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Art Happenings ✨ Santa Fe Indian Market 📝 August

Art Happenings ✨

Santa Fe Indian Market
📝 August 15-16, 2026, 8:00-5:00 pm
📍Santa Fe Plaza
63 Lincoln Ave, Santa Fe, NM 87501 ·

Now in its 104th year, the Santa Fe Indian Market (SFIM) is the largest and most prestigious Native art market in the world. Each August, nearly 1,000 Native artists from over 200 Tribal Nations transform the streets of Santa Fe into a vibrant celebration of creativity, community, and culture.

Check out MFA student Ryan Singer's booth alongside art faculty and alum.

Art Happenings ✨ "The Rooms We Inhabit" 📝 August

Art Happenings ✨

"The Rooms We Inhabit"
📝 August 7, 2026-September 2, 2026
Opening Reception: Friday, August 7, 2026, 5:00-7:00 pm
📍Santa Fe Community College
6401 Santa Fe Richards Ave, Santa Fe, NM

"The Rooms We Inhabit" is an exhibition bringing together New Mexican artists inlcuding art graduate students/alum who explore interior spaces as sites of memory, tension, and psychological mystery. Shifting away from the region's traditional emphasis on landscape, the exhibition turns inward to rooms charged with narrative possibility-spaces that feel lived in, uncanny, and in transition. Through depictions of thresholds, architecture, and domestic environments, the works invite viewers to imagine the stories unfolding within and beyond these interiors.

Still looking for a course to take this Fall 2026?

Still looking for a course to take this Fall 2026? ✨

Consider ARTH 429/529 Models of Thought and Life: Worldmaking and Social Change in Latin America

In a 2008 interview, the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar was asked, “Can art still change the world or change people?” Jaar responded by affirming: “I believe that it can. I believe that art creates models. Art does not concretely and immediately change the world. But it can indeed create models of thought and life, and these models can be shared with an audience.” Taking this proposition as a point of departure, this upper division course examines how artists and other cultural producers have mobilized diverse media, including print culture, craft, textiles, knitting, architecture, painting, sculpture, performance, and photography, to imagine new forms of social, cultural, and political life in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present.

Rather than following a strictly chronological narrative, the course explores the politics of knowledge formation, labor, gender, and the relationship between public and private life through diverse artistic and cultural practices. We will consider how artists and cultural producers have engaged questions of environmental justice, racial inequality, civil conflict, human rights abuses, migration, and human survival while situating these concerns within Latin America’s rich intellectual, aesthetic, and political traditions. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, students will examine, interrogate, and interpret the ways artistic practices function not only as responses to social realities but also as forms of worldmaking that imagine and test alternative social and political possibilities. Particular attention will be given to the formal, material, and conceptual strategies through which artists have articulated alternative visions of collective life, as well as to the geographic contexts, local traditions, and transnational exchanges that have shaped their work and reception.

For more information, contact Sabrina Carletti: carletti@unm.edu

Sabrina Carletti will be joining us as our newest

Sabrina Carletti will be joining us as our newest Assistant Professor of Art History!! ✨

Sabrina Carletti's research focuses on modern and contemporary Latin American art and culture, exploring the intersections of artists’ practices, literature, media, and the production of knowledge. Her scholarship rethinks the history of Latin American art by examining how the ways we describe artistic practice shape what art is understood to do.

Her research spans modernism and the historical avant gardes, histories of reading and print culture, visual culture, pedagogy, environmental humanities, and artistic exchanges between Latin America and Europe. She is the author of Xul Solar: Reading and Modernity in Argentina and is currently working on a second book, Bodies of Trash, which examines how artists across the Americas transform discarded materials into powerful reflections on labor, migration, and ecological change.

Before joining UNM, Sabrina was the Leonard A. Lauder Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art. She has also taught at Princeton University, New York University, Texas A&M University, and Lafayette College.

Please join us in welcoming Sabrina to the Department of Art ❤️🎨

Art Happenings ✨ MOIFA @museumofinternationalfolk

Art Happenings ✨

MOIFA @museumofinternationalfolkart Summer Research Fellowship Presentation
📝 Sunday, August 2, 2026, 2:00–4:00 pm
📍706 Camino Lejo, on Museum Hill
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505

Schedule:
2:00–3:00 pm-Research Presentation with Carla Gilfillan
3:00–4:00 pm-Tin working Demonstration and hands-on Workshop with Esteban Ismael Duran

Join Art History graduate student Carla as she presents her research exploring the history of New Mexico's unique tinworking tradition through the Museum of International Folk Art's collections and archives. Her research combines archival research with community knowledge to examine the emergence of tinwork during New Mexico's territorial period and how artists transformed materials like tin, glass, and wallpaper into a distinctive local artistic tradition.

Central to Carla's research is the anonymous Isleta tinsmith, whose work represents one of the most significant groups of 19th-century tinwork in MOIFA's collection. Through archival research, visual analysis, oral histories, and reconstructions of historic techniques, she investigates the maker and the cultural context behind these remarkable works.

Following the presentation, master tinsmith Esteban Ismael Duran will lead a demonstration and hands-on workshop introducing traditional tinworking techniques, offering attendees the opportunity to connect art historical research with a living artistic tradition.

ASL interpretation provided.
FREE First Sunday for New Mexico Residents.

We hope you'll join us!!

The UNM CFA Dean’s Office and Department of Art ar

The UNM CFA Dean’s Office and Department of Art are pleased to announce that Armando de la Torre @guavasufi has been awarded the UNM SOMA Summer Travel Grant ✨

This grant is awarded to a UNM graduate student to attend SOMA Summer 2026 @somamexico, a 4-week program in Mexico City. The $4,000 USD grant, plus an award by SOMA ($800 USD) is applied to the cost of attending the SOMA Summer program. Congratulations to Armando!!

Armando is a Fronterizo artist who uses alternative materials to explore place, borders, and identity, imagining possible new worlds. Born in Tijuana and raised in San Diego, their borderland experience shapes a multidisciplinary practice rooted in community and storytelling. A U.S. Army veteran with the 82nd Airborne Division, they earned degrees from Santa Monica College and San Diego State University and are currently pursuing an MFA in Art & Ecology where they teach Art Practices I. For over a decade, they have performed and taught puppetry through the San Diego Guild of Puppetry. Their work has been exhibited throughout the San Diego–Tijuana region, including at MCASD, the San Diego Museum of Art, ICA San Diego, Bread & Salt, Centro Cultural de la Raza, and The FRONT, while extending the impact of their exhibitions through teaching and community engagement.

MSC04 2560
1 University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM
87131

art@unm.edu
(505) 277-5861

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