Don’t miss these essential art exhibitions across the Southwest for fall 2024, featuring major surveys, immersive installations, and artistic dialogues.
School is back in session, and now is the time to study up on these major fall exhibitions around the Southwest. Subjects include: science and art, experimental materials, genealogy and ancestry, ecology and fragility, geopolitics, civic engagement and agency, and immersive installations. But don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz at the end of your museum visit.
Arizona Art Exhibitions
Karima Walker: Graves for the Rain
September 13, 2024 – February 16, 2025
Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson
In Tucson-based Karima Walker’s first solo museum exhibition, the interdisciplinary artist known for her experimental music compositions is filling the east wing with dirt. Over several durational performances, Walker will build an earthen sculpture that doubles as an immersive audio piece—a meditation on the ecological destruction of the drying Santa Cruz River. Catch the next performance this Sunday, November 3, at 2 pm.
Mariana Castillo Deball: The Flames Leave a Feathered Mark on the Clay Spider in the Chamber of Ash and Clay
September 29, 2024 – July 27, 2025
Arizona State University Art Museum, Tempe
Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball brings to her first solo museum presentation in Arizona a newly commissioned installation of hand-built, pit-fired stoneware ceramic sculptures. One work in the exhibition—a fiberglass sculpture of half of an Olmec head—will join the museum’s collection.
David Taylor: COMPLEX
October 19 – December 14, 2024
Pidgin Palace Arts, Tucson
Pidgin Palace’s first exhibition in their re-conceived space, David Taylor will show the latest in his long-running project COMPLEX, the Tucson-based artist’s photographic survey of the built environment of the border and its surveillance apparatus, along with video work, scale models, and stereoview images.
California Art Exhibitions
Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees
September 7 – December 29, 2024
Museum of Art and History, Lancaster
Part of the Getty initiative of Pacific Standard Time (PST ART), themed this year Art & Science Collide, the Lancaster Museum of Art and History has brought in a cadre of contemporary artists considering the “threatened Joshua tree and the fragile Mojave Desert ecosystem that sustains it,” including Adriene Jenik, Chip Thomas (aka Jetsonorama), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Ed Ruscha, Kim Stringfellow, and many more.
Digital Capture: Southern California and the Pixel-Based Image World
September 21, 2024 – February 2, 2025
California Museum of Photography and Culver Center of the Arts, Riverside
This genre-spanning survey of digital image making, which links the inventions of Cold War-era Southern California research laboratories to the ubiquity of digital images in social media, promises to be a fascinating one. Also part of PST ART, Art & Science Collide, the artist roster contains contemporary art heavyweights and web art pioneers, including Lynn Hershman Leeson, Nam June Paik, Trevor Paglen, Penelope Umbrico, Dean Sameshima, Stan VanDerBeek, John Divola, Amir Zaki, and others.
Colorado Art Exhibitions
Lost & Found
October 11 – November 23, 2024
Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Denver
On quite the other side of the spectrum of photographic imaging, Lost & Found, curated by Analog Forever Magazine editors Michael Behlen and Michael Kirchoff, focuses on analog processes in photography. They maintain that these are part of a “passionate analog resurgence” that resists the disconnection of the digital era. Artists include Claire A. Warden, Mark Sink, David Emitt Adams, Rashod Taylor, and other hands-on, traditional, and alt-process photo heads.
Denise Zubizarreta: Descansa en el Poder (Rest In Power)
October 26 – December 1, 2024
RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Denver
Multimedia artist (and SWC contributor) Denise Zubizarreta unveils an immersive experience in RedLine’s project gallery this fall, curated by Tya Anthony, that honors and explores the artist’s complex Caribbean ancestry, delving into the stories of overlooked figures in history, the result of about a decade of research. The installation will take the form of a sacred space, with candles, incense, and audio elements, inviting viewers into a kind of séance with the ancestors.
New Mexico Art Exhibitions
Broken Boxes: A Decade of Art, Action, and Dialogue
September 7, 2024 – March 2, 2025
Albuquerque Museum
Borne from ten years of dialogues with artists who have appeared on Ginger Dunnill’s acclaimed Broken Boxes podcast, this exhibition, curated by Dunnill and Josie Lopez, physically brings these artists’ works—including India Sky Davis, Marie Watt, Saya Woolfalk, Cannupa Hanska Luger, SWOON, Mario Ybarra Jr., and many more—into conversation with each other.
Among Monsters
September 13 – November 30, 2024
Gerald Peters Contemporary, Santa Fe
Among Monsters brings together an impressive group of six artists—Angelica Raquel, Esther Elia, Hank Saxe, Nani Chacon, Peter Rogers, and Gil Rocha—working in and around mythological references “to explore identity, fear, nostalgia, and sociopolitical conditions.”
Nicholas Herrera: El Rito Santero
September 21, 2024 – June 1, 2025
Harwood Museum of Art, Taos
This spellbinding exhibition showcases works by modern master santero Nicholas Herrera, in his first museum exhibition, who was called to become a saint-maker after nearly dying in a car accident at the age of twenty-six.
Carlos Rosales-Silva: Border Destroyer
September 27, 2024 – March 08, 2025
New Mexico State University Art Museum, Las Cruces
Resulting from a two-day visit with students in the NMSU art department in the spring, New York-based artist and educator Carlos Rosales-Silva is back in Las Cruces to install a monumental mural project, entitled Border Destroyer, in the Mullennix Bridge Gallery. The mural critiques “unjust land boundaries and border control while depicting the liberating force of art and education,” incorporating some of the imagery painted by students of Rosales-Silva’s spring seminar, responding to their environment.
The Paseo 2024
October 3 – 6, 2024
Kit Carson Park, Taos
This weekend the Paseo Project is bringing to Taos a 7,000-square-foot inflatable installation, DAEDALUM, created by UK-based artists, Architects of Air, with nineteen chambers of light and color to explore. The free weekend-long event is jam-packed with programming, including silent discos, storytelling, community tents, food carts, dance, art, and STEAM kids’ workshops.
Nevada Art Exhibitions
Laura Esbensen: Soma
October 3 – December 13, 2024
Core Contemporary, Las Vegas
Las Vegas- and San Diego-based artist Laura Esbensen crafts sculptures from a wild array of materials—plastics, epoxies, vinyl, latex, gauze, resin, cinder block, plastic tubing, polymer clay, LED lighting—that are simultaneously organic and artificial, playing on notions of the grotesque.
Texas Art Exhibitions
Julie Speed: The Suburbs of Eden
September 20, 2024 – February 2, 2025
Ballroom Marfa
Ballroom Marfa marks its 20th anniversary this year with an exhibition by nationally recognized, locally based artist Julie Speed. Over seventy intricate and surreal works from the prolific artist, representing decades of work, are on display.
Samara Golden: if earth is the brain then where is the body
September 28, 2024 – January 12, 2025
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden is known for her dizzying installations involving mirrors and meticulously constructed environments. In the Nasher’s lower level gallery, Golden has created a new mind-bending installation—where visitors enter a darkened, “seemingly infinite and fantastic space that appears to open up the ground beneath the museum.”
Johnny DeFeo: Wild America
October 19 – November 30, 2024
Cris Worley Fine Arts, Dallas
Taos-based artist Johnny DeFeo shifts his gaze from landscape spectacle to arrangements of taxidermy, continuing his interrogation into the imagery of the natural world and its constructs within the American imaginary.
Is It Real? Contemporary Artists Address Reproductive Freedom
October 6 – 26, 2024
Lagoon Studio, Dallas
As election-year anxiety ramps up to its zenith in the coming weeks, art around crucial issues gains greater urgency. Curated by Emily Edwards and Sara Hignite, Is It Real? gets its title from an epic, nine-panel 1969 painting by Juanita McNeeley detailing the artist’s harrowing experience obtaining an illegal abortion. The curators have brought together a robust program of performances, talks, films, and readings to accompany the exhibition featuring artists from across the Southern states—where reproductive freedom remains most under attack, hearkening back to the frightening, pre-Roe era that women like McNeeley had to fight to survive.
Utah Art Exhibitions
Russel Albert Daniels: Wild Roses
September 28 – November 8, 2024
Material Gallery, Salt Lake City
Comprising black-and-white photographs and ink drawings, Russel Albert Daniels’s (Diné, Ho-Chunk) exhibition at Material offers a glimpse into the process of his long-term inquiry into Indigenous enslavement in the American West, a process that, in the artist’s words, “leads to heartbreak and pain but [is] also full of love, connection, and healing as it scratches away at generational trauma.”
Figuratively Speaking
October 4 – November 9, 2024
Bountiful Davis Art Center, Bountiful
The Bountiful Davis Art Center is opening a suite of exciting new exhibitions this fall, including Figuratively Speaking, with figurative work by Fidalis Buehler, Andrew Alba, and Richard Taylor in the main gallery, alongside exhibitions of paintings by Wren Ross and photographs by Bryce Olsen, and The Utah Exquisite Corpse Project featuring contributions from fifty-eight Utah artists in the underground gallery.