Plaza Building

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...

Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking, brought from The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, showcases the American artist’s sketchbooks, notebooks, inventories, and vibrant color swatches to illuminate the systematic process he used to create his lively hard-edge geometric paintings. The presentation in New Mexico, where the artist lived from 1968 until his death in...

Photographer Patrick Nagatani (1945-2017) didn’t just take pictures, he made pictures. While most art photographs are the result of careful choices about subject, framing, lighting, and other factors, Nagatani went to even greater lengths to get the picture he wanted. With experience working in Hollywood special-effects and an MFA from UCLA, the artist began creating...

Stage, Setting, Mood: Theatricality in the Visual Arts examines the formal means artists employ to impart a sense of drama and setting in their compositions. The exhibition opens with a free public reception hosted by the Women’s Board of the Museum of New Mexico at the New Mexico Museum of Art on February 5, 2016...

The New Mexico Museum of Art celebrates the artistic influence of lowriders on contemporary New Mexico artists in the exhibition Con Cariño: Artists Inspired by Lowriders. Responding to this unique cultural icon in photographs, paintings, sculptures, and videos, artists celebrate the lowriders as a subject of continuing vitality and relevance. The exhibition includes more than...

Earth Now was an exhibition of landscape photographs held at this Museum in 2011. Ansel Adams’ and Eliot Porter’s landscape photography fueled a growing concern for the environment in this country. Their idealized, unpopulated landscapes set the standard for twentieth-century nature photography. Earth Now begins with a suite of works by these two artists and moves on to a group...

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...