Plaza Building

Shifting Light offers a twenty-first century perspective on the museum’s long-term engagement with the popular medium of photography. Organized into the broad categories of Place, Identity, and Creativity, the exhibition juxtaposes photographs in ways that amplify their meanings and suggest new narratives. Ansel Adams’ famous 1940 photograph Moonrise, Hernandez is paired with a 1975 landscape...

Horizons: People & Place in 20th Century New Mexican Art celebrates this museum’s role as a place where traditional and innovative arts practices from diverse cultures intersect to create something unique to the region. Contemporary since the beginning, the New Mexico Museum of Art has been an advocate of progressive arts since opening its doors...

New Mexico has consistently provided fertile ground for communities of artists to gather together and create shared forums for their individual visions. The Taos Society of Artists, Los Cinco Pintores, the Transcendental Painting Group, Rio Grande Painters Group and the artists of Stieglitz circle were among the many communities of artists that formed in New...

Wait Until Dark explores the nocturne in art, demonstrating how it has become a subgenre within the broader category of landscape painting, how it is used to set a narrative mood, and how it has illustrated significant cultural and community events, particularly in New Mexico. Most generally, a nocturne can be understood as simply a...

Photography is most often associated with light and the word itself means “light writing” in Greek. However, in this exhibition of nearly thirty images, four Southwestern photographers explore the dark side of the medium. Featured are about thirty photographs by Christopher Colville, scott b. davis, Michael Lundgren, and Ken Rosenthal. Each of the artists makes...

“Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” American painter Adolph “Ad” Reinhardt once quipped, reflecting on the secondary treatment of sculpture in the larger context of fine art. Three-dimensional art has often been consigned to the footnotes of art history, and the case in New Mexico is...

Museum collections are a source of inspiration, appreciation, and learning. Bringing Together celebrates the ongoing process of building our collection by sharing a portion of the artworks acquired by the New Mexico Museum of Art over the past five years. Either by gift or purchase, every well-chosen object added to our collection broadens its scope...

The traveling exhibition, Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, on view from October 5, 2019, to January 5, 2020 at the New Mexico Museum of Art, surveys the works of an artist who made significant contributions within twentieth-century abstraction. Pelton’s work has been associated with Georgia O’Keeffe and Marsden Hartley, and yet remained unrepresented in critical artistic...

Art collectors are often said to have “a good eye” for pictures, but what does that really mean? This selection of photographs from three collections recently donated to the museum and one promised gift illustrates a variety of approaches to choosing works of art and assembling a collection. United by a passion for photography, each...

A prominent fixture in the Santa Fe arts community, Rick Dillingham was a scholar, author, collector, curator, dealer, and ceramic artist who was firmly grounded in the tradition and canon of Southwest ceramics. After his death in 1994 due to complications from AIDS, Dillingham’s collection of ceramic artworks was distributed across multiple institutions in central...