Current Exhibits

Vale la Pena/It's Worth It

January 14-March 25, 2023

Multi-media artist Gina Gwen Palacios draws upon her family history and Mexican American identity to create portraits of her family’s lived experiences, using colors and materials that emphasize the long cultural heritage she and they have in the south Texas/Mexico borderland. Palacios uses traditional and non-traditional materials, including cardboard, cotton, sandpaper, and paint, to highlight an often underrepresented geographic and cultural narrative. Her parents’ stories about migrant farm work, picking cotton, and racial discrimination are found in Palacios’ work. She uses cardboard because of its brown color, availability, and strength. However, it is also cheap and disposable; and in using it Palacios makes it symbolic of the Mexican American labor force and the disposable treatment many workers receive from their employers.

City of Hope: Resurrection City and the 1968 Poor People's Campaign

January 20 - April 1, 2023

For forty-three days during the early summer of 1968, a tent city covered sixteen acres of land on the National Mall where some 3,000 people from across America gathered to advocate for economic opportunities, racial equality, and justice. A year earlier, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, declared poverty a national human rights issue. SCLC made plans for a Poor People’s Campaign - a grassroots, multiracial movement - that would draw thousands of people to Washington, D.C. They decided to proceed with the gathering despite the assassination of Dr. King on April 4, 1968. Between May and June, demonstrators demanded social reforms while living in a tent city known as Resurrection City. Dr. Abernathy declared it a “City of Hope” in honor of Dr. King.

Honesty of Construction: The WPA and Spanish Colonial Style Furniture

Nov 29, 2022-Summer 2023

This exhibit examines the Works Progress Administration-era vocational training program in New Mexico that drew upon Spanish Colonial furniture to teach young men and women a marketable trade in woodworking. Drawings from the University Museum collection at New Mexico State University, the exhibit features fifteen furniture pieces made through a 1930s community vocational program that was established in Las Cruces at the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts (now New Mexico State University).