Charlie Chaplin’s Cabin, and Western Mythologies, Teeter on the Edge at Cookie Factory
In the cyclonic installation Rush, Gary Simmons critically blurs history, cinema, and Western propaganda. He also makes space for wishful grief.
February 05, 2026
installation
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
The Medium is their Message: Compulsion and Identity in Zion
Artists Stephanie Leitch, Angela Ellsworth, and Nancy Rivera use materially obsessive processes to reflect on the mythos of Utah.
September 05, 2025
FeatureSouthwestThe Hyperlocal
Exiled Artist Named “War and Peace” Never Gave Up Faraway Fight for Democracy
Two fires marked Burmese artist Sitt Nyein Aye’s life. After his tragic death in Colorado, a tribute to his "Little Myanmar" of the Southwest.
August 21, 2025
Peek Inside Mysterious Southwest Land Artworks You May Never Visit
From James Turrell’s Roden Crater in Arizona to Charles Ross’s Star Axis in New Mexico, some Southwest land art is stubbornly elusive.
August 14, 2025
Guide to the SITE Santa Fe International: Every Artist, Venue, and Special Project
SITE’s citywide exhibition Once Within a Time is about surreal flow—not completionism. Here’s your primer, with tips from insiders Cecilia Alemani and Brandee Caoba.
June 24, 2025
In Tulsa, an Ambitious Exhibition Asks Us to Hold onto Our Roots, While Drifting Toward the Future
Drift///Hold is the ambitious inaugural exhibition of Central Standard in Tulsa with major new works by five compelling early-career artists.
April 11, 2025
Caroline Liu’s Chinese Garden is Not as Sweet as It Looks. And That’s Good.
Caroline Liu’s exhibition lures you in then hits you with a one-two punch about erased histories and Asian marginalization.
April 02, 2025
ArtistsColoradoVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
The Hyperlocal: Sammy Lee
Denver-based artist Sammy Lee makes highly portable sculptures from paper, but a longing for home is embedded in her materials.
March 07, 2025
ArtistsArizonaVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
The Hyperlocal: Urgent Care Art
Urgent Care Art’s pop-ups in quotidian Tucson spaces juxtapose the healing and fear inherent to queer visibility.
March 07, 2025
ArtistsTexasVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
The Hyperlocal: Antonio Lechuga
Antonio Lechuga shrouds spaces in vibrant fleece blankets called cobijas, offering care, comfort, and commentary on gun violence.
March 07, 2025
ReviewColoradoVol. 11 The Hyperlocal
Ugo Rondinone’s Aspen Show is a Decadent Confection that Knows its Audience
Ugo Rondinone, creator of Las Vegas’s Seven Magic Mountains, returns to the American West with more rainbows and a light touch.
March 07, 2025
UMFA’s Copper-Infused Riverbed Installation Surfaces Shimmering Visuals from Poisoned Depths
Yasuaki Onishi's site-specific installation Stone on Boundary poetically links Japan and Utah's mountains, rivers—and entanglements in the mining industry.
February 18, 2025
In an Artery of New York Commerce, Diné Artist Eric-Paul Riege Plays with “the Real and Fake”
New Mexico–based artist Eric-Paul Riege chose Canal Street, a commercial thoroughfare and counterfeit market, to question notions of material value in his first New York solo exhibition.
February 11, 2025
Beautiful Corners: A Road Trip to Witness Larry Bell’s First Cube, and His Last
Artist Jon Revett makes a pilgrimage to see his mentor Larry Bell's career retrospective in Phoenix, and view what the Light and Space master calls his last cube in Taos.
January 30, 2025
Flowers as Hammers: A Project to Build Up Black Men Started With One Man’s Crisis
Robert Washington-Vaughns dumped the "capitalistic dream" to start Black Men Flower Project, a fanciful gifting initiative with the muscle of a mutual aid organization.
January 28, 2025
MCA Denver’s Dance Exhibition Churns with Social and Political Energy, Matching a “Moment of Anxiety”
“All my dances are protests,” says one artist from Movements Toward Freedom, which explores how bodily expressions can influence society.
November 14, 2024
Guadalupe Maravilla’s Magic School Bus Outmaneuvers Political Rhetoric with Mystical Migration Stories
Guadalupe Maravilla migrated from El Salvador to the U.S. as an unaccompanied eight-year-old. Now he's on a more metaphysical journey in his winged bus, Mariposa Relámpago.
November 01, 2024
Cybele Lyle Queers Desert Landscapes Through Portals, Lean-tos, and Constructed Architectures
Cybele Lyle attempts, in confounding and curious ways, to queer desert landscapes in her current installation Cybele Lyle: Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms.
October 17, 2024
ArtistsTexasVol. 10 Radical Futures
Bonny Leibowitz: Radical Futures
Texas-based artist Bonny Leibowitz creates hybridized installations of natural and manufactured materials that reflect the impacts of isolation, environmental degradation, and human conflict.
September 06, 2024
At SMoCA, Carolina Aranibar-Fernández Uses Soil, Sequins, and Blood to Explore the Impacts of Global Trade
California-based artist Carolina Aranibar-Fernández explores colonization, extraction, and exploitation in the Southwest in her exhibition Oleaje at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona.
July 30, 2024
Laboratory Conditions: Despite Spring Layoffs, Meow Wolf’s Union Sees Encouraging Progress
Nearly four years into Meow Wolf's unionized era, employees say things are looking up despite a recent round of staff cuts.
July 11, 2024
Vladem Contemporary Ignites Santa Fe Nights with Art After Dark
Step into a world of after-hours magic and experience art that transcends time and space at the New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary in Santa Fe.
July 09, 2024
Wading in the Shallows: The Conundrum of Cj Hendry’s Public Pool
Cj Hendry's Public Pool delights some and confounds others, as it celebrates Las Vegas pool party culture while ignoring serious realities of PVC manufacturing, drought, and the wealth divide.
April 19, 2024
Dimensions Variable with Mixed Results: Sarah Sze Brings Together Technology and Nature at the Nasher
Sarah Sze at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas is proof the affair between an artist and museum doesn’t always result in marriage.
March 28, 2024
Jenna Maurice Investigates the Language of the Complicated Human Experience
Jenna Maurice, currently a resident artist at RedLine Contemporary Art Center in Denver, discusses how relationships with humans and the natural environment shine through her artworks. She also ponders nonverbal communication and life’s various gray areas.
March 18, 2024
Jeannie Hua’s Tailings Focuses on a Dark History Involving Chinese Americans, Mining Waste, and a Burial Site
Las Vegas artist Jeannie Hua conceptually illustrates the Tonopah tailings burial site and asks the viewer to ponder the historic neglect of Asian Americans who settled in the American West.
February 08, 2024
No Man’s Land: Amy Cutler at Ruby City
Amy Cutler: Past, Present, Progress at Ruby City in San Antonio follows a community of women performing ambiguous domestic tasks as a means of feminist critique.
September 19, 2023
Junk Drawer Invites All To “Come As You Are” To Its Queer Rave Art Installations
Junk Drawer is an inclusive queer techno dance party in Denver featuring installations by local artists who bring together social-justice politics and joy.
June 14, 2023
A-Z West Might Make You Rethink Absolutely Everything
A-Z West, Andrea Zittel’s decades-long art experiment presently stewarded by High Desert Test Sites near Joshua Tree, investigates the architecture of everyday life by stripping items to their most basic components.
April 28, 2023
