The Woods Before Sunrise: Environment and Place In New Mexico’s Black Contemporary

On View: June 20, 2026 – October 18, 2026
Co-Curators: William Gassaway & Nikesha Breeze
Curatorial Support: Audrey Borneman
Location: Albuquerque Museum

Exhibiting Artists
– Nikesha Breeze
– Ron Adams
– Noé Barnett
– Maurice Burns
– Karsten Creightney
– Jakia Fuller
– Jackie Mitchell Edwards
– Rein Whitt-Pritchette
– Paula Wilson

Exhibition Overview

**Please note that the language below is from the
Albuquerque Museum website for this exhibition.**

The Woods Before Sunrise: Environment and Place in New Mexico’s Black Contemporary highlights the New Mexico landscape as a space shaped by memory, identity, and connection. Focusing on the work of nine contemporary Black artists, the exhibition invites visitors to see the region not as a distant or unchanging backdrop, but as a lived environment: one where the land, as seen through the eyes and experiences of these artists, acts as a primary collaborator deeply connected to personal histories, cultural knowledge, and evolving relationships.

New Mexico’s striking terrain—from its mesas and forests to its dunes and caves—has inspired artists for generations. While Indigenous artists have reflected on the natural world going back thousands of years, Western landscape painting only grew in popularity here around the turn of the twentieth century. These latter works enjoyed widespread recognition after artists from outside the region helped define the state’s place in American art. However, representations from this period often portrayed the land (and its people) as timeless and still. Yet the land is not neutral; it is a repository of memory and a bearer of history that generations of people have actively transformed.

Working across painting, printmaking, sculpture, textiles, and film, the artists in this exhibition reflect the diversity of contemporary New Mexico and bring forward stories that have often been overlooked. In their hands, the landscape becomes a place of resilience and change, where histories of the African diaspora–its movements, cultural exchanges, and hard-won visibility–shape a more expansive vision of place.

As writer and cultural geographer Carolyn Finney argues, creative work plays a powerful role in expressing how people relate to the environment—capturing joy, struggle, survival, and celebration in everyday life. These forms of expression also affirm ways of knowing and experiencing the world that are not always recognized in institutional spaces.

Co-curators William Gassaway and Nikesha Breeze invite visitors to reconsider familiar ideas about the “American West,” and to see New Mexico, including this museum and its surrounding landscapes, as a place continuously shaped by many voices, histories, and perspectives.

This exhibition is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

– Albuquerque Museum