Often operating at the intersection of design, social critique, and absurdity, Wes Heiss’ work questions the roles of the man made things we surround ourselves with. Bringing life to inanimate objects and manipulating functional products into metaphors for the fears and longing that defines the American experience. more...

The 2011 Invitational Exhibition, Natural Beauty, includes work by regional artists Julia Barello (Las Cruces, New Mexico), Susan Beiner (Tempe, Arizona), Suzi Davidoff (El Paso, Texas), and Ana Maria Hernando (Boulder, Colorado). Natural Beauty refers not only to the subject of the natural world, but also to the philosophical enquiry of beauty as found in nature. more...

Georgia O’Keeffe is perhaps the most widely acclaimed of New Mexico’s pioneering female artists. But, she is not alone in her independent, self-determined passion to create powerful statements exulting her surroundings. O’Keeffe’s peers made indelible contributions to the art historical record of the Southwest and the spread of the American modernist movement more...

An artist’s life is one that many romanticize but very few people choose for their life’s occupation. It is a journey that at the best of times is arduous, balancing the material and aesthetic worlds and being responsible to one’s family and to the demands of the work in the studio, yet there are those individualsthat make the conscious choice to lead a creative life of discovery. They are compelled to move forward through more...

The eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant described decoration as “enlivening the object for sensation.” In the work of Nathan Craven, small extruded ceramic units—numbering from hundreds to tens of thousands—are stacked, arranged, more...

The paintings, wall-reliefs and sculptures in this exhibition straddle the languages of abstraction and representation, combining beauty, pathos and humor. New Mexico Poet Lisa Gill writes that the works “achieve something akin to negative capability, the phrase used by John Keats to describe the ability to exist ‘. . . in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without more...

For her exhibition, Around, Shona Macdonald has been focusing on specific views seen from and around her studio in Roswell, investigating unknown “space,” and re-presenting it as the more familiar “place.” Her exhibition will consist of a six-part painting depicting a 360-degree horizontal view of the perimeter surrounding the Roswell Artist-in-Residence site more...

Our historic and cultural relationship with flowers touches a deep creative genius in world culture. Flowers form a direct connection with the beauty of the natural world and the cycle of the seasons. It is the seductive power of flowers that has served as the inspiration for literature, music, dance, culinary and visual arts. more...

Every few years the Museum mounts a “curators’ choice” exhibition that showcases items from the vault; many of these items have not been on view for some time. This format allows the staff to conduct research that provides new context to collection objects. Resonance and Wonder is comprised of seven vignette exhibitions developed by more...

The works on exhibition reflect a New Englander's astonished reactions to the phenomenon of daily life in New Mexico. The paintings express moments from exploration of Bitter Lake, Carlsbad Caverns, Ghost Ranch, and the Hondo Valley, and also more intimate motifs found closer to home: spider webs and tumbleweeds, the pale colors of grass and scrub, and the drama of the sky. more...

For her exhibition, Reflected in Real Time, Anna Hepler will transform the gallery into a workspace and create, on-site, a floor sized woodcut and monumental inflatable sculpture—each part reflecting the image of the other. The exhibition will feature the process of making, rather than showcasing, finished work and will close with a display of Hepler’s efforts. This project will more...

Roswell native Harold Lee Jones had his first adventure in photography when he was a sophomore at Goddard High School in the 1970s. This early interest in photography stayed with Jones throughout the intervening years. It was around the time of his fortieth birthday that the passion for creating photographic images returned. more...

Gift of Time: Dorota Mytych is comprised of work that reflects the artist’s stay with the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program combined with a recent trip to, and study in, Florence, Italy. Her work is a response to her surroundings—interactions with people, animals, the landscape—as well as cultural references. She gathers these elements together on the same surface, building a bigger picture more...

Those that have missed Tim Prythero’s Last Emperor will be thrilled to learn that this popular mixed-media sculpture will return in the exhibit Cool Art. Numerous works in this exhibition point to a phenomenon in postmodern art that reconciled high (academic) and low (popular culture) art—blurring the edges. more...

For his exhibition, Larry Bob Phillips will exhibit a large, mural-like painting that will run the full length of the gallery. The installation, titled Butterfly Trigger, depicts a unique, anxiety-laden world filled with an organic blend of characters and environments. Phillips’ work is inspired by an array of graphic styles including renaissance, pulp, and more...

Paper Money is a series of large oil paintings that depict a type of yellow paper money burned in traditional Chinese culture as a ritual offering to heaven and a medium to communicate with gods or underworld spirits. Stacked in tall, almost unwieldy piles, the depicted money becomes a meditation on the more...

This exhibition focuses on the collection of firearms that Tucson artist and collector Raymond Wielgus has created. As unique art forms, these firearms reflect Wielgus’s appreciation for craftsmanship, sculptural form, and a discerning aesthetic. They are modified according to a unique personal aesthetic: hand engraved, inlayed with gold, and their grips are of antique hand carved ivory. more...

Debra M. Smith’s markedly formalist work is created through an intuitive approach. Her work involves the overlapping of vintage silk fabric, primarily deconstructed Japanese kimonos, stitched together to form bold geometric abstractions. She incorporates opaque and transparent fabrics, which create an interplay of masked and obscured areas that add a dimensionality to the work. more...

Emil Bisttram (1895-1976) was a painter, teacher, and spokesman for the arts. He was born in Hungary and moved with his family to New York in 1906. As a young adult, Bisttram studied at several institutions in New York including the Art Students League and the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (now Parsons The New School for Design). It was more...

Janice Jakielski’s current work is an investigation of perception, communication and experience. The body dressings she fabricates facilitate perceptual shifts for the participants of her objects. By disrupting or enhancing the senses, the objects make possible an exaggerated self-awareness, a break in the normalcy of daily experience.  With these body objects Jakielski is creating more...

From the beginning of the 20th century, demand for original art to illustrate books and magazines grew dramatically, especially with the onset of improved printing and production techniques. In the 1920s and 1930s a few artists in the United States—where the demand for magazine illustration grew enormously—became household names through more...

In the land of Supersize, America is known for its unbridled sense of scale: the scale of our continent, economy, industry, architecture, fast food, and monster trucks. The theme of this exhibition is based on scale and the crucial role that it plays in artistic expression. It is the scale of ambition, psychology, history, and technology that informs the viewer’s experience in the gallery. more...

There is an austerity of life in the eastern plains of New Mexico and West Texas—the geographic region that the Spanish called the Llano Estacado. The landscape of the West and our relationship to the land is a rich source of material for authors, songwriters, poets, and artists.
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Artist Ted Kuykendall, who was born December 5, 1953, died on October 5, 2009 in Roswell, New Mexico at the age of 56. This handwritten quote hung on the wall of Kuykendall’s studio: The face of truth remains hidden behind a circle of gold. more...

Between Heaven and Earth features 21 photographers from the Roswell Museum and Art Center’s archival and photography collections, celebrating not only the visual record of the photographers and their work but also the development of photography as a historic record and the meteoric rise of photography as an art form in the 20th century. more...

Agustin Lucho Pozo began his studies in his native country of Chile at Universidad de Chile, Escuela de Bellas Artes. He then moved to Los Angeles in 1968, and later traveled throughout the United States spending time in New York and New Jersey, and hiking every national park in the continental United States. His travels acquainted him with the vastness more...

The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and the Federal Art Project (FAP) put many Americans back to work during the tumultuous Great Depression. For those individuals gifted in the visual arts, the WPA provided for their families and created an American aesthetic that has become a part of our national identity.
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The cycle of purchasing and consuming can become overwhelming sometimes. There’s a tension between the urge to collect and accumulate and the equally strong desire to purge, de-clutter, and simplify. Two years ago Soesemann began saving ordinary packaging boxes from all the products and food items she used... more...

Soesemann’s recent work explores the conventional relationships between seeing and representing, using textile surfaces both to obscure and to reveal. Her constructions often incorporate translucent and opaque areas, manipulating light to bring perception into conflict with uncertainty... more...

Alex Kraft constructs ceramic sculptures that represent imagined life forms and their environments. Inspired by internal bodily systems such as organs, muscles, and bones, Kraft investigates the physical and emotional essences present in the body. more...

This landmark exhibition features fifty-five works by twenty-six American photographers presenting diverse points of view, interpretations, and techniques that push the visual envelope of contemporary desert photography. more...

Kelli Vance’s current body of work examines the nature of women’s relationships to themselves and other women, and behavioral prescripts mandated by society. Her paintings are manifestations of the complexities and uncertainties surrounding identity and the psychological upheaval that can result. more...

Michael Stillion creates paintings, drawings, and collages that draw from visual sources and memories which have impacted him emotionally and visually throughout his life. His current body of work explores a fascination inspired from his childhood: monsters. more...

Painter, poet, curator, and art historian; all are befitting titles that lend a single voice to describe Wesley Rusnell and his work. Rusnell’s first solo exhibitions (1961-1962) were held at the legendary venue of Lawrence Ferlinghettii’s City Lights Books in San Francisco. This experience set him on a course that would soon land him in the vibrant art community of Taos, New Mexico where he received the Helen Wurlitzer Prize for Painting in 1964. more...

This exciting exhibition provides a glimpse into the ever-evolving artistic lives of the partners, spouses and returning Fellows associated with the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (RAiR). The forty-year history of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program has produced many wonderful examples of contemporary art, and has provided an environment that is conducive for the development of great friendships and a far-reaching “sense of family.”more...

Koi Neng Liew’s clay figurative sculptures portray a variety of expressive characters who are based on personal experiences and intriguing people he has met. Exaggerated proportions, obscure objects, and gestures personify each character’s disposition. more...

Rigoberto Gonzalez’s Baroque-inspired paintings explore contemporary issues affecting the Texas-Mexico border region. The figures in his paintings, drawn from both historic and contemporary corridos (or Mexican folk ballads), portray and inform life along the border—the brutality associated with drug cartels, tales from folklore, and moments of domestic tranquility. more...

Contemporary Journeys features the work of four American Indian artists: the late Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu/Hawaiian/ Portuguese), Marvin Oliver (Isleta/ Quinault), Darren Vigil Gray (Jicarilla/Kiowa Apache), and Melanie Yazzie (Navajo, or Diné). Like other artists of our time, their visual dialogue is rooted in personal history, cultural beliefs and identity, oral tradition, art history, and a response to place and the natural world. more...

Renee van der Stelt’s richly-detailed drawings and paper sculpture are interpretations of human interactions with the environment. Informed by pre-existing data—maps of natural resources, geographical surveys, and symbolic distinctions such as borders and lines of latitude—van der Stelt abstracts and overlaps the data as a means to see how these systems work together. more...

Fascinated with the landscape in New Mexico, Mimi Kato created a series of digital photographs that tell a story of her imaginary creatures living secretly out in the New Mexican desert. In her photographs and through objects that she refers to as artifacts, Kato creates a series of myths that have never been told before. more...

Ted Kuykendall’s photographs are psychologically dark and perplexing, invoking memory and perception on a subliminal level. His imagery is dense in meaning, amplified by what the viewer brings into a personal conversation with these works. Kuykendall relies on unusual juxtapositions of found items—dolls, toys, and discarded junk—to build layered and nuanced theatrical dramas. more...

Organized by Arizona State University and traveled by Smith Kramer Fine Art Services, Innovation and Change highlights seventy-nine masterworks by many of the leading international artists of our time, offering a panaramic survey of the potential of clay as an expressive art form. more...

Nicholas Conbere's arwork presents invented landscapes composed of multiple layers of drawings and hotos to build complex, dreamlke panaramas that provoke thought on relationships between natural and manmade worlds. more...

Artist Weronika Zaluska uses inexpensive, light-weight cloth as a familiar “stand in” for other substances, in order to trigger a wide variety of perceptual sensations within the human body. The colorful, whipped-up layers of the soft and airy wall hangings are reminiscent of desserts, such as meringue pie or custard. more...

David Politzer makes videos and sculptures that examine insecurity and masculinity in the context of our contemporary social landscape. He uses an intimate and straightforward approach along with humor to discuss such topics as relationships, body image, pornography, and self-confidence. His most recent video project, Rio Macho, looks at the issues of masculinity and myths surrounding cowboy culture. more...

This year marks the 75th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, a sequence of programs (1933-1938) devised to put Americans back to work during the Great Depression. The Federal programs built dams for power generation and irrigation, the interstate highway system, courthouses, and post offices, and were reponsible for initiatives that shaped more...

During his current residency with the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Australian painter Stewart MacFarlane has sought to capture the mood, space, and light of New Mexico. Beginning with small studies painted on-site and in his studio of the people and places of the region, MacFarlane has produced a series of bold, large paintings which seemingly expose something behind the normalities of everyday life. more...

The Art of Empty Space presents a selection of vessels from the permanent collection that span cultures, time, and place from ancient to contemporary societies and from Mexico to Alaska. While many of the exhibited vessels utilize similar materials, they possess discernable differences in technique, form, and surface decoration—invariably dictated by the vessel’s purpose. more...

The travels of Howard Cook (1901-1980) and Barbara Latham (1896-1989) resulted in oeuvres that are penetrating and distinct. Interweavings provides a concise panorama of important works from the Museum’s Permanent Collection offering a rich exploration of the joint travels and intellectual bond that impacted the imagery and stylistic pathways of these artists. more...

Painters and sculptors often inform one another, and many artists have no difficulty shifting back and forth between two- and three-dimensions. Some meld sculptural form into the painted surface and vice versa. more...

Flo McGarrell illustrates his year-long experience developing a sustainable life specific to living in Roswell, through sculptural experiments and systems that encompass scavenging, gardening, greywatering, composting, cooking and preserving—all of which are “open sourced” as online and offline recipes. more...

Raïssa Venables creates surreal, digitally composed images of uninhabited spaces. Through her large-scale images of everyday places she provokes a visceral interpretation of the ordinary. She illustrates that as we mark the environment it marks us. Without showing any people, Venables shows us their traces. more...

2007 is a landmark year for the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program (RAiR), marking 40 years of in-residence grants to notable emerging and established artists from throughout the world. This is also the year that a new and improved residency complex opens on a private 40 acre parcel of land on the outskirts of Roswell. more...

John DePuy lives in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, and has been a resident since 1951 of various other places in the deep west and high plateaus of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. He paints the transcendent spirit of these landscapes, the paint taking root on the canvas, carving and gouging and coaxing into shapes and colors the mysteries and sacred spaces of the Southwest. more...

This exhibition is a journey through the past seven decades of the Museum’s history, beginning with its inception in 1937.
Punctuated by notable works from the permanent collection, this exhibition provides anecdotal information about the Museum’s mission, its grassroots beginnings, its amazing growth, and its unique accomplishments. more...

Tucson artist DeAnn Melton’s multi-year sojourn into the studio and personal spaces of some of the Southwest’s most prominent artists is both revealing and memorial. The majority of her subjects have been artists, collectors, museum curators, or directors—people with a high regard for and connection to the visual arts, hence the title of this exhibition: Masters and Lovers. more...

José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) was an illustrator, designer, and master printmaker who worked in relative obscurity in Mexico City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He produced thousands of type metal engraved images for the loose leaf broadsheets that could be purchased on the streets for a few centavos. more...

In the 1940s local photographer Walt Wiggins returned to his native New Mexico to capture the meaning of family and the vanishing way of life in his own backyard—rodeos, roundups, and the vitality of small town rural America. This came after establishing himself in the national publishing and photographic markets, and as a photojournalist and combat newsreel cameraman during World War II. more...