Exhibitions
Essential Elements: Art, Environment, and Indigenous Futures
October 12, 2025 through April 5, 2026
Using the lens of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, this exhibtion explores the impact of climate change and environmental destruction on Native homelands and how artists are sounding the alarm and advocating for action. From the devastation of wildfires and drought to the contamination of ecosystems from uranium mining and other extractive industries, art offers a means to explore human connections to our planet and its precious resources. Traditional Ecological Knowledge, developed and refined over generations, can inform strategies for adaptation to a changing environment and building a sustainable future---but only if we listen. On view in the JoAnn and Bob Balzer Native Market and Contemporary Art Gallery. Image: Mallery Quetawki (Zuni Pueblo), We Will Continue to Fight, 2019, Courtesy of the artist and the Community Environmental Health Program at UNM-CO
Màatakuyma
August 31, 2025 through April 19, 2026
Photographer and filmmaker Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.) has been on a lifelong quest to understand the ideas of “existence” and “being” in terms of Hopi ancestral traditions in the modern world. Màatakuyma, meaning “now it is becoming clearer to me” in the Hopi language, represents this continuing quest. Featuring images created throughout Duwawisioma’s long career, Màatakuyma highlights aspects of Hopi culture, history, language, metaphysics, and agricultural practices through complex, layered compositions and juxtapositions of color. Image: Ninma, © 2025 Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.) All rights reserved by copyright holder.
Makowa: The Worlds Above Us
June 1, 2025 through August 17, 2026
Look up. What do you see? From radio astronomy to solstice calendars, Indigenous peoples look to the sky for timing, meaning, and beauty. Makowa: The Worlds Above Us juxtaposes ways of seeing, noticing, and understanding the skies and the beings in them. Told through stories of an ever-changing world, the exhibition connects science, stories, and observations. For Indigenous peoples of the Southwest, observing the sky brings joy, information, and a connection to the worlds above us.
Here, Now and Always
July 2, 2022 through July 2, 2028
Here, Now and Always centers on the voices, perspectives, and narratives of the Indigenous peoples of the American Southwest. This groundbreaking exhibition features more than six hundred objects from the museum’s extraordinary collection of ceramics, jewelry, paintings, fashion, and more.
The Buchsbaum Gallery of Southwestern Pottery
March 4, 2021 through March 4, 2026
The Buchsbaum Gallery features each of the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona in a selection of pieces that represent the development of a community tradition. In addition, a changing area of the gallery, entitled Traditions Today highlights the evolving contemporary traditions of the ancient art of pottery making.