Unpacking the Uneasy Cultural Hybridity of Paula Castillo’s Denver Monoliths
In Paula Castillo's three new public artworks across downtown Denver, cultural fusion is an optimistic and ideologically risky proposition.
January 15, 2026
essay
Why Write About Art at the End of the World?
At the unofficial wake of a legendary art magazine, a SWC editor weighs the real-world purpose of arts journalism.
December 18, 2025
All Vibes Must Die: Industry and Virality in the Lisa Frank Warehouse
Lisa Frank, headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, offers up a rainbow-bedazzled mirror to the emptiness of the American dream.
September 05, 2025
Texas Artist Michael Tracy Channeled the Violence and Transcendence of the Borderlands
Late artist Michael Tracy hit the Texas border village of San Ygnacio like a "cyclone." His creative aggression melded with an empathic awareness of his adopted home.
May 29, 2025
Time Zero: How Radical Artistic Interventions Are Exposing the Nuclearized World
Time Zero podcast producer Sean J Patrick Carney on art and the nuclearized world, from the hyperlocal of the Trinity site to the planetary effects of nuclearism.
March 11, 2025
EssayNew MexicoVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Center of the Universe: Agency and Ecology in a 77-Degree October
Bruce Nauman’s Center of the Universe on the campus of the University of New Mexico inspires a personal ritual and creative essay that asks us to reconnect to the environment and ourselves.
March 07, 2025
EssayUtahVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
The Neon Guardian of Ogden: A Familial Origin Story
How a lost-and-found neon dragon on Ogden's main drag shaped one family's mythology—and captured a community's heart.
March 07, 2025
EssayNew MexicoVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Rolling into the Here-and-Now with Jesse Littlebird’s Petrolglyph
Jesse Littlebird’s Petrolglyph moves in place, expanding horizons on the future of New Mexican lowriding and American car culture through Indigenous art.
March 07, 2025
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
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
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
Sifting Family Lore and Life Advice from the Files of Taos Moderns Beatrice Mandelman and Louis Ribak
Newly discovered letters revive a writer's quest to discern why two Taos-based modernist artists had an outsized impact on her family—but not art history.
August 23, 2024
Art at the End of the World: A Day at the Bombay Beach Biennale
The Bombay Beach Biennale along Southern California’s Salton Sea is an insurgent arts festival and ongoing ecological discourse.
April 23, 2024
Memory and Meaning: Histories of Violence in Dallas’s Public Monuments
In this psychogeographic account, Emma S. Ahmad wanders the West End Historic District in downtown Dallas and considers how the various memorials reflect the shifting political landscape of the city.
April 05, 2024
EssayUtahVol. 9 Living Histories
A Fluid History Set in Stones, Springs, and Rivers
In this essay, nicholas b jacobsen braids together ongoing histories of Mormon and U.S. settler colonialism and genocide against Nuwu and Diné peoples at Pipe Spring National Monument and Lake Powell.
March 01, 2024
FeatureTexasVol. 8 Medium + Support
Soy de Tejas: Home as open permeable itinerant and metaphysical?
JD Pluecker explores the artworks of five artists in the exhibition Soy de Tejas, looking at issues of home and belonging in Texas.
September 01, 2023
WritingsVol. 7 Finding Water in the West
A shell. A picture. A fish.
Laura Neal reflects on her earliest memories of water and the profound presence water has for humanity as a whole.
March 03, 2023
