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Editor’s Picks: Southwest Contemporary‘s Winter 2025-26 Art Guide

The Southwest art world doesn’t hibernate. SWC editorial director Jordan Eddy selects thirty-five exhibitions—and three hot trends—for the cold season.

Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country at Georgia O'Keeffe Museum is a must-see show on this list of Southwest art exhibitions winter 2025.
Left to right: Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow, 1945, oil on canvas, 36 x 48 inches. Copyright the artist. Michael Namingha, Disaster #8, 2025, silkscreen on Canvas, 58 x 90 in. Courtesy the artist.

“What are some regional art trends you’ve noticed this year?” asked an audience member at a recent Southwest Contemporary event in Denver. It’s a difficult question, even for a Southwest arts editor who’s supposed to have a bird’s-eye view. I often feel like I’m inside the creative tempest rather than soaring above it, but I managed an answer about time-bending curatorial efforts that compared Once Within a Time at SITE Santa Fe to Gathering Place at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

For our winter 2025-26 exhibition guide, I attempt to identify three tentpole shows that also align with regional trends. This context serves as a launchpad into the state-by-state lists that follow. On that note, here’s a delicious New Year’s resolution: visit at least one exhibition in a neighboring state this winter.

Into the Time Horizon

Nevada Museum of Art, Reno
November 15, 2025–January 3, 2027

Reno is the fastest-warming city in the United States, followed by Las Vegas. This monumental exhibition sounds the alarm for Nevada and the planet, injecting fresh urgency and hope into a discourse that increasingly swings toward nihilism. We still have a “time horizon” for decisive action. The museum-wide display sorts nearly 200 artists into seven phased “thematic sections,” and includes three solo installations by Maya Lin, Ernesto Neto, and Pierre Huyghe. Into the Time Horizon folds into a larger curatorial current in our beleaguered region: exhibitions that reflect the enormity of the climate crisis through dizzying scale.

Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country

Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe
November 7, 2025–September 7, 2026

The two-year curatorial process for Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country was akin to an eclipse: inch by inch, the “Pueblo world” overtook “O’Keeffe Country.”  Co-curators Jason Garcia (an artist of Santa Clara Pueblo) and Bess Murphy (the museum’s curator of art and social practice) invited creative practitioners from the six Tewa Pueblos of Northern New Mexico to interrogate Georgia O’Keeffe’s frequent claims of ownership of their ancestral lands. It’s a remarkable moment for an institution that has reflexively sheltered its namesake—and a bellwether for inspired institutional reform across the Southwest.

Les Sembrantes

Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, El Paso
January 29–April 11, 2026

The four artists of Les Sembrantes—”the sowers”—each participated in La Semilla Food Center’s annual Desert Cultural Fellowship in Anthony, New Mexico. For this exhibition, they effectively collectivize to plant a sociocultural idea of the “border’s edge as a fertile ground for understanding the whole.” The reframing of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands—from (only) a site of political friction to a generative cultural seam—echoes other recent frontera-spanning projects.

Eric Fischl's exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum is a must-see show on this list of Southwest art exhibitions winter 2025.
Eric Fischl, Barbeque, 1982, oil on canvas, 65 x 100 in. Courtesy and copyright the artist. Collection of Steve Martin and Anne Stringfield.

Arizona Art Exhibitions

Colorado Art Exhibitions

New Mexico Art Exhibitions

Nevada Art Exhibitions

Texas Art Exhibitions

Utah Art Exhibitions

Lucy R. Lippard: Notes from the Radical Whirlwind at Vladem Contemporary is a must-see show on this list of Southwest art exhibitions winter 2025.
Political and protest buttons by unknown makers from Lucy R. Lippard: Notes from the Radical Whirlwind at Vladem Contemporary. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Lucy R. Lippard.

Jordan Eddy

Jordan Eddy (he/him) is the editorial director of Southwest Contemporary. He is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he also works as an independent writer and curator.

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Jordan Eddy

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