Plaza Building

The 20th century saw some of the most seismic shifts in the tried-and-true tradition of landscape as a subject for artists. In the United States, we left the 20th century with many of the same concerns we entered it with. Among those concerns are issues of land use, expansion and border conflicts, and industrialization and...

Words and pictures have a long history of playing well together, sometimes reinforcing and sometimes contradicting each other. This exhibition of more than forty works of art in a variety of mediums features images by artists who incorporate letters, words, and phrases into their visual creations. Among the delights of the exhibition are photographs inspired...

At a time when the black-and-white camera image dominated the field of photography, a small cadre of American artists began developing new approaches to the medium that brought photography into conversation with other art forms. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam conflict and social justice movements, these artists incorporated historic photo processes but also printmaking,...

After more than a century of collecting, the New Mexico Museum of Art has become home to some of the finest examples of Southwestern Art by the regions most beloved artists. On the second floor of the Museum’s historic building, find treasured classics and new surprises in our permanent installation of twentieth-century art. Featuring work...

This is the story of a place. It’s a place where millions of years of the earth’s development are openly revealed and where the hopes and aspirations of the human race have been inscribed for centuries. Located in canyon country along  the Colorado River, Glen Canyon stretches down from southeastern Utah down northern Arizona, not...

Breath. It is one of the first things we do in life and one of the last, but in between we generally don’t give it much thought. In this exhibition, contemporary artists find inventive ways to express this fundamental and elusive act by measuring it, scanning it, enclosing it, evoking it, and reminding us of...

Western Eyes: 20th Century Art Here and Now will explore regional developments of modernism including American realism, Indigenous modernism and Native American art, and Mexican modernism. It will highlight southwestern modernist painting and sculpture and display stylistic developments including abstract expressionism, minimalism, and pop. This exhibition illustrates how the museum’s collection is representative of these...

Ansel Adams is one of the first names that springs to mind when people think about photography. This exhibition of sixteen prints from the museum’s collection, augmented with two promised gifts, concentrates on the photographs that Adams made around 1932, before he became a household name. In the late 1920s, Adams shifted away from the...

Art dealer Elaine Horwitch was a major force in contemporary art in the Southwest from the early 1970s until her death in 1991, responsible for launching the careers of hundreds of artists from the region. With galleries in Scottsdale, Santa Fe, Sedona, and Palm Springs, she was a leader in fostering what has been called...

Narrative art tells a story. It can either illustrate historic events or bring the imagination to life. It can be somber, humorous, didactic, or entertaining. The traditions of storytelling in the Southwest go back to ancient times and the indigenous populations of the region, and include themes such as satire, agriculture and ecology, everyday experiences,...