Plaza Building

Art does not only reflect the identity of a place, it plays an active role in defining that image. Imagining New Mexico is an exhibition from the museum’s collection that investigates how artists have both shaped and reacted to four key themes of New Mexican identity: Land, Tradition, the Arts, and Modernity. New Mexico, like...

Cady Wells: Ruminations  presents watercolor paintings from one of the Southwest’s most interesting modernists. Previously shown at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, OK, Ruminations explores the dynamic and psychologically penetrating watercolor paintings of Cady Wells (1904-1954). This group of more than 22 works all drawn from the museum’s collection features Wells’ uniquely modernist...

Light Tight: New Work by Meggan Gould and Andy Mattern, on display from March 25 – Oct. 2, 2017, is a two-person exhibition that presents new and unconventional work by Meggan Gould and Andy Mattern. Both artists investigate the basic materials of photography and subvert the idea of photographic representation and the commercialization of the...

The exhibition examines the many ways artists have used drawing as a means of recording and provoking thought from the fifteenth century to today. The internationally  recognized line-up of artists is a ‘who’s who’ of artists through the centuries. The exhibition includes work by artists as diverse as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, Piet...

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...