Work in Progress with Zac Travis
AI tools just hit the mainstream, but Albuquerque-based artist Zac Travis has been messing with them for years—in trippy, analog ways.
October 03, 2024
Articles
Study Up: Here is Southwest Contemporary’s Fall 2024 Art Guide
Don’t miss these essential art exhibitions across the Southwest for fall 2024, featuring major surveys, immersive installations, and artistic dialogues.
October 02, 2024
Southwest Art News: October 2024
New contemporary art centers in Dallas and Santa Fe, and other recent Southwest art news headlines.
October 01, 2024
In Dario Robleto’s The Signal, Love is Imperative
Dario Robleto’s wide-ranging reach—in which the deepest interiors and most distant exteriors mix with popular culture and early analog media—is getting more articulate with each pass.
September 27, 2024
Work in Progress with Shawn Skabelund
Flagstaff-based artist Shawn Skabelund returns to the storm-swept ravine that birthed his latest show—and explains what a squirrel stick is—in an intrepid studio visit.
September 26, 2024
Film and Aboriginal Paintings at Nevada Museum of Art Celebrate the Ngurrara People’s Successful Land Reclamation
The U.S. debut of a documentary by Tuan Andrew Nguyen potently combines with the museum's recent gift of Aboriginal paintings in We Were Lost in Our Country.
September 24, 2024
Immersive Exhibitions Redefine Art and Language at MOCA Tucson
Graves for the Rain and 500 Places at Once blend sound, performance, and poetry engaging visitors in ecological narratives. On view through February 16, 2025.
September 24, 2024
Turning up the Heat: Inside the Controversy Sparked by Drag, Censorship, and Public Funding in a West Texas City
When the Lubbock City Council defunded a popular art event for promoting the “LGBT Agenda,” confirming fears of repressive drag bans in Texas, the art community got fired up.
September 20, 2024
Mourn the Dead, Fight for the Living: How Should Salt Lake City’s Fleet Block Murals Be Commemorated?
The artists and families tied to soon-to-be-demolished Salt Lake City murals depicting people slain by police diverge on how best to preserve their legacy.
September 19, 2024
16th Annual Santa Fe Studio Tour
More than 100 local artists will open their studios on September 21–22 and 28–29, 11 am-5 pm, at various locations across Santa Fe.
September 18, 2024
How Do We Remember? How Do We Forget? In Memory Explores Remembrance Through Body and Mind
In Memory presents the work of twenty-one artists who excavate the archives of remembrance to reveal how humans document, distort, and cling to the past.
September 17, 2024
The Youth are Our Future: the Hamrah Arts Club Brings Refugee Youth Together on a Journey of Self-Expression
The Hamrah Arts Club, founded by artist Nazafarin Lotfi, uses art and creative expression to foster solidarity between refugee and asylum-seeking communities for youth in Tucson.
September 13, 2024
Longtime New Yorker Paulina Ho Suddenly Started Painting—and Pining for—the Southwest
Santa Fe-based designer and artist Paulina Ho’s work tilts reality to find pleasure in the everyday absurdities of her new Southwestern environs.
September 12, 2024
Land Forms, The Paintings of Robert R. Compton at James Compton Gallery
Experience the vibrant landscape paintings this September in Santa Fe. On view September 13–29, 2024.
September 11, 2024
A Double Prism Materializes on Canyon Road through REDHORN and When The Earth Was Young
At Smoke the Moon, two exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous artists consider histories of specific geographies and foster a dialogue countering today’s apocalyptic cynicism.
September 10, 2024
Concurrent Exhibitions at the UMFA Highlight Impressionism and Photography’s Mutual Influence
Together, Blue Grass, Green Skies and Photo-Secession present a unique dialogue between painting and photography in new Salt Lake City exhibitions. On view through December 29, 2024.
September 10, 2024
FeatureNew MexicoVol. 10 Radical Futures
Virgil Ortiz: Historical Memory, Indigenous Futurisms, and the Art of Storytelling in 2180
Drawing from his community’s roots in social commentary, Virgil Ortiz crafts a future without limitations, and his epic series Revolt 1680/2180 reaches a climax this fall.
September 06, 2024
Studio VisitNew MexicoVol. 10 Radical Futures
Mallery Quetawki: Circulatory Systems + Translational Aesthetics
Mallery Quetawki paints cross-cultural translations that help bridge futures between Indigenous communities and science and medical professionals.
September 06, 2024
Studio VisitNew MexicoVol. 10 Radical Futures
Jason Garcia: The Futurism of Narrative Change
In bold pop culture style, Santa Clara Pueblo artist Jason Garcia envisions Native futures by challenging narratives that have always kept us in the past.
September 06, 2024
Studio VisitColoradoVol. 10 Radical Futures
Lydia Andrew Farrell: Reimagining the Suburbs
It's Halloween everyday and outsiders rule the streets in hypersaturated paintings by Denver suburbanite Lydia Andrew Farrell.
September 06, 2024
FeatureUtahVol. 10 Radical Futures
Red Planet Role-Play at the Mars Desert Research Station
At the Mars Desert Research Station near Hanksville, Utah, scientists conduct experiments as if they are on the Red Planet, the only caveat being that they aren’t.
September 06, 2024
FeatureSouthwestVol. 10 Radical Futures
Radical Architecture, Radical Imagination: How Will We Live in a Hotter, More Arid Future?
Science fiction authors have provided many visions of dystopian futures in the Southwest. Can architects help avert such disastrous outcomes?
September 06, 2024
FeatureArizonaVol. 10 Radical Futures
The Ants of Biosphere 2
Seeking fresh hope in the 20th-century futurisms of Arizona architectural marvels Biosphere 2, Taliesin West, and Arcosanti.
September 06, 2024
FeatureNevadaVol. 10 Radical Futures
Emily Budd Breaks the Mold: Founder of the Foundry Project Aluminati
Emily Budd, founder of Aluminati, challenges the norms of monument-making, advocating for diversity and inclusion in public art.
September 06, 2024
Fires Fires
"Fires Fires" is a personal essay by Caitlin Lorraine Johnson about the effect of global uncertainty on the small scale of a life.
September 06, 2024
EssayTexasVol. 10 Radical Futures
Farewell to Giants: The Uncertain Futures of Two Crumbling Land Art Works
Jon Revett compares and contrasts two monumental works of art, Amarillo Ramp and Cadillac Ranch, and discusses their possible futures.
September 06, 2024
InterviewColoradoVol. 10 Radical Futures
“I don’t think there’s going to be any future that’s not radical”: an interview with Pamela Zoline
Pamela Zoline speaks with Noah Travis Phillips about the Colorado Plateau, recent work, and the science that excites her.
September 06, 2024
WritingsColoradoRadical Futures
The Life-Warmth of the Universe
Noah Travis Phillips’s more optimistic, queer, and contemporary “cover” of Pamela Zoline’s feminist collage sci-fi classic “The Heat Death of the Universe.”
September 06, 2024
Accidental Utopia: An Introduction to Radical Futures
In Southwest Contemporary Vol. 10: Radical Futures, curator and conceptual artist Ian Breidenbach ruminates on creative agency and utopian praxis as the guest juror for this issue.
September 06, 2024
ArtistsTexasVol. 10 Radical Futures
Bonny Leibowitz: Radical Futures
Texas-based artist Bonny Leibowitz creates hybridized installations of natural and manufactured materials that reflect the impacts of isolation, environmental degradation, and human conflict.
September 06, 2024
