelling reasons to visit Roswell, New Mexico—a mecca for UFO culture and contemporary art.
May 24, 2024
Travel2023 New Mexico Field Guide
WNMU Museum in Silver City, New Mexico, occupies a historic building and houses one of the largest collections of Mimbres pottery and artifacts in the world, as well as other prehistoric Southwestern pottery and artifacts.
May 26, 2023
Travel2023 New Mexico Field Guide
Santa Fe’s Chapel of Light is designed to inspire a sense of unity across peoples and beliefs, and features a naturally occurring solstice lightshow.
May 26, 2023
Travel2023 New Mexico Field Guide
Stardreaming is a twenty-two-acre site just outside of Santa Fe created by visionary artist James Jereb.
May 26, 2023
Travel2023 New Mexico Field Guide
The Monastery of Christ in the Desert is host to a community of Benedictine monks in the magnificent Chama Canyon and was designed by famous designer and woodworker George Nakashima.
May 26, 2023
Travel2023 New Mexico Field Guide
Fans of midcentury designer Alexander Girard will enjoy exploring the Pritzker Student Center at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
May 26, 2023
Travel2023 New Mexico Field Guide
Dwan Light Sanctuary is a prismatic art installation in Las Vegas, New Mexico conceived by influential arts patron Virginia Dwan.
May 26, 2023
Travel2023 New Mexico Field Guide
The Henge by Herb Goldman, a peculiar outdoor structure akin to a reconstituted Stonehenge, announces Roswell as a robust arts scene facilitated by the late Donald B. Anderson.
May 26, 2023
Land Art scholar Hikmet Loe has visited and studied Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, and other earthworks for decades. She returned to a handful this summer—and found cause for concern.
August 16, 2022
Art meets nature in four Colorado gardens and outdoor installations—creating space for meditative contemplation and divine catharsis at Aspen Art Museum, Chatfield Farms, Greenbox Arts, and the San Luis Valley.
August 08, 2022
Field Report2022 New Mexico Field GuideTravel
Hannah Dean visits Hills Snyder and shares some of the local lore, food, art, and books from Magdalena, New Mexico.
May 27, 2022
From Banksy prints in Austin to skateboard decks in Phoenix, you’ll find intriguing art at airports across the Southwest, so leave a little time for looking during your holiday travels.
December 22, 2021
Maggie Grimason's guide to Joshua Tree and other High Desert towns, a deeply weird region where art, energies, and aliens are as commonplace as tie-dye and scrub oak.
October 28, 2021
It should be on everyone’s bucket list. Silver City. It sounds like a romantic vestige of another time. I didn’t realize how much so until I turned off the highway and onto a deliciously winding drive through the Black Range and into the Gila National Forest and Pinos Altos Mountains.
August 28, 2019
Downtown Juárez still feels gutted since the demolition of its nightclubs and the shuttering of so many businesses and markets, but among the ruins you can experience—if, I will stress, you have a Juarense to guide you—a lively community trying to find itself and its sense of vitality and ownership over the space again...
April 26, 2019
Whatever all of this change ultimately means for Denver as an arts and culture community and market is to be determined. But even in the space of four years, my experience of the city as an arts destination has changed. I previously felt charmed and thrilled to stumble upon a scrappy operation in the then-industrial RiNo district, but now that district has gentrified to the point of pushing many of those emergent art spaces out...
November 27, 2018
If you’ve read Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe—or felt the difference between mud and stucco...
August 28, 2018
For us the journey to Naoshima, the art island of Japan in the Seto Inland Sea, will necessarily be long. You’ll have taken a plane or two or three, a Shinkansen, a train, a bus, a ferry, a shuttle. You’ll have overcome the inevitable travel dramas of buying the right...
June 02, 2018
I keep waiting for New Mexico to embrace the taco. I love a burrito as much as the next guy, and the enchiladas at La Choza are life-changing, but with so much green chile and red chile flowing here in Santa Fe, the taco and its valiant hero, salsa, have been eclipsed. I visited...
April 01, 2018
To borrow a word used by Peruvian artist William Cordova to describe a wall-sized projection of open ocean in a screening room within his show, I think of Marfa as a portal...
November 01, 2017
