Plaza Building

“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...

Out West surveys the work of gay and lesbian artists in the American Southwest from the early twentieth century through the Stonewall Riots of 1969, when the face of queer representation changed dramatically in the United States. While some artists built lives for themselves in states less welcoming to queer people, other areas, including northern New...

Mexican photographer Manuel Carrillo (1906-1989) turned to the camera fairly late in life, joining the Club Fotográfico de México at the age of 49. He quickly found his voice by making images of everyday life throughout Mexico, celebrating local culture and the human spirit. His work is an extension of Mexicanidad, a movement begun in...

An American in Paris: Donald Beauregard surveys the short yet ambitious career of one of the first artists affiliated with the New Mexico Museum of Art. When artist Donald Beauregard (1884-1914) passed away prematurely at age 29, he left behind an impressive body of work conversant in the latest artistic developments in Europe. Following his study...

Organized from the New Mexico Museum of Art’s growing art glass collection, this exhibition explores how artists working in glass have engaged the natural world as content for their work. It also examines the nature of glass as a medium, exploring the technical and material nature of glass, the natural qualities of the medium and...

With the Grain explores the dialogue between artists and their materials at play in the work of modern and contemporary Hispanic carvers in Northern New Mexico. Focusing on the intersection of materials, form, practice, and place it traces the relationship between wood carvers in Northern New Mexico and the distinctive way in which the aesthetics...