Southwest art exhibitions to hit the road for this summer in Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah.
Southwest Contemporary‘s guide to summer 2022 exhibitions includes Indigenous fashion in Santa Fe, Frank Lloyd Wright designs in Denver, and experimental installation works in Amarillo. If these seventeen exhibitions are not tantalizing enough to reel you in, the promise of museum-grade climate control definitely will. Either way, we hope these longer days will gift you longer art viewing.
Arizona Art Exhibitions
New Earthworks
April 9–September 25, 2022
ASU Art Museum, Tempe
David Brooks, Carolina Caycedo, Desert Artlab (April Bojorquez and Matt Garcia), Hope Ginsburg, Scott Hocking, Mary Mattingly, Sam Van Aken, and Steven Yazzie tackle issues related to biodiversity and environmental equity while re-centering Indigenous knowledge in a visual conversation that envisions new systems to address climate change.
Kenneth Tam: Silent Spikes
May 14, 2022–February 5, 2023
Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson
Kenneth Tam’s two-channel video installation with accompanying photographs investigates the confluences of masculinity, race, and labor, and reflects on the underrepresented relationship between histories of westward expansion and Chinese immigration in the United States.
California Art Exhibitions
Pattern Play: The Contemporary Designs of Jacqueline Groag
May 12–November 20, 2022
Palm Springs Art Museum
The late British fashion designer Jacqueline Groag wanted to brighten the monochromatic hues that seemed to accompany the era of world wars. She did just that after World War II, injecting home furnishing fabrics and fashion textiles with vibrant patterns and colors. Pattern Play displays her original drawings and collages alongside her bold textile designs.
Colorado Art Exhibitions
Ursula von Rydingsvard: The Contour of Feeling
April 30–September 11, 2022
Denver Botanic Gardens
Ursula von Rydingsvard’s heft as a sculptor—she’s known for towering cedar and bronze public outdoor sculptures—is on display in a show that features sculptural pieces and works on paper.
Floyd D. Tunson: Ascent
June 9–August 28, 2022
Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities
June 10–July 31, 2022
RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver
This major survey exhibition, spread across two art venues, compiles work from the last five decades by Floyd D. Tunson, a Colorado contemporary artist and public-school educator who has “prodigiously, fearlessly, and innovatively created art from his keen cultural perspective, taking on identity, race, and history in a number of series,” according to a press release.
Frank Lloyd Wright Inside the Walls
June 17, 2022–January 8, 2023
Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative Art, Denver
This survey exhibition focuses on the famed American architect’s lesser-known design works, ranging from tableware to furniture.
New Mexico Art Exhibitions
Bigger Than This Room
April 29–July 30, 2022
form and concept, Santa Fe
The group exhibition featuring works by living and departed-from-this-planet artists (including Robert Smithson) reframes Land Art in the American West via small objects that reference famous and lesser-known land works.
Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric
May 6–September 11, 2022
SITE Santa Fe
The Body Electric, a solo exhibition that catalogues the multi-decade practice of Jeffrey Gibson (who is a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and is half Cherokee), includes paintings, sculptures, installation, and the commissioned large-scale mural THE LAND IS SPEAKING ARE YOU LISTENING.
Nathaniel Tetsuro Paolinelli: Downtown
June 11–September 3, 2022
516 Arts, Albuquerque
Nathaniel Tetsuro Paolinelli’s exhibition features portraiture, candid images, and documentation of downtown Albuquerque’s lowrider scene between 2018 and 2022.
Art of Indigenous Fashion
August 19, 2022–January 8, 2023
Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe
The exhibition features more than twenty Indigenous designers from Canada and the United States, and “offers insights into the approaches and perspectives of Indigenous designers beyond the visual and material qualities of their work,” MoCNA explains.
Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery
July 31, 2022–May 28, 2023
Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe
More than 100 historic and contemporary works of Pueblo pottery will be on display in Grounded in Clay, which is curated by the Pueblo Pottery Collective in collaboration with the collections of Santa Fe’s School for Advanced Research and New York’s Vilcek Foundation. Read more about Grounded in Clay—which will feature objects from the nineteen New Mexico Pueblos, Ysleta del Sur Pueblo of Texas, and the Hopi Tribe of Arizona—in a Southwest Contemporary story by Will Riding In (Pawnee/Santa Ana Pueblo).
Texas Art Exhibitions
Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene
April 1–August 31, 2022
Rice University Solar Studios, Houston
The Houston Justice Climate Museum and Cultural Center, a central gathering spot in the East End that’s engaged in the arts, environmental issues, social sciences, and grassroots action, presents this physical exhibition of a digital humanities project that “charts the stories of feral entities which emerge through human infrastructure projects but go beyond human control.”
Bottomland
May 14–September 24, 2022
Sweet Pass Sculpture Park, Dallas
An exhibition in the Dallas sculpture park features works by artists who participated in a two-week program offered by the Sweet Pass Sculpture School, in which participants learned about the vanishing Texas Blackland Prairie and interrogated the reasons behind the loss of this natural ecoregion.
Catherine Czacki: start over spirit
June 4–June 30, 2022
Lasso Gallery at Caliche Co., Amarillo
The Las Vegas, New Mexico-based artist, educator, writer, and musician showcases her paintings and craft-based works, ranging from ceramic sculptures to floor works and hanging tapestries. “She pushes the viewer when she’s working with galleries so it’s a very experimental hang,” says Kegan Hollis of Lasso Gallery at Caliche Co.
Utah Art Exhibitions
Laura Sharp Wilson: Chiasma
May 25–September 23, 2022
Granary Arts, Ephraim
Chiasma by Salt Lake City-based artist Laura Sharp Wilson “explores the chronology of Wilson’s process from her in-depth study of textile design, to later apprenticeships in the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, to her present practice,” according to a press release, and showcases her acrylic paintings on mulberry paper alongside never-before-exhibited works. (Southwest Contemporary contributor Scotti Hill curated this show.)
Ya La’ford’s Survey: The West
June 3–July 24, 2022
Ogden Contemporary Arts
Survey: The West by Ya La’ford, who is an OCA artist in residence and social practice artist from New York, is a multimedia exhibition featuring painting, sculpture, and video. The show gives viewers an opportunity to renew traditional viewpoints of the West and “reconsider our relationship to the boundaries shaped in the landscape through geological forces and defined by the early pioneers.”
Air
July 16–December 11, 2022
Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City
The work of sixteen regional and worldwide artists, poets, engineers, and designers—including Ai Weiwei, Julianknxx, Cara Romero, Diego Romero, Anna Tsouhlarakis, and Will Wilson—seeks to illuminate how air connects humans to one another and to Planet Earth.
For more shows, peruse Southwest Contemporary’s exhibitions page, which is updated with new listings weekly.
