The New Mexico State University Art Museum (UAM) welcomes works by three artists with exhibitions beginning Friday, June 10, and continuing through Friday, Sept. 2, at the museum, 1308 University Ave., in Devasthali Hall near the intersection of University and Solano Drive.
The show features “Pray for Rain” by Carissa Samaniego in the museum’s Mullennix Bridge Gallery, “(ir)regular evolution: New Works by Rachel Stevens” in the Bunny Conlon Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery and “Joey Fauerso: Wait for It” in the Contemporary Gallery.
Stevens is a professor emeritus at NMSU; Samaniego is from Colorado and will soon be on the faculty at NMSU. Fauerso is from Texas.
The opening reception for all three exhibits begins at 5:30 p.m. Friday, June 10, at the museum.
“Pray for Rain is an exhibition featuring recent works by Samaniego, who will join the NMSU Department of Art as visiting professor of sculpture in the fall of 2022,” UAM said in a news release. The exhibit includes artwork from three of the Samaniego’s ongoing projects: the Querencia textile series, Block Pattern Halo drawings and Americaña research.
“Raised between a small town on the prairie in the upper Midwest and a Nuevomexicano family rooted in the borderlands of the Southwest for 12 generations, her identity straddles geographic and cultural borders. She draws from contrasting family traditions, generational knowledge, histories and relationships to the land based on her personal experience and ongoing research focused in her places of origin,” UAM said.
Visit https://carissasamaniego.com/.
“(ir)regular evolution” is an exhibition featuring all new works in clay by Stevens, who is an NMSU Department of Art emeritus professor.
“These pieces mark a radical shift in Stevens’ practice from large-scale monochromatic metal installations to multicolored biomorphic ceramic sculptures. From evolutionary theories of meteors sparking life on Earth to genetic mutations causing cataclysmic pandemics, in this exhibition Stevens’ new forms explore the (ir)regularities that she is embracing in her own work and in our modern world,” UAM said.
Stevens received the Fulbright Research Scholarships to Patan, Nepal in 2006 and Lviv, Ukraine in 2018. She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and has shown in galleries and museums nationally and internationally. She served as area head of sculpture at NMSU for 25 years.
Visit www.rachelstevenssculptor.com.
Fauerso is a San Antonio-based artist and a professor of art at Texas State University in San Marcos.
“‘Wait for It’ features a selection of Fauerso’s recent paintings and monoprints, from intimate portraits to mural-sized abstractions, alongside a four-channel video installation made in her San Antonio studio and at a residency in Berlin,” UAM said.
“‘You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make’ (2017-19) transforms the artist’s workspaces into sites for destruction and reconstruction, with Fauerso’s two sons, their friends, and other performers adopting clever methods to tear down a series of black and white installations for the camera’s lens. This work was acquired into the NMSU Permanent Art Collection in 2020.”
Visit www.joeyfauerso.com.
Visit https://uam.nmsu.edu/upcoming-exhibitions-events/.
