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Celebrate the opening of Push & Pull: The Prints of Helen Frankenthaler and Her Contemporaries

UNM Art Museum latest exhibition celebrates abstraction in all print processes. Featuring Modern and contemporary abstract prints and drawings, the exhibition focuses on the works of Helen Frankenthaler and Elaine de Kooning. Displayed alongside prints by their contemporaries, the works in this exhibition demonstrate important collaborations with American publishers such as Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), Tyler Graphics Ltd., and Tamarind Institute. Read more about Push and Pull.

We invite you to join us for an opening reception on Friday, January 31, from 4:00 – 7:00 pm, with opening remarks beginning at 4:45 pm from UNMAM Curators Mary Statzer and Angel Jiang, and Director Arif Khan.

This exhibition is made possible by a generous donation of twenty prints from Helen Frankenthaler as part of the Frankenthaler Prints Initiative. UNM students from the course Abstraction on Paper: Curating Postwar American Prints and Drawings (AHIS 429/529) played a key role in developing this exhibition, providing labels and sound pieces.

Kayliegh Begay
Hannah Cerne
Ava Marr
Logan Petersen
Marina Perez
Savannah Phelps
Sophie Rubeo
Michael Schultze
Brianna Tadeo
Yoma Wilson

In response to Frankenthaler’s work, students created original pieces featured in the exhibition. Adrian Ricca Lucci (BFA student in painting and drawing), Brianna Tadeo (third-year MFA student in photography), and Yoma Wilson (second-year MFA student in printmaking). whose works reflect a deep engagement with Frankenthaler’s artistic vision.

Spring Reception, Saturday, March 22, 2025, 3:00-6:00 pm

Professor Meggan Gould, who teaches photography within the Department of Art at UNM and serves as the Associate Dean of Research, is a contemporary photographer whose work often explores the rhetorical, semiotic, and material ways in which photography and its tools—namely, cameras—have been socially constructed. She places under the lens facets of camera technology that usually reside comfortably outside the resultant image—the varying structures and functions of viewfinders, film frame counters, and camera icons—questioning the particular ways in which these seemingly natural and neutral attributes shape the photographer, and the medium itself.

During the creation of her series “7 Pictures Remaining,” the artist’s images of camera counters took on a surprising new dimension when she discovered that many of the cameras documented contained rolls of undeveloped film. Gould opened nearly all the cameras in the collection and discovered hundreds of never-before-seen images residing within. This yielded fascinating discoveries and intimate moments connecting cameras, and former camera owners, to their images, effectively operating as a “shadow archive” within the California Museum of Photography (CMP) technology collection. A selection of prints made from these anonymous images are presented alongside Gould’s own work, attributing personal histories and biographies to these otherwise mute objects.

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 15,2025, 6:00-8:00 pm

In this group exhibition curated by Daniel Ulibarri, “New Tableau: Experiments in Photography” explores how contemporary artists are returning to the photographic medium’s experimental beginnings within the context of modernity. From thermal cameras to alternative darkroom techniques, these artists embrace subtraction, abstraction, amalgamation, unorthodox imaging, and non-traditional practices to explore new frontiers.

“New Tableau” features nine local and international artists, including Roger Ballen, Stefan Jennings Batista, Ryan Dennison, Jesse Draxler, Derrell Lopez, Emily Margarit Mason, Zuyva Sevilla, Nick Tauro Jr., and Ramona Zordini.

Opening Reception: Friday, March 28, 2025, 5:30 pm

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 29, 2025, 3:00-6:00 pm
Artist Talk: Tuesday, April 8, 2025, 5:00 pm, Zimmerman Library, Frank Waters Room

MFA Thesis exhibition by Emma Ressel ’25 at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, 2nd floor.

Artist Talk: Friday, April 24, 2025, 3:30 pm
Opening: Sunday, May 4, 2025, 1:00-4:00 pm

XeO is presenting a collection of seven Risograph-printed perzines explore the shared animalness between XeO and XeO’s cat, Kurdle. Queer joy is showcased through mundane aspects of identity and connection. Philosophical musings and biographical narrative merge in a fascinating study of similarities between us and our non-human kin—and how we activate each other.

Reception: Friday, April 25, 2025, 5:00-7:30 pm

Join the free public reception celebrating the opening of the exhibition, Voces del Pueblo: Artists of the Levantamiento Chicano in New Mexico, curated by Ray Hernández-Durán, Ph.D. and Irene Vásquez, Ph.D.

This is an exhibition 7 years in the making that features a group of New Mexican artists who were among the earliest generation of Chicana and Chicano activists in the state. All 6 artists, 3 men and 3 women, were students at New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) in Las Vegas in the early 1970s when Chicano scholar Pedro Rodríguez was hired as the inaugural Director of Chicano Studies at NMHU. It was at NMHU that these young men and women became politically active and proceeded to paint murals, produce art, and organize in New Mexico as part of the nascent Chicano civil rights movement that was unfolding nationally. The artworks on display capture a distinctly New Mexican Chicana and Chicano experience that has received little attention in Chicano art history.

Opening Reception: May 3, 2025, 5:00-7:00 pm

SciArt Santa Fe presents Woven Skies: SciArt from Air to the Cosmos, a group exhibition and series of artists’ talks, with a diverse range of perspectives and media at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Artists in the exhibition selected through a statewide open call illuminate matter, energy, form and other aspects from air to the cosmos through research-based investigation at the intersection of art and science with a high level of aesthetic quality.

Featured Artists: Established and emerging artists from across the state using a variety of traditional and experimental media featured are: Kirsten Angerbauer, Colin Barker, Fiona Bell, Paul Biagi, Natalie Christensen, Shirley Crow, Jim Eyre, Marianne Hornbuckle, Susan Latham, Andrea Polli, Alyce Santoro, Zuyva Sevilla, Joan Stango, Dora Tass and Isabel Winson-Sagan.

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 10, 2025, 6:00-9:00 pm

LASER Talk: Science, Art, World in Heidegger’s Thought featuring students from St. John’s College Santa Fe: Kanstantsin Tsiarokhin (’25), Antonio Fox (’25), Marlo Bauer (’28), Clara West (’27), Sophie Frankel (’25) organized by Chuck Tucker

Heidegger, one of the most prominent philosophers in the 20th century, has developed an original body of thought, relying on insights of the ancient school of philosophy—particularly Aristotle—on the relationship between world, art, and science. Following his line of thought, our panel will attempt to unfurl his complex yet edifying thinking concerning the contrasting and overlapping relationships between technological and artistic dispositions and the way these modes of being shape our interaction with the world. Through a focused consideration of Heidegger’s theories on nature, reality and art, we will explore the way in which truth and the experience of the natural world are determined with regard to the development of both art and science.

In conjunction with the exhibition Woven Skies: SciArt from Air to the Cosmos, SciArt Santa Fe is hosting a series of these presentations called ‘LASERs’. LASER stands for Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous and take place around the world in more than 40 institutions in 4 continents. SciArt Santa Fe represents New Mexico in this prestigious international Leonardo Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology initiative. Woven Skies LASERs feature exhibiting New Mexico artists and sciart experts from across the state.

Opening Reception: May 17, 2025, 6:00-8:00 pm
Closing Reception: May 22, 2025, 6:00-8:00 pm

The University of New Mexico’s John Sommers Gallery is honored to host the final MFA thesis exhibition of the Confluence Low-Residency Program, a program for place-based learning in interdisciplinary art and regenerative culture. This culminating exhibition shares the work of nine artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, textiles, performance, ceramics, language, and collaborative education. As the final graduating class of this MFA program, the exhibition is both a celebration of artistic achievement and a bittersweet farewell to a beloved program that has nurtured a generation of socially and ecologically engaged artists.

There is Another Sky is curated by Erin Elder and showcases the work of:

Megan Bartley Matthews (Albuquerque, NM, US), who distills lightness, darkness, and language into durational and sculptural forms that provoke wonder;
Rachel Hebert (Phoenix, AZ, US), whose large-scale quilt entwines memory, public land, and care for a commons;
Julia Knowlden (Canmore, AB, Canada), whose layered paintings trace the subtle presence and erasure of nonhumans and human impact, both efforts to conserve wildlife and shortcomings in the Canadian Rockies;
Jill Nuckles (Calgary, AB, Canada), who weaves sculpture, textile, and natural dyes into water-based narratives of connection and transformation;
Carissa Pobre (Manila, Philippines), who developed Slant School, a socio-poetic framework for organizing writing and learning around cultural realities in the postcolonial urbanized South;
Shondra Leigh (Atlanta, GA, US), who collaborates with her students through an evolving painting practice rooted in dialogue and shared authorship that share this generation’s multifaceted struggles;
Kimberly Thompson (Santa Fe, NM, US), who transforms discarded objects into intimate and precious sculptures that contain emotion, revaluing the overlooked;
Clare Wilkening (Roberts Creek, BC, Canada), who combines ceramic installations with workshops, and in this case shares a sculptural tableware set that tells the story of the connected ecology of salmon.

The Confluence MFA program has been a fertile site of experimentation, reciprocity, and interdependence. Rooted in New Mexico and unfolding across geographies, the program has shaped practices that are attuned to place, politics, and the poetics of care. This final exhibition shares what we built together: a community of artists, thinkers, and educators whose work will continue to ripple outward.

The exhibition will be open to the public at the John Sommers Gallery in Albuquerque from 5/17/2025 to 5/23/2025. Visitors are invited to engage with the works, meet the artists, and reflect on the legacy of a program that championed field-based learning, deep material inquiry, and collective stewardship.

For more information, please contact co-directors:
Mary Mattingly: mmattingly@unm.edu
Carol Padberg: padberg5@unm.edu