2024 Juried Student Show
March 22-April 20, 2024
The 2024 JSS, juried by Celia Álvarez Muñoz, features a wide range of mediums created by both undergraduate and graduate students from diverse disciplines and various majors across the NMSU main campus.
Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding
University Art Museum
October 20, 2023-March 2nd, 2024
Opening: October 20, 2023, 5:30-7:30pm
Celia Alvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding, spans forty years, and features over thirty-five artworks – including large-scale immersive installations, photographic series, and book projects – this major exhibition highlights the artist’s playful, witty style, often characterized by her use of bilingual puns and mistranslations in both text and image. Muñoz often draws inspiration from her lived experience as a resident of the United States-Mexico borderlands.
Originating from the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, the exhibition was curated by Dr. Kate Green, Chief Curator & Nancy E. Meinig Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art at Philbrook Museum of Art, and Isabel Casso, Associate Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Celia's exhibition is accompanied by a full-color publication that will be available at the opening and during the run of the exhibition in the NMSU Art Museum.
Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding
El Museo de Arte de la Universidad
20 de octubre de 2023-2 de marzo de 2024
Apertura: octubre 20, 2023, 17:30 - 19:30pm
La exhibición Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding abarca cuarenta años y presenta más de treinta y cinco obras de arte – incluyendo instalaciones inmersivas a gran escala, series fotográficas y libros – esta importante exposición destaca el estilo divertido e ingenioso de la artista, a menudo caracterizado por su uso de juegos de palabras bilingües y traducciones incorrectas tanto en texto como en imagen. Muñoz frequentemente se inspira en sus experiencias vividas como residente de las zonas fronterizas entre Estados Unidos y México.
Originándose en el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de San Diego, la exposición fue comisariada por la Dra. Kate Green, curadora en jefe y Nancy E. Meinig, curadora de arte moderno y contemporáneo en el Museo de Arte Philbrook, e Isabel Casso, e Isabel Casso, curadora asociada del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de San Diego. La exposición de Celia va acompañada de una publicación a todo color que estará disponible durante la inauguración y la exposición en el Museo de Arte de la Universidad Estatal de Nuevo México.
Mayores informes sobre esta exposición próximamente.
Cara Despain: Specter New Mexico
Contemporary Gallery, University Art Museum
June 22-September 16, 2023Opening: June 22, 2023, 5:30-7:30pm
Click HERE for Virtual 3D Tour
The University Art Museum at NMSU is pleased to announce Specter New Mexico, an immersive multimedia solo exhibition by artist Cara Despain. Through site-specific research-based processes, Despain explores nuclear weapons development — addressing the difficult history and legacy of territory expansion, industrialization and empire building in the United States. Using sculptural and video-based installations created with found objects and archival film from the 1940-60s, Despain questions our cultural memory and underscores the irreversible environmental consequences and hidden psychological and microscopic health effects left in the wake of weapons development and testing across the Southwest.
For more information: click here
Agnes Martin and Karen Yank: Meditations on Mentor and Student
Bunny Conlon Modern & Contemporary Art Gallery, University Art Museum
June 22-September 16, 2023
Opening: June 22, 2023, 5:30-7:30pm
Click HERE for Virtual 3D Tour
The University Art Museum is pleased to present Agnes Martin and Karen Yank: Meditations on Mentor and Student, an exhibition exploring the work and intersecting lives of artists Agnes Martin and Karen Yank. Featured in this exhibition are Martin’s lithographs on vellum, whose complex and meditative grids are indicative of the renowned artist’s style which impacted upon Abstract expressionism, Minimalism, and Transcendentalism. Yank’s steel wall-based sculptures reference nature and convey abstract emotional content in minimalist/maximalist forms.
Yank met Martin in 1987 at the artist residency, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Maine. The two had a passion for New Mexico, and both chose the high plains to live out their lives and artistic practices. For nearly 17 years, Yank and Martin met weekly as a friendship and mentorship flourished. Martin taught Yank how to focus her inspirations, create a strong artistic vision through meditation, and scale her mind's-eye sketches into large-scale artworks. Towards the end of Martin’s life, she asked Yank to share her philosophies with younger artists to keep her teachings alive past her death. Many elements of those teachings are revealed in this exhibition.
For more information click here
Wild Pigment Project Curated by Tilke Elkins
Mullennix Bridge Gallery, University Art Museum
June 22-September 16, 2023
Opening: June 22, 2023, 5:30-7:30pm
Click HERE for Virtual 3D Tour
The University Art Museum at NMSU is thrilled to present Wild Pigment Project, a group exhibition featuring artists who actively integrate plant, mineral and waste-stream pigments, hand-gathered and prepared in local landscapes, into their studio practice. Wild Pigment Project promotes ecological balance and regenerative economies through a passion for wild pigments, their places of origin, and their cultural histories. The project connects artists to the land by providing resources, education, and inspiration through an international directory, monthly pigment subscription, newsletter, art exhibitions and more.
This exhibition, which originated at form & concept gallery in Santa Fe, NM, is curated by Wild Pigment Project founding director Tilke Elkins and gathers pigments, artwork and stories from people who have engaged with the project since its inception in 2019. It traces the project’s extraordinary path, starting in Elkins’ home on Kalapuya lands (colonially known as Springfield, OR) and branching out across the world.
For more information click here
Icons & Retablos: The Blessings of Christ on Home Altars
University Art Museum, Margie and Bobby Rankin Retablo Gallery
March 10 - August 26, 2023
The NMSU University Art Museum (UAM) is excited to announce the opening of Icons & Retablos: The Blessings of Christ on Home Altars in the Margie and Bobby Rankin Retablo Gallery at the UAM on the campus of NMSU. Guest curated by Dr. Elizabeth Zarur, this exhibition, created in collaboration with the Museum of Russian Icons in Clinton, Massachusetts, invites visitors to see devotional works iconic to both Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.
In these joint exhibitions, both the UAM and the Museum of Russian Icons will display portions of each other’s significant collections. Concurrent running exhibitions at the UAM and the Museum of Russian Icons were curated by Dr. Zarur to explore these two styles of devotion through diverse materials, themes, and artistic expressions.
Please join us Friday, March 10, 2023 at 5:30 p.m. for the opening reception of Icons & Retablos: The Blessings of Christ on Home Altars. The exhibition will be on view March 10 through August 26, 2023 in the UAM’s Margie and Bobby Rankin Retablo Gallery.
For more information about associated programming click here
Echoes of an Empty Space
2023 MFA Thesis Exhibition
April 28 – May 20, 2023
In Echoes of an Empty Space, Saldana, Latkar, and Gus pull thoughts, ideas, and experiments surrounding connectivity and identity made during their time at NMSU into a singular exhibition. Viewers will have a full sensory experience in the gallery with each artist providing takeaways like the lasting aroma of Latkar’s spice-laden mixed media works to the shiny informational postcards from Gus. Saldana uses her field-based practice to orient herself in spaces of solitude as means of exploring human connection, materiality, and time. Latkar’s multimedia creations are focused on the experience of living in an in-between space, belonging ‘nowhere,’ and the tension between ‘here’ and ‘there’. Gus challenges the binaries within gender, cultural identity, religion, and queerness through an interdisciplinary practice.
For more information about associated programming click here
Ad Infinitum: Artists Against War and Imperialism
Curated by Dr. Joanna Matuszak
On view: January 20 - May 20, 2023Bunny Conlon Modern & Contemporary Art Gallery
Opening: January 20, 2023: 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. MST
Ad Infinitum: Artists Against War and Imperialism presents war-era posters and artworks from the NMSU Permanent Art Collection that address twentieth-century imperialism and its effects: militarization, nuclear arms race, destruction of human lives, and damage to the natural environment. Curated by Dr. Joanna Matuszak, visiting Art History Professor in the Department of Art, this exhibition also highlights violence and methods of survival, which not only characterize wars, but are often enacted by children and adults in the form of games.
Including works from the NMSU Permanent Art Collection by: Mary Frances Babb, Lane Barden, Seymour Chwast, Sue Coe, John P. Geiger, Daniel Kasser, Joyce Kozloff, Eric LoPresti, and Terri Warpinski.
Read more information regarding this exhibition here
Image Credit: Terri Warpinski, Boyhood (Two Narratives), 2012. Archival print on paper. 15.5 x 27.25 in. Courtesy of the NMSU Permanent Art Collection
2023 Juried Student Show
University Art Museum, Contemporary Gallery, and Bunny Conlon Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery
March 24 - April 15, 2023
The NMSU University Art Museum (UAM) is thrilled to announce the 2023 Juried Student Show (JSS) in Devasthali Hall on the campus of NMSU. Every year the UAM receives an impressive variety of submissions by both undergraduate and graduate students, highlighting a broad range of materials, methods, and ideas. The JSS is an opportunity to acknowledge NMSU’s hard-working students by recognizing their outstanding creativity. This exhibition always attracts a large audience and encourages widespread community support.
The 2023 JSS, juried by Xochi Solis, features artworks in a wide range of mediums created by both undergraduate and graduate students from diverse disciplines and various majors across the NMSU main campus.
Please join the UAM for our opening reception on Friday, March 24, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. The award ceremony will begin at 6 p.m. The Juried Student Show will be on view in the Contemporary Gallery at the University Art Museum at NMSU from March 24 through April 15, 2023.
More information about our juror: Xochi Solis is an Austin, TX based mixed media artist. Her works include multilayered, collaged paintings constructed from paint, hand-dyed paper, vinyl, plastics, and images from found books and magazines. Xochi exhibits throughout the United States, with recent project sites including New Mexico State University Art Museum (NM), Glass Rice (CA), and Galveston Art Center (TX). She holds a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin (TX).
For more information about associated programming: click here
NMSU Department of Art ExhibitionCurated by Leslie Moody CastroOn view: January 20 - March 11, 2023In conjunction with Artists as Knowledge Carriers at 516 ARTS
Opening: January 20, 2023: 5:30 - 7:30 p.m. MST
Participating artists: Christopher Bardey, Tauna Cole, Craig Cully in collaboration with Kelly Leslie, Brita d’Agostino, Maggie Day, Jeffrey Erwin, Motoko Furuhashi, Michelle Haberl, Carissa Samaniego, Rebecca Smith, Bree Lamb/Muscle Memory + Joshua R. Clark/Muscle Memory
Together Through as Within is an exhibition of the work of staff and faculty within the Department of Art at New Mexico State University, where each educator is also an artist, working to build their own practice and the practices of the generation of artists whom they mentor and guide. Their work comes together in a new space, a building made for the collision of ideas and generations, of methods and mediums, of the push and pull of criticism and acceptance.
Together Through as Within is curated by Leslie Moody Castro, independent curator and writer based in Mexico City and Inaugural Curatorial Fellow at the Department of Art at New Mexico State University.
Read more information regarding this exhibition here
Craig Cully & Kelly Leslie, Tethered Descent, 2022, 48” x 80”, oil on panel.
New Wave: The Society for Photographic Education West x Southwest Chapters Juried Student Exhibition
On view: January 20 - March 11, 2023
Nelson Chan was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents from Hong Kong and Taiwan and has spent most of his life between the States and Hong Kong. Having grown up on two continents with unique cultures, this immigrant experience has influenced the majority of his work.
He is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received his BFA, and a graduate of the University of Hartford, Hartford Art School, where he received his MFA. Nelson is a co-founder of TIS books, an independent publishing house that concentrates on limited-edition photobooks. He was the production manager at Aperture Foundation from 2016 - 2019 and has most recently taken an appointment as an Assistant Professor of Photography at the California College of the Arts.
Read more information regarding this exhibition here
Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium
Curated by: Dr. Emmanuel OrtegaUniversity Art Museum, Contemporary Gallery, Bunny Conlon Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery, and the Margie and Bobby Rankin Retablo Gallery
September 30-December 22, 2022
Opening: September 30, 2022; 5:30-7:30pm
Performance by DJ Mira Mira: 5:30-6:30pm
Artists Introduction: 6:30pm
Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium, is the first exhibition to pair 19th–20th century retablos from the NMSU Permanent Art Collection with new works by contemporary Latinx artists. Guest curated by Dr. Emmanuel Ortega, Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), this exhibition sheds light on the understudied iconographic and ideological aspects of ex-votos, a type of retablo (small devotional painting) depicting miracles painted on tin and found materials.
The NMSU Art Museum houses the largest collection of Mexican retablos in the U.S. This exhibition demonstrates the important place retablos hold in the history of the Americas; it recontextualizes studies of contemporary devotion in Latin America and the U.S. by commissioning artists to research the retablo collection. This show results in site-specific works that consider how retablos are more than by-products of colonialism, illuminating current socio-political issues of class, race, and gender through artistic methodologies of resistance.
Artists include: Justin Favela, Eric J. García, Francisco Guevara, Dan45 Hernandez, Juan Molina Hernández, John Jota Leaños, Guadalupe Maravilla, Yvette Mayorga, Daisy Quezada Ureña, Krystal Ramirez, Sandy Rodriguez, Xochi Solis, and José Villalobos.
For all Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium information click here
Image: Guadalupe Maravilla, I am sending love to my eight-year-old self Retablo, 2021, oil on tin, mixed media on wood, 44 x 21 x 4 inches.
(ir)regular evolution: New Works by Rachel Stevens
Bunny Conlon Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery, University Art Museum
June 10-September 2, 2022
(ir)regular evolution is an exhibition featuring all new works in clay by Rachel Stevens, NMSU Department of Art Emeritus Professor. These pieces mark a radical shift in Stevens’ practice from large-scale monochromatic metal installations to multicolored biomorphic ceramic sculptures. From evolutionary theories of meteors sparking life on earth to genetic mutations causing cataclysmic pandemics, in this exhibition Stevens’ new forms explore the (ir)regularities that she is embracing in her own work and in our modern world.
Stevens received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) and MFA from Syracuse University. Stevens received the Fulbright Research Scholarships to Patan, Nepal in 2006 and Lviv, Ukraine in 2018. She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and has shown in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. Rachel served as Area Head of sculpture at New Mexico State University for 25 years. She now divides her life between Las Cruces, New Mexico and Missoula, Montana.
Full Press Release
Joey Fauerso: Wait for It
Contemporary Gallery, University Art Museum
June 10-September 2, 2022
The NMSU Art Museum is pleased to present Joey Fauerso: Wait for It, a solo exhibition featuring the work of San Antonio-based artist Joey Fauerso. Employing techniques that upend traditional modes of art-making, Fauerso’s work opens onto questions of identity, gender and representation. On view June 10 through September 2, 2022, Wait for It includes recent artworks by Fauerso alongside a poem and essay authored by 2017 State of Texas Poet Laureate Jenny Browne. Wait for It travels to the NMSU Art Museum from the Visual Arts Center at The University of Texas at Austin where it was organized by MacKenzie Stevens, director, with Clare Donnelly, gallery manager.
Full Press Release
Pray for Rain by Carissa Samaniego
Mullennix Bridge Gallery, University Art Museum
June 10-September 2, 2022
The NMSU Art Museum is pleased to present Carissa Samaniego: Pray for Rain in the Mullennix Bridge Gallery at the University Art Museum (UAM) at New Mexico State University (NMSU), June 10–September 2, 2022.
Pray for Rain is an exhibition featuring recent works by Carissa Samaniego, who will join the NMSU Department of Art as visiting professor of sculpture in the fall of 2022. The selections are from three of the artist’s ongoing projects: the Querencia textile series, Block Pattern Halo drawings, and Americaña research. Through experimentation with varied materials and alternate methodologies, Samaniego explores the cultural histories and socio-political issues of life in the Rio Grande Valley.
Full Press Release
This exhibition was opened by appointment beginning Saturday, February 20, 2020.
The Better Show: #Bring Your Own
MFA Show, Spring 2022
April 21-May 14, 2022
The University Art Museum (UAM) is proud to announce The Better Show: #Bring Your Own 2022 MFA Thesis Exhibition, featuring work by MFA candidates: Dina Perlasca, Carlos Lee Sullivan, and Katrina Laine.
The Better Show: #Bring Your Own is composed of three separate installations presented by Dina Perlasca, Carlos Lee Sullivan, and Katrina Laine that imagine spaces where the irresolvable can be resolved. Perlasca is a Mexican-American ceramicist looking for reconciliation between ideal and real domestic spaces using symbols to encode her heritage. Sullivan is an assemblage artist who creates fairy tales without resolutions, pointing at the emptiness in their structure. He seeks to create new forms of optimism and innocence in that emptiness. Laine is an installation artist giving permission to herself and others to take up space and time in order to heal from collective and personal trauma.
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Judy Chicago, Marie Antoinette from the Great Ladies series, 1973, sprayed acrylic on canvas, 40 x 40 in., private collection. |
Establishing Our Own Art History: The Influence of Judy Chicago
MA Show, Spring 2022
April 21-May 14, 2022
The University Art Museum (UAM) is proud to present the first Master’s of Art thesis exhibition in the UAM by MA candidate Courtney Uldrich. Establishing our Own Art History: The Influence of Judy Chicago, curated by Courtney Uldrich, explores themes produced throughout the career of leading Feminist artist Judy Chicago, while analyzing the impact of her work on other women-identified artists housed in the NMSU Permanent Art Collection at the University Art Museum (UAM). Through photography, video, prints, artists books, and an array of mixed-media works, the exhibition explores key concepts in Chicago’s career including: historical erasure of women; gender constructs; personal heritage and identity; environmental issues; and mortality. Expanding upon the scholarship of Judy Chicago’s career, this exhibition provides a critical look at how her work influenced and intertwined with other women-identified artists, principally Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ artists. In 2016 a new collecting mission was established to transition the UAM’s focus onto collecting significant works by leading female, LGBTQ+ and other underrepresented artists to more accurately reflect the diverse cultural and social communities in the Southwest region. This curatorial project is an intentional step towards recognizing the continued focus of diversifying the NMSU Permanent Art Collection. Included artists such as Wendy Red Star, Paula Wilson, Rose B. Simpson, and Las Hermanas Iglesias, reflect how the lack of representation of this history is essential to contemporarily understanding these important topics.
2022 Juried Student Show
University Art Museum, Contemporary Gallery, and Bunny Conlon Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery
March 18 - April 9, 2022
The NMSU University Art Museum (UAM) is thrilled to announce the 2022 Juried Student Show (JSS) in Devasthali Hall on the campus of NMSU. Every year the UAM receives an impressive variety of submissions by both undergraduate and graduate students, highlighting a broad range of materials, methods, and ideas. The JSS is an opportunity to acknowledge NMSU’s hard-working students by recognizing their outstanding creativity. This exhibition always attracts a large audience and encourages widespread community support.
The 2022 JSS, juried by Carissa Samaniego, features fifty artworks in a wide range of mediums created by both undergraduate and graduate students from diverse disciplines and various majors across the NMSU main campus.
One of the most exciting components of the JSS is that students are eligible to receive monetary awards. These awards benefit the students both by honoring and encouraging them during a crucial time of growth, development, and training. As usual, the JSS has received significant support from the community, and the UAM is honored to be able to give out over $4,500 in awards this year.
Please join the UAM for our opening reception on Friday, March 18, from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. The award ceremony will begin at 6 p.m. The Juried Student Show will be on view in the Contemporary Gallery at the University Art Museum at NMSU from March 18 through April 9, 2022.
Remembered Landscapes: The Sacred Space of Home
Works by Jackie Mitchell Edwards
University Art Museum, Mullennix Bridge Gallery
January 21-March 5, 2022
Remembered Landscapes: The Sacred Space of Home, an exhibition in the Mullennix Bridge Gallery at the University Art Museum (UAM) at New Mexico State University (NMSU), will open on January 21st, 2022 and will remain on view until March 5th, 2022. This multimedia installation by artist Jackie Mitchell Edwards reveals an elongated poetic search for home and healing through material and spiritual relationships with nature and landscape.
This new body of work by Mitchell Edwards was inspired by artist Nikesha Breeze’s 2020 call for BIPOC artists to create Hand Tools of Resilience. Hand Tools of Resilience, an international juried exhibition, invited artists to examine the conscious and unconscious tools that Black, Indigenous and People of Color have created to survive, thrive and build within oppressive and abusive systems. Breeze’s call sparked a deeper and focused research on the power of ritual objects within Mitchell Edwards’s greater practice and the results are witnessed in this powerful installation. Mitchell Edwards’s own journey as a Black woman in the African Diaspora (a term that refers to the descendants of Africans shipped to the Americas via the Atlantic slave trade) focuses on the primacy of the study of nature and other spiritual traditions. Mitchell Edwards, like Breeze, uses ritual and remembrance when creating talismanic healing objects that protect and guide one’s way back to their ancestral home.
Press image: Jackie Mitchell Edwards ,Ritual Object for Action, 2021, Root/Branch of a desert bush, Rutile, quartz with iron inclusions, Length: 10 in, Courtesy of Artist. Photo credit: Form & Concept / Byron Flesher.
Nikesha Breeze– Four Sites of Return:
Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation & Reclamation
University Art Museum, Contemporary Gallery and Bunny Conlon Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery
January 21-March 5, 2022
Click here for 3D Virtual Tour
Four Sites of Return- Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation & Reclamation, includes new and existing works by artist Nikesha Breeze that surface the collective traumas, histories, rituals, and healing of the African Diaspora in the Southwest. Through site-specific installation, sculpture, paintings, film and live performance, Breeze seamlessly weaves African Diasporic histories, Afrofuturism and their own ancestral connection to Blackdom, NM, the state’s first all-Black community. This exhibition opens on January 21st, 2022 at the University Art Museum (UAM) at New Mexico State University (NMSU) in the Contemporary Gallery and Bunny Conlon Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery and will remain on view until March 5th, 2022.
Within Four Sites of Return, a new iteration of the project Stages of Tectonic Blackness will be presented. Stages of Tectonic Blackness is an ongoing series of durational performances and ritualized, elongated mourning rites choreographed and orchestrated by performers Nikesha Breeze, Miles Tokunow, Lazarus Nance Letcher, and cinematographer, MK. Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom, was physically performed in November, 2021 and is conceptually centered in the early 20th century Black freedom town called Blackdom. The UAM will present a two-channel film of the performance, as well as mixed-media objects and a kiosk playing interviews from descendants of Blackdom.
Join us for the opening reception of these two exhibitions including a special performance of Stages of Tectonic Blackness in the University Art Museum on Friday, January 21, 2022. The public reception begins at 5:30 PM and the performance is scheduled to begin at 6:30 PM.
Read full press release here
Learn more about programming
Press image: Nikesha Breeze and Miles Tokunow; Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom (Still from performance), 2021. Photo credit: ©Monica Kennedy.
Syn- Ger Xiong & Cierra Redding MFA Thesis Exhibition 2021
April 23 – May 15, 2021
Virtual opening reception Friday, April 23, 5:30 PM
The UAM is proud to present Syn – featuring work by artists Ger Xiong & Cierra Redding, the first Master of Fine Art candidates to exhibit in the newly opened Devasthali Hall. In Syn-, both Xiong and Redding explore themes of identity, loss, and absence through the use of various materials and forms. Ger Xiong’s finely crafted textiles and wearable objects are representative of his complex Hmong cultural identity. Each work navigates his Hmong American experience through the lens of assimilation, migration, and colonization, reflecting loss, commodification, and the resilience of being Hmong. Cierra Redding’s sensorial and experiential sculptures reveal a fascination with vision and longing influenced by a long-distance relationship and Nystagmus, a rare chronic eye condition she has had since birth. Redding’s large black ceramic vessels allude to mourning the loss of touch during our complicated COVID times; the exterior textures and brightly colored interiors reference a warm and affectionate time, reminiscent of her childhood in the 90’s. NMSU Assistant Professor, Joshua Clark, interprets, “between them exists an engaging discourse, which feels timely and timeless” where “ both artists are wrestling with one of the oldest human conundrums; how to conserve the worthy aspects of our past, both collectively and personally.”
More information regarding the exhibition available by clicking here.
CALLING ALL ARTISTS!
Submit to the JSS now- March 31, 2020
The University Art Museum at NMSU is requesting submissions for the annual Juried Student Show (JSS). They are accepting entries from currently enrolled NMSU main campus students in any major. Students can submit up to 3 original artworks that have been created within the past 18 months. Submissions will be reviewed by this year’s Juror: Leslie Moody Castro. Castro is an independent curator who splits her time between Mexico City and Texas.
To apply, register for access to the JSS Canvas Site by emailing your full name and NMSU email address to artmuseum@nmsu.edu . The deadline to submit is March 31st, 2021. To be eligible to receive awards, students must also apply to Scholar Dollar. Accepted works will be posted on the UAM website, social media, and building doors on April 9th. The exhibition will open on April 23, with a virtual opening reception from 5:30-7:30 PM; the award ceremony will begin at 6 PM.
Labor Motherhood & Art in 2020
February 28 – May 28, 2020
Labor: Motherhood & Art in 2020, the inaugural exhibition of the new University Art Museum (UAM) at New Mexico State University (NMSU), will open on February 28, 2020 and remain on view until May 28, 2020. This exhibition, co-curated by museum director Marisa Sage and artist Laurel Nakadate, aims to expand and enrich the compelling conversations regarding motherhood in today’s socio-political climate. Through video, painting, installation, sculpture, film and photographic works, a diverse group of artists explore themes of empowerment, empathy, intimacy, selflessness, vulnerability, failure, anxiety, and choice. Situated in the Borderplex region of Southern New Mexico, Labor confronts and challenges historic and contemporary ways mothers and mothering have been represented in both art and popular culture. This exhibition strives to create a space of inclusivity and support that offers opportunities not only for internationally-celebrated artists, but also for the regional community, through local programming and the exhibition of work by New Mexico-based artists that speak to their own experiences relating to motherhood.
Please read the full press release here.
Current schedule of online events.
Raphael Benero: 2020 MFA Thesis Exhibition
On view now online
Las Cruces, NM–The University Art Museum (UAM) presents Raphael Benero: 2020 MFA Thesis Exhibition, featuring artwork by MFA candidate Raphael Benero. Benero reflects on the intersections of class, gender, ethnicity and lived experience with hybrid identity through the use of humble materials in sculptures that replicate childhood objects.
Growing up in El Paso, TX, Benero quickly realized that no matter how hard his family worked, keeping up with the Joneses was never in reach. Through observation of other neighborhood kids having lavishly expensive toys while he was left to his own devices, he became aware of unbalanced cultural and class
FLUXX: 2020 BFA Student Exhibition:
On view now online
Presenting Bachelor of Fine Art Graduating Seniors: Shaunia Grant, Katelyn LaPage, Olivia Lemmons, Alexxis Ortiz and Jose A. Suarez. The five artists forming the spring 2020 BFA cohort at New Mexico State University each engage in research examining their understanding of themselves within a complex world; made all the more convoluted by the incursion of COVID-19 into their practice. United in their clarity and commitment that saw them through the completion and documentation of their work with a minimum of tools and a lack of studio facilities, their accomplishments are, with more reason, laudable given these challenging times. Please click on each name to enter the student sites. —Department Head, Julia M. Barello
NMSU Art Museum joins over 14 institutions to host events about climate change
Artists from Las Cruces to Albuquerque hope to draw attention to a biological crisis happening along the Rio Grande with an exhibit titled “Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande.” Subhankar Banerjee, NMSU alumnus and University of New Mexico professor of art and ecology, co-curated the exhibit at 516 Arts, which reached out to enlist other institutions including the Albuquerque Museum, the Ruben Center for the Visual Arts, the New Mexico State University’s Art Museum and many others. The result is a series of local events in Las Cruces throughout October and November intended to bring recognition to issues of regional climate change. Events include a city proclamation, an extinct species workshop, a mural, a film screening and a lecture.
Learn more about Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande and the events around Las Cruces by clicking here.
dis-continuum: 2019 MFA Thesis Exhibition
On View: April 26 – May 11, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, April 26, 2019, 5:30 PM
dis-continuum: 2019 MFA Thesis Exhibition, featured the work of MFA candidates Cleo Arevalo and Fernando Enriquez. dis-continuum linked Arevalo and Enriquez through the duality of their years growing up in both Juarez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas. Both artists focused on their binary heritage, and the complexities that arise from these connections. NMSU Visiting Assistant Professor, Joshua Clark, remarks of their practices, “Arevalo’s work addresses the strategies used in the systemic globalized oppression of the masses, and in Enriquez’s work one can glimpse the results of this globalized capitalist system on a local and personalized scale.”
Reveries: 2019 BFA Thesis Exhibition
On View: April 26 – May 11, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, April 26, 2019, 5:30 PM
Reveries: 2019 BFA Thesis Exhibition, featured artwork by six BFA candidates: Debbie Jo Baxter, Angelica Jones, Bernadette Larimer, Raquel Madrigal, Saul Ramirez, and Carissa Staples. The common thread between the artists in this exhibition was their exploration and use of unexpected media–pushing the boundaries of their respective art practices to tackle controversial issues, like self-image, identity, intimacy, and the current world around them.
On View: March 14 – April 6, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 14, 2019, 5:30 PM
Juried By: Julie Alpert and Andy Arkley
The annual Juried Student Show, which kicks off 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 14 with an opening reception at the New Mexico State University Art Gallery, will serve as an opportunity for the community to get an up-close look at the artistic talents of NMSU students. The Juried Student Show will feature 41 individual pieces of work from both undergraduate and graduate students at the university. The pieces were chosen from a wide range of artwork submitted from various majors all across the NMSU campus. Artists Andy Arkley and Julie Alpert served as the jurors for this year’s show. The pair are fresh off the spring exhibition of their own show, “Light Tricks,” which ran at the University Art Gallery from Jan. 31 until March 2.
Julie Alpert and Andy Arkley
On View: January 31- March 2, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, January 31, 2019, 5:30 PM
Curated By: Marisa Sage
Julie Alpert and Andy Arkley present new installations, sculptures, drawings, and interactive videos. Each artist utilizes various forms of light and shadow (projected, reflected, and emitted) to evoke a nostalgic, playful, dramatic mood. They each use light to draw attention to their invented visual language of signs and symbols abstracted from childhood memories. Alpert’s use of everyday materials and her repetition of hearts, chains, hashtags, drips, and friendship bracelets refer to high fashion, teenage doodling in the margins of notebooks, the keepsakes she made and traded at summer camp, and the inevitable decay of all things. Arkley’s work encourages a childlike sense of discovery and strives to foster inclusion, positivity, and elation.
On View: October 4, 2018- January 12, 2019
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 4, 2018, 6:00 PM
Curated By: Marisa Sage
Superbloom was a solo exhibition by NYC-based artist Eric LoPresti at the New Mexico State University Art Gallery. This exhibition examined the complicated effects the Cold War and nuclear testing have had on the Southwest American landscape and the global psyche. Sited a mere 97 miles from Trinity, location of the first atomic bomb, the exhibition outlined an expansive framework within which viewers meditated on two increasingly relevant antipodes of human experience: the quest for aesthetic expression, and the threat of global apocalypse
Read more about the exhibition and programming here.
This exhibition was partially funded by a grant from the Community Foundation of Southern New Mexico’s Devasthali Family Foundation Fund and the George and Lucy Gray Endowed Art Fund.
On View: July 26 – September 21, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 26, 2018, 6:00 PM
Curated By: Marisa Sage
Jenny Morgan: A HIGHER GROUND, tracks the development of Morgan’s body of work starting from graduate school at the School of Visual Arts to her more recent paintings exploring the individual through high-def glimmering layered portraits that tackle the real and surreal.
Read more about the exhibition here.
This exhibition was supported by the Friends of the University Art Gallery and Dr. Wayne F. Yakes, M.D..
On View: May 24 – July 14, 2018
Joint Opening Reception: Friday, June 1, 2018, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m.
New Mexico State University Art Gallery, in collaboration with The Las Cruces Museum of Art presents Here and Now, a regional, juried exhibition featuring works in all media. Here and Now includes works created by artists living and working within a 150 mile of Las Cruces. Paintings, prints, photographs, video, ceramics, and sculpture highlight the diverse approaches to creative expression found in Southern New Mexico and West Texas.
Read more about the exhibition here.
Read more about Community Quilt- A new project facilitated by the artist John Garrett.
Featured Artists:Fahimeh Foudazi, Joshua Flores, Madison Manning, Monica Martinez, Tiago Finato, Patrick Shaffer, and Jeffrey Erwin
On View: April 26 – May 11, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, April 27, 2018, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
NOT ONLY, BUT ALSO: 2018 MFA Thesis Exhibition, gathers together a broad range of creative interventions into the questions we face every day. As you walk through the galleries, engaging with these works, you will encounter a number of efforts to ask what it means to be someone now, what identity is and how we might find it, maintain it, and come to own it. Meanwhile, we learn from these works that the questions of identity intersect with questions of memory, society, power, and politics.
Juror: Cathy Lee Crane, 2017-18 Resident, Border Art Residency
On View: April 3- April 17, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 5, 2018, 5:00-7:00 pm
Awards Ceremony 6:00 pm
“The annual NMSU Juried Student Show is an incredible opportunity for the community to see a glimpse of what NMSU Art students of all levels are working on at this moment in time,” said Jasmine Woodul, gallery manager. The exhibition features a wide range of artworks created by both undergraduate and graduate students from diverse disciplines and various majors across the NMSU main campus.
Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest)
Supported by a $20,000 Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the University Art Gallery (UAG) presented Wendy Red Star: The Maniacs (We’re Not The Best, But We’re Better Than The Rest) as its major exhibition for Spring, 2018. On view from January 26 through March 16, 2018, this site-specific exhibition visually materialized and meshed memories of the past and present in Red Star’s investigation of her Apsáalooke (Crow) Indian father’s life in rock music, a site of familial importance and popular culture that has informed the artist’s practice and individual and collective identities as an Apsáalooke (Crow)-Irish American woman.
ON VIEW: January 26 – March 16, 2018
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, January 26, 2018, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
CURATED BY: Michelle Lanteri
PROJECT: POSTCARD; AN EXHIBIT AND FUNDRAISER BENEFITING NMSU DEPARTMENT OF ART.
ON VIEW: November 27-8 , 2017, University Art Gallery, D.W. Williams Hall, NMSU.
POSTCARD SALE: Thursday, November 30, 2017, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM.
The 4 th biannual Project: Postcard exhibit and fundraiser was presented by the NMSU Department of Art and the University Art Gallery in D.W. Williams Hall on the NMSU campus. Postcard-sized artwork was created and donated by alumni, faculty, and students, as well as regional, national and international artists will be exhibited and offered for sale.
Featured Artists: Nabil Gonzalez, Daisy Quezada, Laura Turón, and the Jellyfish Colectivo
On View: Thursday, October 12 – Friday, November 17, 2017
Curated by: Michelle Lanteri and organized by Marisa Sage.
The artists in Interference + Interaction mediated everyday noise, communication, and social predicaments within personal and political spheres, negotiating the boundaries of the complex and multilayered issues that arise due to the current relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.
Read more about the exhibition here.
Oprima aqui para leer el comunicado de prensa completo acerca de la exhibición.
Featured Artists: Sandra Doore, Erika Lynne Hanson, Jeana Eve Klein
Mara Lonner
On View: August 31-September 30, 2017
Juried by: Exhibition Review Committee 2016-17: Julia Barello, Jessika Edgar, Heather Gordon, Madeleine Griffin, Michelle Lanteri, Emily Nachison, Katy Stuckel, Jasmine Woodul Organized by: Michelle Lanteri & Jasmine Woodul
New Acquisitions / Nuevas Adquisiciones
UAG Permanent Collection 2015-2017
On View: June 9-August 18, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, June 9, 2017, 5:30-7:30 pm
Closing Reception: Friday, August 18, 2017, 5:30-7:30 pm
Each year, the UAG actively acquires locally and globally significant artworks to incorporate into its permanent collection, which has exceptionally strong holdings of twentieth and twenty-first-century photographs and prints and nineteenth-century Mexican retablos. Works including those by Joshua Shane Flores, Felice House, Zachery Lechtenberg, Mónica Martínez, Jason Middlebrook, Jenny Morgan, Christine Nguyen, Wendy Red Star, Jim Waid, Terri Warpinski, Kerianne Quick, and selections from the Don M. Gonzales Poster Collection. View works and installation images here.
Yolanda Cooper MFA Thesis Show
Life As It Is: Yolanda Cooper
On View: April 28- May 13, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, April 28, 2017, 5:00-7:00 pm
This solo exhibition by Yolanda Cooper is comprised of a series of complex and deeply personal self-portraits of the artist. These scintillating works are visual materializations and embodiments of the artist’s fight for her place in the present moment.
Juror: Steven Randall, 2016-17 Participant, Border Art Residency in La Union, NM
On View: April 28- May 13, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, April 28, 2017, 5:00-7:00 pm;
Awards Ceremony 6:00 pm
This exhibition is an annual tradition at the University Art Gallery at New Mexico State University. It features a wide range of artworks by students of all levels at New Mexico State University.
Java What?
Juried by: Michelle Lanteri
On View: April 4-April 11, 2017
NMSU Music Center (1075 N. Horseshoe Las Cruces, NM 88003)
Complementing the “Java Love” musical and live poetry performances, this juried art exhibition features work by eight NMSU Department of Art students. Art and design of any media and style were welcomed for this show, with a wide range of content from the abstract, to the sincere, to the satirical.
Exhibiting artists include: Jenny Abeyta, Fahimeh Foudazi, Olivia Lemmons, Rubi Madrid, Raquel Madrigal, Nicholas Ostella, Melissa Michelle Perez, and Mariah Shelby.
The Aperture Foundation and the Hermès Foundation are pleased to present the touring exhibition: In Good Time:Photographs by Doug DuBois
Curated by: Cory Jacobs
On View: February 23-April 15, 2017
Artist Talk: Thursday, February 23, 5:15-6:15 pm
Opening Reception: Friday, February 24, 5:00-7:00 pm
Doug DuBois approaches his work slowly and engages in long-term photographic projects. He tells stories that reveal both a profound humanity and the inexorable passing of time. The Hermès Foundation and Aperture Foundation are pleased to present the exhibition In Good Time, the first mid-career survey of DuBois’ photographs, curated by Cory Jacobs. This retrospective contains three different bodies of work: All the Days and Nights, Avella, and My Last Day at Seventeen.
Impermanent Topography: 2017 Department of Art Faculty + Staff Exhibition
On View: January 17-February 9, 2017
Curated by: Michelle Lanteri, Interim Gallery Director
Featuring works by eleven NMSU Department of Art faculty and staff members, Impermanent Topography addresses the social, political, geographical, and cultural landscapes that comprise our ever-shifting understandings of contemporary life. This exhibition grapples with the unwieldy intersections of memory, selfhood, and information through human inscriptions of identity in paint, metal, clay, digital media, and experimental sculpture. A diverse selection of media and style give form to the inquiries put forth by the Impermanent Topography artists.
Artists: Julia Barello, Tauna Cole-Dorn, Craig Cully, Jessika Edgar, Motoko Furuhashi, Richard Hesketh, Wes Kline, Adam Labe, Bree Lamb, Jacob Muñoz, Rachel Stevens
GEOMAGIC: Art, Science and the Zuhl Collection
On View: September 8 – December 21, 2016
Co-curated by: Marisa Sage and Tiffany Santos
GEOMAGIC: Art, Science and the Zuhl Collection is an interdisciplinary exhibition that creates a visual laboratory and educational space unifying contemporary visual art, geology, and other natural sciences into a hypothetical space. GEOMAGIC creates a platform to explore ontological responses to spirituality, technology, and anthropogenic geological concerns of preservation in relation to the natural environment.
Featured artists will include: Christine Gray, Jason Middlebrook, Megan Harrison, Amy Brener, Laura Moriarty, Katie Paterson, Emily Nachison, Christine Nguyen, Andrew Yang and Ryan Thompson.
This exhibition was made possible by an Art Works Grant from The National Endowment for the Arts.
NEOMAGIC , juried by Marisa Sage and Tiffany Santos, was an exhibition that featured geological-inspired artworks by both undergraduate and graduate students from New Mexico State University. With NEOMAGIC, the student version of the UAG’s GEOMAGIC exhibition , it was our intention to provide NMSU students an opportunity to show their work for an entire semester in conjunction with an exhibition featuring internationally renowned artists.
September 23 – December 7, 2016
*Click here to read more information and see installation shots.*
Cranbrook Ceramics +/- 25
Organized by: Jessika Edgar and Drew Ippoliti
July 28, 2016 – August 25, 2016
Univarsity Art Gallery
An Ocean Trapped Behind a Wall
Guest Curated by: Jessica Hankey and Erin Colleen Johnson
May 26 – July 16, 2016
Subjects to Change: 2016 MFA Thesis Exhibition
Cassandra Dixon, Andrea Luella Gohl, Katy Stuckel.
April 20 – May 14, 2016
January 21 – February 27, 2016
This exhibition featured works by Florida-based artist Bethany Taylor and Texas-based artist Brenda Perry. In Water! What is it good of?, Taylor and Perry create critical spaces for viewers to engage with multifaceted environmental concerns. Click Here for installation photos of this exhibition.
November 12 – December 19, 2015
“Points of Departure” offers a multifaceted collaboration between NMSU and Towson University in Maryland. In this immersive exhibition, there are three concepts being presented: l abo ra tory, Curatory, and Points of Departure. Click here for installation photos.
Your General Store by Jason Middlebrook
September 3 – November 7, 2015
Your General Store is no ordinary place of commerce.Jason Middlebrook (b. Jackson, MI; lives in Hudson, NY) has altered an old shipping container to create a replica of a nineteenth-century general store, reminiscent of another era, when early towns in the west relied on the general store to carry supplies of all kinds. Middlebrook’s general store features handmade and salvaged objects available through barter. Within Your General Store an alternative economy exists, one that is defined by both the clerk and the visitor. The project is part of SITE Santa Fe’s biennial exhibition series Unsettled Landscapes, exploring the work of contemporary art and cultural production in the Americas. Learn more here.
Project:Postcard Exhibition
NMSU Department of Art’s third biennial Project: Postcard, an exhibition of original postcard-sized art, created by professional artists from around the globe, NMSU art faculty and art students, past and present, and friends and families of these communities.
Learn more here!
Between Here and There | Paul Turounet | Terri Warpinski
September 3, 2015 – October 3, 2015
Opening reception on September 3 rd from 5-7 pm
In this two-person exhibition, visual artists Paul Turounet and Terri Warpinski present works that grapple with the complexities and controversies surrounding the constructs of international borders as junctions that designate the present and future for many migrants in transition as well as the effects on existing communities in border regions.
Jeffrey DaCosta, Felice House, Kathleen Scott, Millee Tibbs, and Dana Younger
University Art Gallery
Opening Reception is Thursday, May 21, 5-7 pm. The exhibition will run through August 22nd, 2015.
In this exhibition titled Re:Visioning the West, the University Art Gallery will challenge the audience to consider our beloved West in a new light.
Click here to read more about the exhibition and associated programming.
June 26th, 5-7pm
“30 UNDER 30” Exhibition Opening
Santa Fe Community Convention Center, Santa Fe, NM
The Santa Fe Commission’s Community Gallery will be opening their doors for their “30 UNDER 30” Exhibition. The featured artists (which include both NMSU faculty and alumni) were selected by a jury, of which our very own Director, Marisa Sage, was a part! If you cannot make the opening, the exhibition will run from June 26th through September 5th, 2015.
Read more about this event here.
Runs: April 17 – May 9, 2015
Opening Reception: April 24th, 4 – 8 PM
This year’s MFA graduates are Aubrey de Cheubell, Lea WiseSurguy-Sophiliazo, and Kristopher Wilson. While all working in highly different formats, each artist has a connection to the world around us as well as within us.
Read more HERE
2015 Juried Student Show
The NMSU University Art Gallery hosted the annual Juried Student Show, the exhibition featured a wide range of artwork created by both undergraduate and graduate students from diverse disciplines, and various majors across the NMSU main campus.Juror Fausto Fernandez carefully weaved through the online submissions and chose which ones would be included in the show. Click here to see who made it in the show and who also got awards! Read more here.
Las Cruces Creates
A group exhibition running in the University Art Gallery January 15th, through February 28th, 2015. This group exhibition features 21 different artists who are currently making art within the community of Las Cruces.
Las Cruces Creates includes works by Chris Bardey, Nancy Begin, Karen Bucher, Sharbani Das Gupta, Greg Decker, Carlos Estrada-Vega, John Garrett, Stephen Hansen, Amanda Jaffe, Suzanne Kane, Robin Labe, Rosemary McLoughlin, Brack Morrow, Louis Ocepek, Mary Robertson, Joshua Rose, Jesse Reinhard, Jacklyn St. Aubyn, Isadora Stowe, Jean Reece Wilkey, and Mary Wolf.
Off the Wall
August 29-December 6, 2014
Off the Wall is an exhibition inspired by the minimal wall drawings and sculptures of Sol LeWitt. This two-parted exhibition will both trace the history of Sol LeWitt’s relationship with NMSU, as well as show the extent of his influence on a new generation of artists who use the surface of the wall as their canvas.
Read full press release here
