About

The importance of the arts as communication, in the past, the present and the future, is pivotal.

This belief is the keystone of our programs, and it is the foundation for our primary goal, which is to expose students to the richness of art through a wide range of new and traditional media. We also seek to develop critical thought in our classes, and the practice and methods for understanding the teaching of the arts and the history of art.

The Department is dedicated to providing the best education possible no matter which degree a student might be pursuing. We are also committed to benefiting UNM, the city of Albuquerque, the state of New Mexico, as well as national, and international communities. To achieve these aims, the Department maintains a world-class faculty that is actively engaged in creative art, art education, and art history.

an art history professor pointing to a work during a lecture

Art Department News

Angel Estrada, UNM Art Education Undergrad, Collaborates with Local Elementary Schools on Art Project

Undergraduate student Angel Estrada is bringing life and color into downtown Albuquerque...

Art and Ecology Professor Subhankar Banerjee Receives 45th Ashley Fellow and Globally-Engaged Research Award

Professor Banerjee has received several awards for his conservation and scholarly contributions. Most recently, he received the 2024 Globally Engaged Research Award from UNM

Summer Residencies with Painting and Drawing Instructor Raychael Stine

Visual artist Raychael Stine is a painter living and working along with her two dogs here in Albuquerque, NM, as well as the Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of New Mexico, where she has taught since 2013.

Department of Art Events

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13dec(dec 13)8:00 pm03apr(apr 3)5:00 pmSeeding Radicle Futures

31jan(jan 31)10:00 am17may(may 17)5:00 pmPush & Pull: The Prints of Helen Frankenthaler and Her Contemporaries

Event Details

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.

Time

January 31, 2025 10:00 am - May 17, 2025 5:00 pm

Location

UNM Art Museum

Center for the Arts, 203 Cornell Dr, Albuquerque, NM 87106

Calendar GoogleCal

05feb(feb 5)9:00 am07may(may 7)9:15 amLive Performance Piece

22feb(feb 22)12:00 pm27jul(jul 27)5:00 pmShadow Archive

Event Details

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.