Events
Museum Exhibits
Cercle et Carré and the International Spirit of Abstract Art
May 8, 2020 - August 2, 2020
New dates to be announced soon
El Paso Museum of Art
In Paris at the end of the 1920s, more than eighty artists from the Americas, Europe, and Russia formed one of the earliest groups on the continent dedicated to abstract art. The group, which included prominent abstractionists Sonia Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky, published a journal and mounted a seminal exhibition in 1930, before disbanding shortly thereafter. Cercle et Carré and the International Spirit of Abstract Art tells the story of the group. Pairing rarely seen drawings, paintings, and prints from the exhibition with earlier and later works, Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) illuminates the international legacy of abstract art.
More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/cercle-et-carre-and-the-international-spirit-of-abstract-art
Tiny Tunnels, Big Connections: Ant Relationships Shape the World
February 13, 2020 - August 8, 2020
Centennial Museum and Chihuahuan Desert Gardens
The Centennial Museum and Chihuahuan Desert Gardens in partnership with the University of Texas at El Paso’s Biodiversity Collections is proud to present “Tiny Tunnels, Big Connections”, an exhibition about ants and their unique interactions with plants and animals across various ecosystems of the world. Featuring specimens from the Biodiversity Collections’ massive 230,000 specimen collection of ants, this exhibit offers a rare peek into the hidden research collections of UTEP and the diversity of ants as farmers, warriors and relationship experts. Images, augmented reality and 3D prints throughout the exhibit allow visitors to get up close and personal with these tiny ecosystem engineers.
More Information: https://www.utep.edu/centennial-museum/museum/current-exhibits.html
Rachel Rose: Lake Valley
January 24, 2020 - September 1, 2020
El Paso Museum of Art
This exhibition features a video and sound installation by Rachel Rose, one of the best-known artists working with moving images in America today. Lake Valley, 2016, is an animated piece that explores a day in the life of a young girl and her pet, using children’s book illustrations and noises to form a family’s world that is at once unique and every day. This family-friendly exhibition includes an area with books and activities for all ages.
More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/rachel-rose-lake-valley
From the Edge of Center: The Chacoan Outliers
January 25, 2020 - September 5, 2020
El Paso Museum of Archaeology
The Chacoan Culture flourished between AD 860-1150 and was originally centered at Chaco Canyon in Northwestern New Mexico. The Chacoans built immense great houses and great kivas capable of hosting large groups of peoples for ceremonies and other public activities.
More Information: https://archaeology.elpasotexas.gov/exhibits/changing-exhibits
Refresh
September 27, 2019 - September 27, 2020
El Paso Museum of Art
For the first time in twenty years, and a year after renovating the museum’s renowned Kress Collection of European Art Galleries, the El Paso Museum of Art refreshes its second floor galleries devoted to permanent collections and special exhibitions. In the museum’s newly renovated galleries, discover spaces devoted to Mexican Art from the Spanish Colonial Period, Mexican Retablos, Early Texas Art, American Painting and Sculpture, Contemporary Art, and Works on Paper. Recent acquisitions appear for the first time alongside long-time favorites from EPMA’s collection of over 7,000 objects.
More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/refresh
Elegy
March 13, 2020 - September 30, 2020
El Paso Museum of Art
New closing Date to be announced
For decades, artist Mary Paz Cervera (born 1967, Mexico City) has made paintings and sculptures that evoke death and affirm life. The textured surfaces of her work, often created using encaustic media or involving collage, reflect an approach that is at times personal and at others environmental or cultural. Family is depicted, but so is wildlife and those affected by institutional violence. This exhibition features two recent bodies of artwork, each reflecting a different perspective and realized in a different media. Hanging on the walls are more than a half dozen paintings from Cervera’s 2015 series “Vuelo Rojo” (“Red Flight”). Each painting is nearly five feet wide and depicts a flock of birds soaring in a wash of celestial silver pigment, yet surrounded ominously by a red halo. As companions to the paintings, in the center of the gallery hang sculptures from the artist’s 2019 series “Perséfone” (“Persephone”). In this series, Cervera examines gender-based violence through the lens of a Greek myth, about the kidnapping of a goddess resulting in the withering of life on earth. The sculptures on view are dresses—for different bodies and occasions—woven from crime scene tape, evoking female victims through absent bodies. The paintings and sculptures by Mary Paz Cervera in Elegy provide a chance to consider what death—and thus life—means to each of us.
More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/elegy
Luces y Sombras: Images of Mexico
July 31, 2020 - November 1, 2020
El Paso Museum of Art
Capturing modern Mexico’s culture, architecture, and people through photographs, Luces y Sombras presents over one-hundred works dating from the 1930s to the present day. Portraits of artists such as Frida Kahlo—by acclaimed photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo—and photographs of indigenous cultures by Manuel Carrillo and Graciela Iturbide are presented alongside contemporary photographs exploring the body, identity, and place.
More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/mexican-and-american-photography-from-the-bank-of-america-collection
Leo Villareal: Early Light
September 27, 2020 - December 31, 2020
El Paso Museum of Art
New closing date to be announced
Raised on both sides of the El Paso/Juárez border in the 1970s, artist Leo Villareal (b. 1967) is now known internationally for activating spaces with LED light. Recently, he gained acclaim for large-scale, site-specific, public endeavors: In 2013 Villareal inaugurated The Bay Lights, a now-permanent artwork of 25,000 LEDs illuminating a light pattern along a nearly two-mile expanse of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and in 2008 he “lit” an underground walkway at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Villareal’s first museum exhibition in his hometown examines his early work. Complementing his light “mural” Sky, 2010, installed in El Paso’s federal courthouse, the exhibition features two large-scale sculptures on loan from the Collection of Jereann and Holland Chaney, Houston, Texas. Lightscape, 2002, is a ten-foot “screen” programmed to bathe surrounding space and people in a sequence of changing hues. Here Comes the Sun, 2004, is from Villareal’s most-recognized series of wall-bound sculptures, taking the form of a spiral made of LEDs. Leo Villareal: Early Light elucidates the early practice of one of today’s best-known contemporary artists.
More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/leo-villareal-early-light
Clandestino: A Project by Animales de Poder
October 16, 2020 - February 14, 2021
El Paso Museum of Art
This exhibition features a new project by Juárez-based collective Animales de Poder. Comprised of related artworks made in 2018 and 2019, the exhibition includes altered photographs and paintings of vehicles modified for urban narco warfare, sculptures fabricated with neon lights and bulletproof glass, a sonic installation produced from covert broadcast signals, and objects that speak to the history of contraband along the Juárez/El Paso border. Informed as much by research as surveillance, the artworks on view gesture toward Animales de Poder’s idea of “narcofuturism,” suggesting a current of the clandestine in Juárez extending from subterranean smuggling and fraternal organizations to, more recently, illicit nightlife and underground violence. With Clandestino, Animales de Poder evokes a past, present, and future of Juárez, and, more broadly, the effects on people of the physical, legal, and psychological barriers that emerge around national boundaries.
Part of the El Paso Museum of Art’s ongoing series examining the border through art, Clandestino: A Project by Animales de Poder is a follow-up to the 5th Transborder Biennial exhibition, from which Juárez-based Animales de Poder was selected for a solo presentation at the El Paso Museum of Art. The Transborder Biennial is a decade-long bi-national collaboration between the El Paso Museum of Art and the Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez. In 2018, the fifth edition featured artworks by thirty-two border-based artists and collectives living along the two-thousand mile border between the United States and Mexico. As a companion project, in 2018 EPMA organized a bi-national convening that brought together over one-hundred artists, academics, journalists, and art-lovers from across the country and the community to consider the next Transborder Biennial in 2020, and the future of arts programming on the border.
More Information: https://epma.art/art/exhibitions/clandestino-a-project-by-animales-de-poder
