Exhibitions

Tuesday October 30, 2007 to Sunday February 10, 2008
Contemporary Desert Photography: The Other Side of Paradise

This traveling exhibition from the Palm Springs Art Museum brings together over fifty photographs from twenty-six American photographers including Thomas Barrow, Patrick Nagatani, Mark Klett, Wanda Hamerbeck, and Lee Friedlander. Rather than concentrating on sublime beauty or the history of landscape images, these artists have approached the landscape from the perspective of mankind's intervention and impact on our deserts.
View Events in this Exhibition

Michael C. McMillen, blue Trailer, Bombay Beach, 1998. Gelatin silver print. Palm Srprings Art Museum Collection, purchased with funds derived from a previoius gift from Kirk and Anne Douglas. © Michael C. McMillen.

January 29 - March 16, 2008
Drawn Closer: The Artist’s Hand

University of New Mexico Art Museum Collection.
Guest curator Jim Jacob, from the Painting and Drawing program in the Department of Art and Art History, has organized a series of four exhibitions over the next academic year that explore concerns specific to the act of drawing. Jacob mines the rich holdings in the UNM Art Museum collection to consider everything from the fundamentals of drawing—space, technique, and medium—to its relationship to history and its inevitable association to printmaking.

"Drawing is usually considered a secondary art, applauded for its utilitarianism and affordability, but never considered as important as the work that it might inform. At the same time, drawing is essential to developing our ability to see. It is simple and direct and allows for a great variety of individual expression. It has qualities and characteristics that are unique unto itself and an incredible range of expressive possibilities. It is for these reasons we have curated a show from the museum’s collection devoted exclusively to the art of drawing.”

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Frauenkopf (Head of a Woman No. 2), 1915-16. Woodcut.

January 22–March 9, 2008
New Acquisitions: The Director’s Cut

This exhibition has been made possible through the civic spirit and generosity of financial contributors and collectors to the permanent collection of the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Much can and has been said about the motives for collecting art. It can be viewed as preserving the cultural commonwealth, as a window into the thoughts, aesthetics, social concerns, and ideals at a particular time and place.  It can also be thought of as a gift from the present to the future. A museum collection might also be regarded as a means of keeping alive the work of artists through exhibitions, study, and research. All of these things together make the museum collection a noble pursuit.  The most worthy goal for me however, is to engage the mind and delight the eye.

Disfarmer (Mike Meyer), Untitled, c. 1940s. Gelatin silver print. University of New Mexico Art Museum Collection. Gift of Ronald G. Weiner.

February 26–May 25, 2008
For the Greater Good: New Deal Art in New Mexico, 1933-1943

In celebration of the 75th Anniversary of the New Deal, the UNM Art Museum presents a major selection of artworks produced by New Mexico artists from 1933 to 1943 under the auspices of the various Federal New Deal art programs. The New Deal was established by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 to support American workers, including hundreds of artists, who were paid a living wage to produce murals, easel paintings, prints, sculptures, weavings, pottery, wood carvings, stage plays, musical scores, and some of the best written works of the period. For the first time in American history, artists were recognized as productive workers and valued for what they did. Every state had its representative artists and, because of its already established art culture, New Mexico was one of the most productive, its artists forging one of the richest legacies during the New Deal era.

Exhibition artists include: Willard Nash, Raymond Jonson, Gene Kloss, Kenneth Adams, Dorothy Morang, Howard A. Barton, Charles Barrow, José Dolores López, James Morris, Walter Ufer, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, Edna Pierce, Polia Pillin, Brooks Willis, Joseph Imhoff, Juanita Lantz, Santiago Matta, Willard Everingham, Blanca Will, Russell Lee, Lloyd Moylan and Victor Higgins.

Raymond Jonson, Cycle of Science- Astronomy, 1934. Oil on canvas. UNM Art Museum’s Jonson Gallery Collection by bequest of the artist.

March 28–May 11, 2008
Chamber Music 4: Filtered Light

An Installation by Steve Peters
As part of UNM’s 36th Annual John Donald Robb Composers’ Symposium, Seattle-based artist Steve Peters created this four-channel sound installation entitled Chamber Music 4: Filtered Light. Chamber Music is an ongoing series of site-specific sound works derived from field recordings made in buildings when no people are present. These recordings of "silent" room tone are filtered to extract subtle resonant frequencies from the spectrum of (very quiet) broadband noise. In this case, an hour-long stereo recording was made during off hours in the Study Gallery of the UNM Art Museum.

March 25 - May 4, 2008
The 14th Annual Juried Graduate Student Exhibition

Engaged in one of the most the rigorous and highly respected art programs in the United States, UNM’s graduate students produce some of the most original and challenging work in New Mexico. This year we are pleased to showcase these young artists in the UNM Art Museum rather than at the Jonson Gallery. These exhibitions particularly, juried and curated by Suzanne Sbarge, Director of Albuquerque’s 516 art space, guarantee an experience you are not likely to find anywhere else in the state. The three prize recipients in this year’s exhibition are May Golden Chaltiel (the Ana Mendieta Prize), Jenna Kuiper (the Florence Henri Prize), and Craig Donalson (the Friends of Art Prize).  All awards for this exhibition will be presented at the end of the semester during April of 2008.

Craig Donalson, Kindling, 2007. Clay, (4'x4'x4'). Courtesy of the artist.

April 1 - May 25, 2008
Drawn Closer: Lasting Impressions