Past Exhibitions

jacobsmeyer_small

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


Between Here and Santa Fe_small

Staff Favorites


April 14 - May 13, 2018
Spring River Gallery


Visitors to the Roswell Museum and Art Center all have their favorite works in the collection. Whether it’s Ram’s Skull with Brown Leaves by Georgia O’ Keeffe, the rare Naskapi coat in the Aston Collection of the American West, or the vintage equipment in the Goddard workshop, we all have objects that we love to visit again and again. Have you ever wondered, however, which pieces the staff like the most? As the people who get to work with this collection every day, which treasures from the vaults do we especially enjoy, and why? Read more
Julie Alpert-thumbnail

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Julie Alpert

March 17 - April 29, 2018
Opening Reception: 
Friday, March 16, 5:30-7 pm with artist's lecture at 5:30 pm
Marshall and Winston Galleries



Julie Alpert modifies and arranges craft materials and found-objects in temporary room-size compositions that become frozen records of her private performance. After it is completed, she documents and de-installs it until, as she describes it, “nothing remains but the photographs and a pile of broken and tattered materials, like the sad detritus of an epic celebration the night before.” She also makes drawings and sculptural works on paper that help her discover new forms and color combinations for future installations.  Read more
inprogress_fagen

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Conor Fagan

January 20 - March 4, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, January 19, 5:30-7 pm with artist's lecture at 5:30 pm
Marshall and Winston Galleries



Current Roswell Artist-in-Residence Conor Fagan paints imaginary landscapes in a naturalistic style, creating invented worlds and environments that appear fantastical yet realistic. Drawing on his history as a realist in all its forms and techniques, he creates images that suggest a place, thing or ecosystem, but have no real identity. Often painted in bright colors and featuring abstract forms reminiscent of bubbles, hills and other objects, Read more.
grobstein image

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Rachel Grobstein

November 18, 2017 - January 7, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, November 17, 5:30-7 pm
with artist's lecture at 5:30 pm
Marshall and Winston Galleries



Rachel Grobstein’s labor-intensive process of miniature painting and sculpture is intended to create intimacy and slow down the act of seeing by representing objects that are commonly overlooked. She often installs her work directly onto the wall with pins, creating a subtle architecture of shadows and playfully referencing natural specimens. Recent work takes the form of visual inventories, suggesting the pathos of creating order from fragments of endless lists. Read more.
shanti grumbine

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Shanti Grumbine

July 29-September 10, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, July 28, 5:30-7 pm with artist's lecture at 5:30 pm
Marshall and Winston Galleries



Shanti Grumbine is a Brooklyn based multimedia artist. For the past six years, she has been transforming appropriated print media through paper cutting, collage, sculpture and printmaking with a focus on how value systems are created and maintained. By removing, fracturing and scrambling text and image from journalistic sources and advertising, she makes space for what has been censored or lost in the translation of experience into words.
Bensons_Garden-15x22_watercolor

Dorothy Peterson: Painting New Mexico


June 9-September 17, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, June 9, 5-7 pm
Spring River Gallery



Dorothy Peterson is one of Roswell's most respected living artists and teachers. Raised in Moriarty and educated at the University of New Mexico and the University of Texas, Permian Basin, Peterson has been teaching and painting in Roswell for more than thirty years. Read more
Jespersen_medium

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Andrea Jespersen

July 29-September 10, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, July 28, 5:30-7 pm with artist's lecture at 5:30 pm
Marshall and Winston Galleries



An embroidery ring morphs into large geometric heavy steel shapes. A wet human-sized photographic print is draped into a sculptural sphere. The intricate work of artist Andrea Jespersen resists any quick singular categorization. She astutely works with a multitude of materials, techniques and mediums that act as support for her ideas. Read more.
luis jimenez_spring17

50 Years of RAiR:

  

Works from the 
Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program


May 27, 2017 - February 12 2018
Horgan and Graphics Galleries



For fifty years, the Roswell Artist-in-Residency Program has empowered artists by enabling them to focus exclusively on their creative practices. Established in 1967 by oil businessman, philanthropist and artist Donald B. Anderson, the RAiR grant offers its recipients "the gift of time" by providing the housing, studio space, and income that gives artists and personal and financial freedom to concentrate on their own art for a year. Read more


Davis_New Mexico gate_1923_web

Collecting Roswell: The Donors of RMAC


March 17-September 10, 2017


Entry Gallery



The collections of the Roswell Museum and Art Center are renowned for their quality and diversity, but the donors who have shared these works with the community also deserve recognition. In anticipation of RMAC's 80th anniversary in October, this exhibit celebrates some of the major donors who have contributed to the formation of the Museum's core holdings, and features selections from the Southwest art collection, the Robert H. Goddard Collection, and the Rogers and Mary Ellen Aston Collection of the American West.  Read more
RAiR Ben Woodeson

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Ben Woodeson

June 3-July 16, 2017
Opening Reception: Friday, June 2, 5:30-7 pm with artist's lecture at 5:30 pm
Marshall and Winston Galleries



Known for precarious, playful and sometimes dangerous sculptures, British artist Ben Woodeson experiments, developing artworks that tease and challenge. He investigates the physical and psychological qualities of materials through a process of trial and frequent error. Read more

RAiR Jeff Krueger

Roswell Artist-in-Residence 
Jeff Kreuger: Failure is an Option

April 8 - May 21, 2017
Marshall and Winston Gallery

 

Albuquerque-based artist Jeff Krueger is an abstract social realist considering the signs and shifting codes of modernity. His works in ceramic and on paper are studies in both private and public aesthetics and the iconographic languages in each. Read more
Ewing image

Consistent Variety: The Art of Silkscreen


February 24-May 14, 2017
Marshall and Winston Galleries

 

Consistent Variety explores the diverse world of silkscreen through the Roswell Museum and Art Center's collection. Visitors will follow the development of this printing process from its connections with the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, to its central role in Pop Art.  Read more
bitran_model_low res

Roswell Artist-in-Residence


Claudia Bitran: Titanic-A Deep Emotion


February 10-March 26, 2017


Marshall and Winston Gallery



For two years Claudia Bitran, New York-based artist and filmmaker, has been remaking James Cameron's Titanic (1997) with practically no budget. She has already shot three-quarters of the film, using recycled materials from her immediate surroundings, and collaborating with over 400 artists, actors and a variety of communities in public spaces in twelve different cities across the United States. Read more

Work by David Emitt Adams

Power: New Works by David Emitt Adams

 

January 13 - May 28, 2017 
Opening Reception: Friday, January 13, 5-7 pm
Spring River Gallery

 

Based in Arizona, photographer David Emitt Adams explores the sense of place through his use of tintype, an early form of photography developed in the 19th century. Rather than use conventional paper, Adams prints his images on cans, scrap metal, and other detritus found in the landscapes he photographs, blurring the distinction between image and object.  Read more

Document

Roswell Artist-in-Residence


Beverly Acha: Mutualities


December

16, 2016-January 29, 2017


Marshall and Winston Gallery



Beverly Acha's paintings encompass technology, science, nature, the cosmos, and human experience: "My paintings arise from a desire to connect with my own physicality. When I paint, I connect to a non-verbal, sensory understanding of my experience. The materiality of paint, surfaces I prepare, and haptic memories feed my process....I aim for the materiality of my work and its forms to activate the viewer's senses and to engage their awareness of nature, space, time, and scale."  Read more
PB177528

Roderick Mead: Looking Between the Lines

December 3, 2016-February 12, 2017
Horgan and Graphics Galleries

This exhibit showcases prints and paintings by innovative Carlsbad artist Roderick Mead (19001-1971), a recent bequest from the Marilyn T. Joyce Trust. Originally from New Jersey, Mead reached his artistic maturity in 1930s Paris while working at avant-garde printmaking workshop Atelier 17. After returning to the United States in 1939, Mead eventually settled with his family in Carlsbad, New Mexico, where he continued to produce paintings and prints. RMAC is excited to have this generous bequest from the Marilyn T. Joyce Trust, and is eager to share it with visitors.  Read more

Cloud Directions Painting

Art & Environment 


2013 - August 2017
Patricia Gaylord Anderson Gallery 



Selected from the Museum’s permanent collection, the works featured in this exhibit are rotated on a regular basis to emphasize the depth of the RMAC’s holdings, as well as explore diverse perspectives on the land that has captured the imagination of New Mexico-based artists for several generations. Read more
2016 RMAC Fall Cover

Bravo/Grande: Zeke Pena


October 28, 2016-March 5, 2017


Entry Gallery



Bravo/Grande is an interdisciplinary exhibit that examines the relationship between regional communities and the Rio Grande River through site-responsive art projects. Through community engagement and collaboration, the project studies generational and binational trends in access, use and perception by documenting oral and written stories from the community. Bravo/Grande also explores the effects of immigration policy, increased militarization, and U.S./Mexico relations on these trends.  Read more
nmmi image

Duty, Honor, Art: 
The New Mexico Military Institute Collection

 

September 20, 2016-July 2, 2017 (extended)
Hunter Gallery

 

Founded in 1891, the New Mexico Military Institute is one of Roswell’s oldest and most significant educational institutions, representing the only state-supported military high school and two-year college in the western United States. NMMI also has its own notable collection of art and historical objects, encompassing works created by both faculty and alumni, prominent southwestern artists such as Laura Gilpin and Kenneth Miller Adams, and international artists. Read more

The Art of the Book Art Piece

The Art of the Book 


September 9 - December 31, 2016
Spring River Gallery 



When we think of a book, chances are we imagine an object containing written text, but it is also a versatile and often personal art form. The Art of the Book explores the diverse world of contemporary book arts in New Mexico, and features work from around the state. From traditional codices to handmade dresses and freestanding sculpture, the pieces on view in this eclectic exhibit celebrate the book as both form and idea.
Document

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Shannon Rankin

October 14-December 4, 2016
Marshall and Winston Gallery


"I create installations, collages, and sculptures that use the language of maps to explore the connections among geological and biological processes, patterns in nature, geometry and anatomy. Using a variety of distinct styles, I intricately cut, score, wrinkle, fold, paint, and pin maps to produce revised versions that often become more like the terrains they represent."      Read more

13510831_10154183991525196_4363685408803744269_n

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Cate White


July 29-October 2, 2016
Marshall Winston Gallery



"I use painting to access a direct experience of the body and the senses as a primary source of knowledge for aesthetic decision-making. This practice is part of my ongoing search for a more true vision of myself and the world, unconditioned by societal constructs."     Read more
19810310025

Beyond American Indian Modernism
July 1 - October 18, 2016
Entry Gallery



The Roswell Museum and Art Center collection features a modest but impressive grouping of modern and contemporary works by American Indian artists, including Fritz Scholder, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and R.C. Gorman, among others. Drawn from this holding, this exhibit explores the complexities of modernism in American Indian art.
Read more
Document

Billy Schenck's West: A Retrospective


April 1-September 18, 2016
Hunter Gallery



Channeling the bright colors and ironic undertones of such Pop artists as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, the paintings and serigraphs of Billy Schenck incorporate film stills, pulp novel covers, and other media in order to simultaneously celebrate and critique iconic western imagery. Drawn from the artist’s personal collection, this retrospective examines Schenck’s ongoing artistic interaction with the American West.
Read more
01_etude-300x199

Currents: New Media New Mexico


May 24-August 14, 2016
Spring River Gallery



Currents is an annual festival of new media art that occurs in Santa Fe each June. New Media New Mexico continues the collaboration that Currents initiated with the RMAC in 2015. This year’s selection features sculptural installations, videos, phone apps, and interactive pieces that relate to both the Museum’s collection and Roswell itself, addressing topics as varied as Native American culture and the infamous UFO incident of 1947.        Read more
DSC_0633-300x200

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Luis Sahagun


May 6-July 24, 2016
Marshall and Winston Gallery


Artist-in-Residence fellow Luis Sahagun draws upon life experience while investigating the in-between spaces where personal memories, ancestral legacies, and the imagination overlap and intersect to create new mythologies.
cropped-300x234

Fresh Air: Modern and Contemporary Abstraction


May 24 - July 24, 2016



When we consider abstract art, we tend to imagine nonrepresentational works, but abstraction applies to all art. Abstractions, after all, are ideas, and what are works of art themselves but ideas, and distinctly human interpretations of the world around us? This exhibit explores the concept of abstraction in the 20th century through an eclectic grouping of photographs, prints, and even scientific blueprints, underscoring the depth and variety of the RMAC’s works on paper collection.       Read more
PB307738-221x300

Native Abstraction: Howard Cook's Study of Native American Practice and Ritual


March 11 - June 19, 2016



In this series of abstract drawings, Taos artist Howard Cook (1901-1980) explores Native American spiritual practice and ritual through dances he observed at Taos Pueblo. Created in the early 1950s, these charcoal and conte crayon drawings represent the Deer and Buffalo Dances, practiced at the Pueblo on December 25 and January 6.
Read more
Kenny Rivero Art

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Kenny Rivero


March 11 - April 24, 2016



“I make paintings and drawings, assemble sculptures and installations, and above all I am invested in telling stories. The narratives are based both in reality and in fiction. In the paintings and drawings, I collapse spaces, figures, and geographies in such a way that allows for a fluidity of space and time, and a flexibility between what is real and what is not."       Read more
Drawing of owls by Roderick Mead

What a Relief! Block Prints from the RMAC


February 12 - May 15, 2016



What a Relief! explores the diverse world of block printing through a selection of works from the RMAC collection. Visitors will learn about different types of relief printing, including woodcuts, wood engravings, and linocuts, while enjoying a diverse array of visual styles and subjects, from the colorful woodblocks of Gustave Baumann to the surrealist imagery of Roderick Mead.      Read more
A photograph of a church by Robert Christensen

New Mexico Vernacular: Architectural Portraits by Robert Christensen


January 29-May 29, 2016



Belen-based photographer Robert Christensen has been capturing New Mexico’s vernacular architecture for more than four decades, seeking out the coffee houses, gas stations, and other structures that motorists often pass, but seldom stop to consider more closely. For him, these unassuming buildings resonate with meaning, becoming rich repositories for personal and regional histories.      Read more
Dialogue by Bill Wiggins

The Wiggins-Howe Legacy


March 21-October 5, 2014



For three generations, the Wiggins and Howe family have been leaving their creative mark on the Southwest. They are artists and explorers who experiment with unconventional materials and techniques, creating ceramics, paintings, pyroglyphs (drawings made from fireworks), and even taxidermy.       Read more
1982 Acrylic on Sewn Canvas

Signe Stuart: Fifteen


October 2, 2015 - March 20, 2016
Hunter Gallery



For more than five decades, Signe Stuart has explored the interconnectedness of materiality and immateriality through her art. Whether she is creating abstract paintings, works on paper, mixed media constructions, or installations, Stuart’s work originates from the patterns and textures of this world, but her subjects are intangible in nature, dealing with essences rather than the appearance of things.          Read more
Art by Bridget Mullen

Bridget Mullen: Don’t Avoid Voids


January 15 - February 28, 2016
Marshall and Winston Gallery



"My work depicts cryptic, comedic, and unsettling narratives, borne from the combination of my found materials and the freedom in my process…I work quickly, without censor, improvising between responsive, in-the-moment mark-making and consciously excavating images. There are no missteps; every action becomes a catalyst for reaction.”      
Read more
Howard Cook World War II Drawings

A Solid Green Mess: Howard Cook’s World War II Drawings


November 6, 2015 - February 1, 2016
Horgan and Graphics Galleries



“A solid green mess,” is how artist Taos artist Howard Cook (1901-1980) described the jungles of the South Pacific in a July 4, 1943 letter to his wife, fellow artist Barbara Latham. At the time, Cook was serving as a correspondent in the War Art Program, and had been assigned to document the daily lives of American soldiers in the South Solomon Islands. 
Read more
Guitars from Club Muse

Guitars from Club Muse


August 22 – January 17, 2016
Spring River Gallery



From the acoustic rhythms of folk music to the electric anthems of stadium rock, the guitar has an uncanny ability to accommodate creativity and personal expression. In addition to its sonic contributions, the guitar has played an important role in visual art for centuries, from its appearances in seventeenth-century genre scenes to Picasso’s cubist paintings. In the case of artist Roger Sweet, however, guitars not only inspire art, but become the art itself.             Read more
Art by Roxy Topia and Paddy Gould

Roxy Topia & Paddy Gould



Roxy Topia and Paddy Gould have worked solely as a collaborative duo since 2008 after meeting in Liverpool, England. Both artists had previously worked for years in other collaborative partnerships and projects. Roxy Topia received her BA in Fine Art from The Kent Institute of Art and Design, UK. Paddy Gould received his BA in Fine Art from Kingston University, London.            Read more
Philip Denker Sugar Glider Art

Philip Denker



“My current work deals with the idea of complicated yet vulnerable structures and systems. Where do these systems stay consistent, and where do they begin to collapse? I’m using pattern and ‘excessive minimalism’ as a language, influenced by the sensory overload and manipulation of Las Vegas.”           Read more
Art by Raymond Johnson

Raymond Johnson



Pulled from the Museum vaults, this exhibit features a selection of landscape drawings, sketches, and watercolors spanning from the late nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. Viewers will encounter landscapes in a variety of styles and subjects, from the meticulous graphite drawings of Peter Moran, to the more abstract works of John Marin and Andrew Dasburg.         Read more
William Masterson Art

William Masterson's Untitled Work



What’s in a name, or in this case, the lack of one? Titles can provide important information about a work of art, whether it’s the identity of a sitter for a portrait, the name of a painting’s location, or a mood or feeling that the artist wishes to evoke. Yet the absence of a name, the decision to call a work Untitled, can be equally suggestive. In some cases, the original name has been lost over time, but in other instances, the absence of a name is a deliberate choice made by the artist, encouraging viewers to seek out their own interpretations.               Read more
Art by Nicholas Frederick

Roswell Artist-in-Residence: Nicholas Frederick



“I use ordinary materials that have a certain humanity about them in order, hopefully, to explore my tenuous, uncertain, mysterious, and sometimes absurd relationship to my surroundings, seen and unseen. I am interested in both a humble physicality and a transcendence of the quotidian. I have a mystic vision of the universe that is just beyond reason, and it is in this zone that I believe my work best functions. I want to express the spiritual with the hands of a sheetrock installer.”          Read more
Art by Margaret Noble

Currents: An Annual Festival


July 19, 2015



New media is an exciting genre of art that is rapidly expanding in many directions. Encompassing film, interactive installations, sound, animation, and more, new media is constantly responding to changing technologies and ideas.          Read more
A years work by Rachel Hayes

Rachel Hayes


July 15, 2015



Rachel’s work embraces exquisite beauty, converses boldly with architectural spaces, and responds to radiant light, becoming anything from a minimalist sculpture to an abstract painting to a massive stained glass patchwork quilt. She has a deep love of experimentation, play and mixing up the homemade and homespun with the haute and modern.         Read more
Art by Charles Mattox

Seeing Cats and Dogs


May 31, 2015



Pets abound in today’s culture. From online videos to specialty costumes to advocacy campaigns, our animal companions are a prominent part of daily life, encouraging conversation, camaraderie, and even rivalry.        Read more
Art by George McNeil

Tamarind: Teaming Up


March 22, 2015



As one of the most prominent active lithography workshops in the United States today, Tamarind Institute, located at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, has been innovating lithography for over five decades by embracing a collaborative approach to printmaking. In addition to training new master printers, Tamarind invites world-renowned artists to team up with its printers and work on projects that explore the expressive possibilities of lithography.          Read more
Art by Olive Ayhens

Olive Ayhens


March 13, 2015



Exploring a special sense of place and the transformation of environment, Ayhens synthesizes nature, interiors, and architectural structures into imaginative landscape paintings. Seeing both natural and urban environments as total, living beings, Ayhens blurs the distinction between natural and manmade structures in her work, with landscapes becoming architecture, and vice-versa.            Read more
Art by Barbara Latham

Dance Macabre


February 8, 2015



Mortality has a long history in art, with skeletons, gravestones, and other macabre objects reminding us of our own impermanence. Dance Macabre explores the depiction of transience through a selection of paintings, prints, and sculpture from the permanent collection.           Read more
Art commissioned by the Works Progress Administration

Survival and Revival: The Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design in New Mexico


January 18, 2015



Commissioned by the Works Progress Administration in 1937 and published in 1938, the Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design in New Mexico was created under the direction of E. Boyd. She enlisted several regional artists to participate in this project, which focused upon documenting the historical and living artistic expression of Spanish New Mexico.
Read more
Art by Carlos Quinto Kemm

Art by Carlos Quinto Kemm


January 5, 2015



Since the early 1980s Kemm’s works have displayed his concentration on three-dimensional painted collages. Kemm has explored numerous techniques along with various methods of assemblage and applications that are represented in his current work. Each piece has emerged out of spontaneous play and may be looked upon as having been borne pout of experimentation and active dreaming.          Read more
David Hines Night and Day

David Hines: Night and Day


October 12, 2014



Based upon introspective reflections and impressions, the paintings of David Hines evolve out of an internal dialogue, which is revealed in his choice of images. With their seemingly mundane subject matter, these paintings evoke a sense of déjà vu within the imagination of most every viewer. What are the elements that Hines skillfully employs to bring the gallery visitor into his dialogue?          Read more
Frank Ettenberg Art

One Time Only: The Monotype and Monoprint


January 17 - March 23, 2014



In the world of printmaking, monotypes and monoprints are the freewheelers. Monotypes are essentially printed paintings, and do not require the technical skills demanded by most printmaking techniques. Monoprints, in turn, combine conventional printmaking methods such as lithography with painting and other art-making techniques to transform a repeatable image into a unique work.         Read more