Current and Upcoming Exhibitions

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Afton Love

September 15 - October, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, September 14, 5:30-7 pm with artist's lecture at 5:30 pm
Marshall and Winston Galleries

Afton Love’s practice develops out of an intimate interaction with her geographic surroundings, and engages the profound yet subtle geologic changes that occur to a landscape through time. Her practice encompasses multiple media, including drawing, casting, and photography. Her meticulous, detailed drawings record places where she has walked and wandered, and focus on revealed erosion and rock formations. Created on multiple sheets of tracing paper with powdered graphite, and then sealed in beeswax, the result is a luminous synthesis of graphite, wax, and paper; natural form and subjugated grid. Read more

Exploring Lithography

August 25, 2018 - February 10, 2019
Horgan and Graphics Galleries

Lithography is among the most versatile printmaking methods available today. Invented in 1796 by German playwright Alois Senefelder, lithography operates on the opposition of oil and water. To make a lithograph, an artist draws onto a stone with an oily, ink-receptive crayon or other substance. The stone is then inked, rinsed, and pressed onto a piece of paper. Compared to the limited shelf life of etching plates or woodblocks, which can begin to wear down after a few dozen impressions, lithography can produce hundreds of images inexpensively, making it one of the most ubiquitous printing techniques of the Industrial Revolution. Initially regarded as a commercial printing medium rather than an artistic one, by the late nineteenth century artists such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec had begun exploring its unique aesthetic qualities to create vibrant, colorful posters and prints that embody the gestural energy of drawing. Read more

Community Minded: The Roswell Federal Art Center
August 11, 2018 - May 26, 2019
Hunter Galley

For 80 years, the Roswell Museum and Art Center has enriched southeast New Mexico with its multidisciplinary collections and educational programs, and its community-driven mission takes inspiration from its origins as a federal art center. Opened in 1937 as the Roswell Museum Federal Art Center, the institution we know and love as RMAC developed out of a WPA initiative designed to bring arts access and education to rural areas, minority populations, and other underserved communities. The Roswell Museum Federal Art Center maintained an active schedule of exhibitions and programming while also overseeing other WPA projects such as the local Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp. Through these activities, the Museum became an important community center bringing together different people through the appreciation of art and history, a role that continues to drive its mission today. Read More

Magical & Real: Henriette Wyeth & Peter Hurd, A Retrospective

June 16 - September 16, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday June 15, 5-7pm

Patricia Gaylord Anderson, Entry and Spring River Galleries

Henriette Wyeth and Peter Hurd are two of southeastern New Mexico’s most significant and beloved artists. Born and raised in Roswell, Hurd studied art with renowned illustrator N.C. Wyeth during the 1920s in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. In 1929, Hurd married N.C.’s eldest daughter, fellow artist Henriette, and the two eventually settled west of Roswell in San Patricio. Hurd became renowned for his luminous egg tempera landscapes and portraits capturing the arid beauty of southeast New Mexico, while Wyeth focused on still life and portraiture, creating paintings that showcased her technical skills as a painter as well as her poetic sensibilities. While many visitors to the Roswell Museum and Art Center are familiar with the southwestern output of Wyeth and Hurd, both artists painted and exhibited their work on a national scale, and merit national recognition in the history of American art. Read more

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Louise Deroualle

May 12 - June 24, 2018
Opening Reception:
Friday, May 11, 5:30-7 pm with artist's lecture at 5:30 pm
Marshall and Winston Galleries

Louise Deroualle uses ceramic materials to create formal abstractions that reveal different physical, experiential and emotional facets of herself. Her work is influenced by the cultural experiences to which she has been exposed—from her upbringing in Brazil to her studies and residence in the United States—and the way those interactions build her identity. She subverts the traditional order of layering glazes over slips and utilizes the fluidity of the glaze layer underneath as a symbol of her inner world of emotions as well as her cultural identity. The stress between the fluid and dry layers of materials results in a partial glimpse into the emotional interior. The slips become an external barrier, while glazes turn into an extremely powerful emotion that always finds its way to the outer reality. Read more

Pennsylvania Impressionists

November 10, 2017 - May 31, 2018

Founders Gallery

Drawn from the Michener’s permanent collection, this selection highlights fifteen works by some of Pennsylvania’s most renowned Impressionist painters of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including John Folinsbee, Edward W. Redfield, Fern Coppedge, and more. From springtime meadows to the snow-covered river scenes, this exhibition has a landscape for every season. Since these works rarely travel to the western United States, visitors will have an unusual opportunity to explore regional painting traditions from another part of the country. Read more

RAiR at 50

October 6, 2017 - April 6, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, October 6, 5-7 pm
Patricia Gaylord Anderson, Entry, Russell Vernon Hunter, and Spring River Galleries

In celebration of RAiR’s 50th anniversary, this exhibition invites alumni of the program to share their recent art with the Roswell community. With more than 170 participants submitting new work, this show will occupy most of the Museum’s galleries, emphasizing the grant’s impressive scope. Visitors will have the opportunity to learn about RAiR’s many recipients while discovering how their work has continued to evolve since their time with the program. Read more

Peter Hurd on Paper

February 24 - August 12, 2018
Horgan and Graphics Gallery

Peter Hurd is renowned for his luminous egg tempera paintings, but his works on paper form another important and substantial body of work. Over the course of his career, Hurd produced finished watercolor paintings, numerous studies in preparation for larger works, and informal sketches of landscapes and people. Some of his earliest surviving watercolors date from the 1920s, and beginning in the 1930s he created pen and ink wash studies for lithographs, as well as charcoal cartoons for murals. Read more

Robert H. Goddard: Dreamer, Tinkerer, Pioneer

On Permanent Display
Goddard Gallery and Workshop Recreation

In 1898, a teenage Robert Hutchings Goddard (1882-1945), captivated by the realism of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, “…imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars.” He began enthusiastically filling notebooks with ideas for getting off the planet. As a graduate student in physics at Clark College in Worcester, Massachusetts, his hometown, he conducted simple tests with gun powder that suggested it was indeed possible to construct a rocket for space travel. Read more

Hurd & Wyeth: Picturing the Hondo Valley

On Permanent Display
Founders Gallery

The Roswell Museum and Art Center is home to the largest public collection of works by Peter Hurd and Henriette Wyeth, painters who have both become synonymous with the landscape and culture of southeastern New Mexico. Peter Hurd (1904-1984) was raised in Roswell where his father worked a small ranch southwest of town. Much of his youth was spent astride a horse, and he was known for his equestrian abilities. Roaming the countryside as a youth on horseback earned Hurd an intimate understanding of the hills, prairies, and arroyos that configured the surrounding landscape. Read more