Events

Museum Exhibits

Pasos Ajenos

August 13, 2022 - March 4, 2023

Pasos Ajenos:  Social Justic and Inequalities in the Borderlands is an exhibition conceived to educate museum visitors about controversial social topics as a healing process toward understanding. This interactive exhibition invites visitors to play, learn, and explore ideas that are often abstract, in a tangible and creative way. By engaging multiple sense, visitors can bring social issues to life and leave with new understandings about history, race, gender, power, labor, segregation, immigration, and environmental justice. Pasos Ajenos is a contemporaneous display that tells the story of disempowered and dispossessed populations along the Boderlands during critical historic times. As a whole narrative, the exhibition aims to transform traditional museum spaces into locations of communal learning toward healing, empowerment, and inspiration.

More Information: https://pasosajenos.org/exhibit/

illuminated

October 20, 2022 - March 12, 2023

Dede Rogers Gallery illuminated brings together paintings, silkscreens, floating Mylar, Plexiglas silhouettes, colored light, and a projected video all with incorporated quadrasonic sound. Multi-media artist Isadora Stowe’s immersive art invites audiences to engage with how realities are constructed and how meanings designated. Focusing on the construction of self and the illumination of narratives, Stowe explores the relationships between borders, real or imagined, and the reconstruction of memory. Through light, shadow, color, and sound, Stowe’s unique installation embraces the senses to create a visual journey. The interactive experience invites viewers to finds themselves by creating their own connections, questions, and shared meaning.

Support for this exhibition is provided by the Mellon Foundation, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the El Paso Museum of Art Foundation, and the City of El Paso Museums and Cultural Affairs Department.

More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/illuminated

Neighborhoods And Shared Memories: Manhattan Heights

March 17, 2022 - March 18, 2023

2nd Floor, Neighborhoods Gallery

This exhibit looks at the historic neighborhood of Manhattan Heights, located in Central El Paso between Alabama Street and Memorial Park. Our installation highlights the development of the Manhattan Heights community through Crockett Elementary School, St. Albans Episcopal Church, Memorial Park, and more.

More Information: https://epmuseumofhistory.org/exhibitions/current/

Changing Pass: People, Land & Memory

December 1, 2022 - December 31, 2024

1st Floor, Permanent Exhibition Gallery

The museum’s permanent exhibition, “Changing Pass: People, Land & Memory” immediately greets visitors who walk through the door, inviting them to explore and reconsider what the borderlands are all about. Now covering more than 1,000 years of El Paso del Norte region history, Changing Pass begins with early Indigenous settlers and concludes with World War II and the Bracero Program in the 20th century.

More Information: https://epmuseumofhistory.org/exhibitions/permanent/

Denise Brown: Seasons

January 12, 2023 - April 6, 2023

Artist Denise Brown’s paintings capture the significance behind universally shared stories and the power within a narrative. This exhibition focuses on the series, The Four Seasons, four large canvases exploring the tales tied to the seasons. Though each of the works are standalone paintings, when displayed together, they become reliant on each other to convey a story. Viewers will encounter imagery and symbolism borrowed from myths and fables combined with the artist’s own imagery. Together the four artworks represent a contemplation of human ambition influenced by literature and personal experience.

More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/denise-brown-seasons

Hank Willis Thomas: Art Bridges loan

January 12, 2023 - May 31, 2024

In his wide-ranging conceptual practice, Hank Willis Thomas explores how American society commodifies Black male identity. His works—which span photography, sculpture, textile, installation, and more—often reflect on media representations and social justice Thomas studied at New York University before pursuing a dual MA and MFA in visual criticism and photography at California College of the Arts. He has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, London, Milan, Brussels, São Paulo, Berlin, and Paris, among other cities. His work belongs in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Hong Kong Arts Centre, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Thomas is also a co-founder of For Freedoms, an organization that promotes civic engagement via large-scale public projects.

More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/hank-willis-thomas-art-bridges-loan

vanessa german: Art Bridges loan

January 12, 2023 - December 31, 2024

Black Girl on Skateboard… provides a meditation on the color yellow through physical objects and the written word. vanessa german, a self-taught ‘citizen’ artist, often crafts these, which she refers to as power figures, out of discarded materials from her local community. german’s power figures serve as protectors for Black people against violence. Drawing from Congolese Nkisi sculptures and elements of folk art, the works defy figurative expectations and emphasize their vibrancy through emotion and energy.

The 2022 iterations of german’s power figures include poetry written by the artist as the object’s materials list. In this decision to disrupt typical object information, german’s Black Girl on Skateboard… bridges materiality and abstraction. The artist describes the resonance of her power figures as, “active technologies of the soul that touch the vast history that exists in the spiral of our DNA.”

More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/vanessa-german-art-bridges-loan

There Is a Woman in Every Color: Black Women in Art

February 3, 2023 - May 14, 2023

There Is a Woman in Every Color: Black Women in Art examines the representation of Black women over the past two centuries. Featuring more than forty works of art from the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s collection, the show will confront the history of marginalization and make visible the presence of women of color in the history of American art. The show will feature works by a number of important 20th and 21st century artists, including Emma Amos, Elizabeth Catlett, Alma Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Betye Saar, Faith Ringgold, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Kara Walker, Mickalene Thomas, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Nyeema Morgan. Supporting these works will be a selection of 19th century works of art that highlight the continuity of experiences of Black women in America.

There is a Woman in Every Color: Black Women in Art is organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Support for this exhibition is provided by Art Bridges.

Additional support is provided by the Mellon Foundation, the Texas Commission on the Arts, El Paso Museum of Art Foundation, and the El Paso Museums and Cultural Affairs Department.

More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/there-is-a-woman-in-every-color-black-women-in-art

Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology

July 28, 2023 - November 12, 2023

Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology documents international Indigenous artists’ responses to the impacts of nuclear testing, nuclear accidents, and uranium mining on Native peoples and the environment. The traveling exhibition and catalog give artists a voice to address the long-term effects of these man-made disasters on Indigenous communities in the United States and around the world. Indigenous artists from Australia, Canada, Greenland, Japan, Pacific Islands, and the United States utilize tribal knowledge, as well as Indigenous and contemporary art forms as visual strategies for their thought-provoking artworks.

Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology is co-curated by iBiennale Director Dr. Kóan Jeff Baysa (Ibanag); Nuuk Art Museum Director Nivi Christensen (Inuit); Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art Chief Curator Satomi Igarashi; Art Gallery of New South Wales Assistant Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Erin Vink (Ngiyampaa), Independent Curator Tania Willard (Secwepemc Nation), and MoCNA Chief Curator Manuela Well-Off-Man.

Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology is organized by IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM.

Support for this exhibition is provided by Ford Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and by Air Tahiti Nui.