Ongoing
How the West Is One: The Art of New Mexico, organizes key objects from the museum’s collections so that they outline an intercultural history of New Mexico art, from the arrival of railroads in 1879 to the present. This long term exhibition presents 70 works by Native American, Hispanic, and European-American artists which illustrate the changing aesthetic ideals that have evolved within southwestern art over the last 125 years.
How the West Is One views New Mexico art as a holistic tradition that has been produced by important interactions between aesthetic perspectives. Over the last few decades, historians have emphasized the fracturing of New Mexico art into competing ethnic, aesthetic, and conceptual groupings. This fractured history promoted the idea of three separate cultures in New Mexico, and implied that little interaction had occurred between these differing aesthetic perspectives. The one-ness of New Mexico art is the unique, unpredictable, often contradictory unity that developed from cultural interactions among people from various ethnic backgrounds living in New Mexico.
Images from the Exhibition
Valorio
James Stovall Morris
Cui Bono?
Gerald Cassidy
Washington Landscape with Peace Medal Indian
T. C. Cannon
The Black Shawl
Esquipula Romero de Romero