Catch up on recent art news headlines in the Southwest region, including people on the move, grants, and more.
News
Meow Wolf Co-Founder Passes Away
Matt King, a Meow Wolf co-founder, died last month at age thirty-seven. The Santa Fe Reporter writes that King attended Meow Wolf’s first planning meeting in 2008, and that he was instrumental in opening the art company’s flagship location House of Eternal Returns in Santa Fe as well as Meow Wolf’s Las Vegas and Denver installations. King’s death reverberated across the country via news reports by The Wall Street Journal and other national outlets.
Albuquerque Museum Foundation Returns Indigenous Artifacts to Mexico
Ancient sculptures that had sat in storage for years were returned to their original home in a ceremony last week in Albuquerque. Five months ago, the Albuquerque Museum Foundation discovered a box labeled “pre-Columbian,” according to numerous news reports, and started investigating and attempting to locate the origin of the works. Eventually, states an Albuquerque Museum Foundation release, “Olmec greenstone sculptures, a figure from the city of Zacatecas, bowls that were buried with tombs, and other clay figurines that date back thousands of years” were traced to Mexico and subsequently returned.
New Businesses/Organizations
Scrambled Eggs, Las Vegas, Nevada
A new art space at 1800 Industrial Road, Suite 130, in downtown Las Vegas is centering Latinx artists and voices, reports Double Scoop, which also writes that the gallery’s event-packed calendar includes at least two exhibiting artists per month.
Various Small Fires, Dallas
The commercial contemporary gallery, which began in Los Angeles in 2012, recently unveiled a location within downtown Dallas’ Joule Hotel at 1511 Commerce Street. (VSF’s second gallery, located in Seoul, South Korea, opened in 2019.) Roots, a solo exhibition by Jessie Homer French, is currently on display through August 13, 2022 at VSF Dallas.
Grants and Awards
El Paso’s Rubin Center Receives Mellon Foundation Grant
The Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, located on the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso, recently received $400,000 in financial support from the Mellon Foundation. The Rubin Center plans to use the multi-year grant to support two new full-time positions—a borderlands curator as well as a curator of interdisciplinary education and outreach—and to fund a strategic plan in addition to a series of workshops, educational offerings, publications, and exhibitions dedicated to artists from El Paso and Ciudad Juárez.
Leadership Changes and Appointments
New Staff Members at Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture
