In a jam-packed Southwest art season, don’t miss these essential summer 2024 shows in Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah.

The art season lasts year-round in the Southwest, from temperate summer spectacles in Northern New Mexico to contrasting winter wonderlands in Aspen and Phoenix. However, this year’s summer season is particularly packed, even in places where the airport tarmac melts during the warmer months.
Mark your calendar for these seventeen exhibitions across the region that are sure to wield national—and even global—influence. Southwestern art stars are joined by influential voices from Australia, the Arctic, Central America, and beyond in a season swirling with groundbreaking aesthetics and ideas.
Arizona Art Exhibitions
Exploding Native Inevitable
August 10, 2024–January 5, 2025
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
Inspired in part by Andy Warhol’s raucous series of late-1960s happenings Exploding Plastic Inevitable, this group exhibition and performance series presents a snapshot (or Polaroid, if you will) of a young artistic circle in full bloom. Twelve Native artists and two collaboratives participate, including painter Nizhonniya Austin, who appeared on the Showtime series The Curse (2023).
Louis Carlos Bernal: Retrospectiva
September 14, 2024–March 15, 2025
Center for Creative Photography, Tucson
Propelled by the Chicano civil rights movement, Tucson-based photographer Louis Carlos Bernal journeyed across the American Southwest in the 1970s and ’80s, creating vivid and “quietly political” imagery in Mexican American barrio communities. This posthumous retrospective also features Bernal’s early photographic experiments from his travels through Mexico.
Colorado Art Exhibitions
In the House of the Trembling Eye: an exhibition staged by Allison Katz
May 30–September 29, 2024
Aspen Art Museum
In a North American first, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii teams with the Aspen Art Museum to interweave Pompeian pottery shards with contemporary and historical artworks. London-based curator and featured artist Allison Katz replicates the layout of a Greek domus in this group exhibition-cum-installation that marks the museum’s 45th anniversary.
The Life and Art of Tokio Ueyama
July 28, 2024–June 1, 2025
Denver Art Museum
Emigrating from Japan to the U.S. in 1908, Tokio Ueyama attended art school in San Francisco and, following Pearl Harbor, taught art classes at a Japanese American incarceration camp. That dramatic chapter of his life (part of a remarkable legacy of Japanese American artistic practice in the Southwest) is just one passage of this biographical show, featuring over 40 paintings loaned by the Japanese American National Museum and Ueyama’s family.
William Villalongo: Myths and Migrations
September 13–December 20, 2024
University of Colorado Art Museum, Boulder
There are overarching themes in this twenty-year survey by William Villalongo —such as the radiating path of African art appropriation across continents and epochs—but this traveling exhibition is most notable for its dizzying range. Paintings, sculptures, and works on paper document the Brooklyn-based artist’s depictions of Black bodies and experiences in relation to the sciences, mythologies and folklore, pop culture, and art history.

Nevada Art Exhibitions
We Were Lost in Our Country
June 29, 2024–March 23, 2025
Nevada Museum of Art
In 1997, forty men and four women of Ngurrara Aboriginal descent gathered to paint a monumental depiction of their ancestral lands—Ngurarra Canvas II, a memory map and makeshift deed that would serve as evidence in a successful legal claim to get their land back. Drawing its title from a featured video piece about this restorative process by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, this show includes paintings by Great Sandy Desert artists, some of whom contributed to Ngurarra Canvas II.
New Mexico Art Exhibitions
Dominic Porras: Silvery Synthesis
June 15–August 18, 2024
Roswell Museum
The exuberant and defiant sensibility of rasquachismo, a Chicano ethic of material ingenuity, informs the practice of Chicano/Coahuiltec photographer and sculptor Dominick Porras. Photography, sculpture, and digital media collide in this solo exhibition, including a “rasquache” aesthetic that ensnares 35 mm film cassettes in abandoned silkscreen frames strung with netting.
Luchita Hurtado: Earth and Sky Interjected
July 27, 2024–February 23, 2025
Harwood Museum of Art, Taos
Luchita Hurtado is one of many women artists who gained late-in-life fame: in 2019 at age 98, she received a lifetime achievement award, a slot on Time Magazine‘s Time 100 list—and her very first solo exhibition. This posthumous show is a tribute to her profound artistic dynamic with New Mexico, where the California-based painter maintained a residence outside Taos.
Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People
August 16, 2024–March 2, 2025
Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe
In the Arctic, arbitrary political borders were drawn without knowledge of how and why the Sápmi and North American Indigenous cultures moved across the land. Tracing the scars of modern highways and much older but more liminal Indigenous trails, this traveling group exhibition overlaps with the thematically-linked Common Thread: Female Perspectives from the Arctic.
(BE)LOVED
August 8–September 14, 2024
Harwood Art Center, Albuquerque
A nascent collective spanning Arizona and New Mexico, which organically grew from a support network of Black women artists, unites for the first time in this multimedia exhibition. (BE)LOVED includes structuralist sculptural interventions by Kelechi Agwuncha, archive-activating social practice by Elizabeth Burden, and lush, multilayered sculptures by Bianca Gabrielle Goyette.
Virgil Ortiz: Pueblo Revolt
August 10–October 27, 2024
Container, Santa Fe
If you’ve ever witnessed an exhibition or artwork by Virgil Ortiz, it likely links with the sprawling multiverse of Revolt 1680/2180, his dual-timeline chronicle of the 17th century Pueblo Revolt and a speculative revolution in the not-so-distant future. The narrative approaches its dénouement in this action-packed exhibition, which melds photography and sculpture with numerous augmented reality experiences.

Texas Art Exhibitions
Native America: In Translation
August 4, 2024–January 5, 2025
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin
Wendy Red Star, a cornerstone of Native American artistic practice, builds a “road map” of early to mid-career works by nine rising artists. Cheekily peripheralizing museum visitors, Red Star aims her curatorial message at the artists themselves, encouraging talents who are well on their way to reaching her vaunted status.
Hugh Hayden: Homecoming
September 14, 2024–January 5, 2025
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
Ergonomics die at the altar of Hugh Hayden’s sharp sense of humor in his spiky sculptural interpretations of church pews, a dinner table and chairs, a football helmet, and other design objects. Anchored by a large-scale installation inspired by the volunteer-built playground in Duncanville, Texas, known as “Kidsville,” which was demolished in 2023, Hayden’s solo effort thrusts viewers into the built environment of his childhood memories of Dallas.
Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue
August 29, 2024–April 12, 20255
Rubin Center for the Visual Arts
Using the corn industries of the U.S. and Central America as an anchor, this group exhibition traverses regions and decades, examining the cascading effects of international political interventions. Photographic and sculptural objects examine armed engagements in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, and U.S. incursions in Honduras.
Utah Art Exhibitions
In the Shadow of the Wall
June 7–August 18, 2024
Kimball Art Center, Park City
The proverbial shadow of an arbitrary political division tends to cast more shade on one side than the other. In the Shadow of the Wall roams both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border fence, examining “social divisions and economic asymmetries” through the eyes of borderlands artists including Jorge Rojas, Elizabeth Pineda, and Jami Porter Lara.
In Memory
July 5, 2024–February 22, 2025
Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City
Fastidious artistic practices dominate this group exhibition that unfolds like a children’s memory game. Artists including Dario Robleto and Do Ho Suh craft trinkets that harness repetition of form and color for conceptual heft.
Artepaño: Chicano Prisoner Kerchief Art
August 24, 2024–February 1, 2025
Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art
A paño is a fifteen-inch cotton handkerchief—and a window into other worlds for artist-prisoners of Chicano, Mexican American, Latino, and/or Hispanic descent who fill them with elaborate line work. Fifty artworks grace this show, mostly hailing from the world’s most prolific paño collector and featuring imagery that ranges “from saccharine valentines to chilling threats and grand biographical narratives.”
