What goes on behind the scenes at the museum is an intriguing story. One aspect is that photographs, prints, works on paper, paintings, and objects from the permanent collection— of some 30,000 works of art— are routinely sought for important national or international exhibitions. Curators working on projects as diverse as Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood, or, Dennis Hopper Double Standard and Playing with Pictures: Victorian Photocollage contacted us this past year about lending to their respective shows. After discussion by the UNM Art Museum Loans Committee several extraordinary pieces of art were then crated and shipped out to the somewhat nearby destinations of El Paso, Fort Worth, and Santa Fe; and the distant locales of Melbourne, Australia; Ontario, Canada; New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and Chicago.

Being the largest collection of fine art in the state, it is rewarding to consider how the Museum contributed to a wide range of 2009-10 exhibitions including Georgia O’Keeffe and Abstraction (Whitney Museum of Art); Georgia O’Keeffe and the Far Away: Nature and Image (Cowgirl Hall of Fame); Solidarity and Struggle:  the Politics of Graphic Design in Mexico During and After the Revolution (Rubin Center at the University of Texas, El Paso); and Converging Streams:  Hispanic and Native American Art of the Greater Southwest, (Museum of Spanish Colonial Art) as well as to two Dennis Hopper exhibitions (Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and the Victorian photocollage (Chicago Art Institute) show. In turn, we have requested loans of rare and rarely seen works of art for four new exhibitions. These include the Antoine Predock Retrospective; and, the Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Eva Hesse, and Cady Wells shows with works on loan from museums in Vienna, Los Angeles, Prague, Phoenix, Santa Fe, New York, Taos, Roswell, and Colorado Springs; and, from private collectors, an artist’s estate, and an architect’s collection in Zurich, Dublin, Dallas, New York, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Chicago, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, which will be on view throughout the spring term and the summer of 2011.

I hope that you take every opportunity to see the four new, groundbreaking exhibitions that have been made possible through the cooperation of so many. Here, artistic genius may be studied and the indefatigable spirit of creativity may be witnessed. It’s a spectacular season!

We look forward to seeing you in the galleries.