Faculty Exhibitions & Publications

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 17, 2024, 6:00-8:00 pm
Performance: Mitsu Salmon, Saturday, February 17, 2024, 6:00 pm

516 ARTS presents Geohaptics: Sensing Climate, a group exhibition uniting poignant works from artists who enact a somatic, empathic collaboration with the Earth using the senses, heart, and mind. The title of this exhibit combines “geo,” meaning earth, and “haptics,” referring to the sense of touch. The word “haptic” derives from the Greek word haptein, meaning “to fasten.”

Curated by artist, writer, and educator Daniela Naomi Molnar, Geohaptics: Sensing Climate features national and regional artists that include Athena LaTocha, Mitsu Salmon, Beili Liu, Ella Morton, Alexis Elton, Jason Franscisco, UNM Art Professor of Practice, Carol Padberg, Jonathan Marquis, Heidi Gustafson, and Sarah Gerats. Artworks range from investigating the Arctic region to New Mexico’s atomic histories, expressed through organic sculptural forms, video, performance, paintings, photography, and multimedia installation.

Living in the midst of the climate catastrophe, how can we refuse despair and apathy? How might we turn this planetary pivot into a portal to new and better human natures? These questions and more are presented and explored in the exhibition, which hosts a series of public programs (more to be announced soon) engaging sensory experiences and poetic responses to a rapidly changing world.

Opening reception: Friday, March 15, 2024, 5:00-7:00 pm

Gerald Peters Contemporary is pleased to announce “Earth and Sky” an exhibition of wood carvings by Associate Professor of Sculpture, Randall Wilson. Featuring over a dozen new works, the exhibition will mark Wilson’s third presentation with the gallery and his largest to date. Upon returning to New Mexico ten years ago, sculptor Randall Wilson refocused his practice. Imbued with a new sense of affection and reverence for his heritage and Southwestern roots, Wilson’s wood carvings are anchored in the folk-art tradition of the region. Honoring these origins, Wilson derives sculpting method and style from an historical model of carving wood, and introduces embossing, once associated with traditional leather and tinwork of the southwest into a distinctly personal and contemporary iconography.

“Grounded in Clay” gives voice to the Pueblo Pottery Collective, the sixty Native American curators who selected and wrote about works in clay, including UNM Associate Professor of Ceramics, Clarence Cruz, from SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center and from the Vilcek Foundation. This unique traveling exhibition features over 100 historic and contemporary works in clay and offers a visionary understanding of Pueblo pots as vessels of community-based knowledge and personal experience. Grounded in Clay will be in New York until June of 2024. The exhibition then travels to Houston, followed by Saint Louis.

Foregrounding Pueblo voices and aesthetics, Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery is the first community-curated Native American exhibition in the history of The Met. The effort features more than one hundred historical, modern, and contemporary clay works and offers a critical understanding of Pueblo pottery as community-based knowledge and personal experience.