The fevered tone of the national political discourse aligns with the Southwest art world, where thirty-six top exhibitions forecast frenetic, empowered conversations this fall.
September 10, 2026
Daniel and Maruca Salazar’s retrospective Accidentally on Purpose - Pasó lo que tenía que pasar at Museo de las Americas celebrates fifty years of Chicano art and activism in Denver.
September 04, 2026
In Historia Sintética at Dallas Contemporary, Francisco Moreno blends history and fantasy to shape a surreal new reality.
September 04, 2026
As the U.S. hits a major anniversary, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture gathers American imagery with Indigenous origins.
September 04, 2026
Kimball Art Center makes space for this group exhibition to zero in on our ears—and it's all-consuming.
September 04, 2026
"We turn backward to move forward," explains the collective Hilma’s Ghost. Their work challenges erasure in the art historical canon and foregrounds female, queer, and trans artists.
September 04, 2026
With Artist Hopid Unveiled, the Museum of Northern Arizona celebrates the shared cultural voice of the groundbreaking Indigenous artist collective founded in the 1970s.
August 25, 2026
Esotericism and activism collide in A Queer Arcana, a wide-ranging exhibition of art and ephemera from the LGBTQ+ underground, part of the Palm Springs Art Museum's Q+ Art Initiative.
August 20, 2026
At UMOCA, Eleanor Mahin Thorp turns minerals, mining waste, and paint into wildernesses that are far from unspoiled—rather, they’re charged with agency.
August 13, 2026
From flipping houses to crashing cars, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People presents a forty-year survey of playful and provocative artworks by Mary Ellen Carroll.
July 23, 2026
Retraction: This review of The Rest Is Drag at 516 Arts has been removed.
July 14, 2026
As the nation marks 250 years this July, SWC arts editor Natalie Hegert picks thirty-two exhibitions that offer an antidote to the flag-waving displays of patriotism.
June 29, 2026
Run the Code explores technological obsolescence, interactivity, and the limits of software as an artmaking tool, revealing a data-driven approach to conceptual art.
June 18, 2026
Chase a Crooked Shadow, a blockbuster group show in Dallas, yanks a cinematic trope from the nostalgic fog into an equally murky present.
June 02, 2026
Into the Time Horizon, the largest exhibition ever mounted at the Nevada Museum of Art, addresses the accelerating climate crisis and ways we might combat it.
May 19, 2026
Arizona Biennial 2026, juried by BAMPFA's Julie Rodrigues Widholm, opens May 22 with thirty-one artists working across the state. On view through September 27.
May 13, 2026
With disarming, familiar objects like coloring books and furniture, Sable Elyse Smith’s Clockwork at The Contemporary Austin exposes how race and the carceral system shape identity.
May 05, 2026
Clever conceit or curatorial cop-out? In Cassidy Araiza / Robert Barry / Jocko Weyland, experiment and open-endedness might be the objective.
April 21, 2026
Yes &..., curated by Tobias Fike and Donald Fodness, advocates for human ingenuity in the face of AI ascendance. But is that a sufficient curatorial framework?
April 02, 2026
Looking for a spiritual awakening this spring? Arts editor Natalie Hegert traces a visionary and esoteric throughline among thirty-seven of this season’s top exhibitions.
March 27, 2026
Tierras Reimaginadas: Migration at ASU Art Museum centers immigrant voices and reimagines migration across species, cultures, geographies, and time.
March 26, 2026
At Ballroom Marfa, five Latinx artists scramble Marfa's mythologies with humor and ferocity. They leave behind a mural, and a challenge.
March 20, 2026
Artwork by Maya Lin and Ernesto Neto soft launch Into the Time Horizon at the Nevada Museum of Art, examining local and global environmental concerns.
March 20, 2026
Phoenix Art Museum presents forty paintings by Eric Fischl, a New Yorker who seems magnetically drawn to the Valley of the Sun—in all its joy and strangeness.
March 20, 2026
Filled with beauty, tragedy, and oddities, UMOCA’s Altered States in the Acid West encompasses the storied contractions inherent to the American West.
March 20, 2026
ReviewNew MexicoVol. 13 The Road
Lucy R. Lippard: Notes from the Radical Whirlwind traces the sixty-year career of one of the most humane and lucid arts writers of a generation.
March 20, 2026
How can art plumb the depths of an aquifer? Abby Flanagan’s exhibition design in To Move Through Stone activates the peripheries to visualize the intangible flows of an ecological system.
March 12, 2026
Adama Delphine Fawundu submerses herself into the Great Salt Lake, activates the UMFA’s African collection, and brings the region into a global dialogue around decolonization.
February 19, 2026
In the cyclonic installation Rush, Gary Simmons critically blurs history, cinema, and Western propaganda. He also makes space for wishful grief.
February 05, 2026
The Southwest art world doesn't hibernate. SWC editorial director Jordan Eddy selects thirty-five exhibitions—and three hot trends—for the cold season.
December 16, 2025
