UNM Harwood Museum of Art’s new exhibit explores the intersection of ancestry and the future through adobe art

Harwood Museum of Art and Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center present Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros, beginning June 27, 2026, to Feb. 28, 2027. Unearthing Futures is a major exhibition exploring adobe as a living practice that links art, architecture and ancestral knowledge across the Americas.

Bringing together some of the most significant artists working with earthen architecture and land-based practice today: Gabriel Chaile, Rafa Esparza, Santino Gonzales, Joanna Keane Lopez, Ronald Rael and Christine Howard Sandoval. The exhibition examines how earth, water and fiber, shaped by hand and sustained through communal care, embody both tradition and transformation.

At an unprecedented scale for the Harwood Museum of Art, the exhibition physically transforms the building through monumental, site-responsive installations. Galleries are reconfigured by large-scale adobe structures, architectural interventions and immersive environments that alter circulation, sightlines and the museum's spatial experience.

Extending beyond the museum through partnerships with Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center and historic sites across New Mexico and southern Colorado, Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros unfolds as a region-wide constellation of projects that trace adobe's pathways across landscapes and generations, revealing its role in shaping shared histories and possible futures.

Adobe, a building material made from earth, water, natural fiber and dried in the sun, has been in use for approximately 10,000 years and can be found across nearly every continent. Buildings made from adobe represent some of the oldest extant structures on the planet, sustained through collective care and land-based practice.

While the artists featured in Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros hail from regions across the Americas, from Argentina to northern California, the exhibition is grounded in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, where earthen building traditions continue as part of daily life. Here, adobe remains inseparable from place, shaped through Pueblo architecture, Hispano and Indo-Hispano devotional forms, and the cultural memory of borderlands, maintained through touch, care, and communal responsibility.

The state boundary between New Mexico and Colorado-an imposed colonial demarcation-draws an arbitrary division across a valley united by shared histories, cultural practices, and language. The exhibition rejects this line, defining the region by heritage rather than colonial imposition, embracing the continuity of these borderlands.

Two community-rooted guest curators shape major sections of the exhibition. Guadalupe Tafoya, an archivist of San Francisco de Asís Church and descendant of generations of enjarradoras, curates a gallery centered on devotional art and adobe architecture, honoring parishioners and the annual enjarre as practices of faith and collective care.

Deborah Lujan, an artist and member of Taos Pueblo, curates a gallery focused on Taos Pueblo as one of the oldest continuously inhabited earthen architectural sites in the Americas, including her own photography that addresses adobe as lived sovereignty and self-representation.

Opening Weekend

The opening of Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros marks the culmination of years of research, artistic exchange, and community collaboration across northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Harwood Museum of Art and Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center will celebrate the exhibition with a weekend of public programs featuring exhibiting artists, guest curators, music, food and community gatherings that invite audiences to engage directly with the ideas, relationships and living traditions at the heart of the project.

Friday, June 26

Press and VIP Preview

2 - 3 .p.m (RSVP to [email protected])

Saturday, June 27

Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros Artist Panel 11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. (Ticketed)

Opening Celebration at Harwood Museum of Art:

4-8 p.m. Community Celebration with live music by Lone Piñon and Communities of Questa Mariachi

8-10 p.m. After-party with DJ Sonny Goodnight, Free and open to the public.

Sunday, June 28

Opening Celebration at Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center 10:00 am-2:00 pm. Free and open to the public.

Featured Artists

Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros positions adobe not as something fixed in the past, but as a living material through which communities continue to build, repair, gather, resist, and imagine-holding together questions of land, sovereignty, care, extraction, technological change, and collective futures across imposed borders and layered histories.

The installations for this exhibition began with the artists gathering in Taos, entering into sustained time together and with those who continue adobe practices every day. Each artist arrived with their own adobe knowledge and cultural lineage; what unfolded was reciprocal exchange. Through visits to San Francisco de Asís church, la Hacienda de Los Martinez, Taos Pueblo, Ute Indian Agency, la Capilla de Viejo San Acacio, adobe yards, and kitchens, they shared techniques, histories of land and labor, and material knowledge carried across generations. The artworks in this exhibition arise from these relationships-carrying forward the lived knowledge exchanged in conversation, presence, and respect.

• Gabriel Chaile (Argentina) creates a monumental adobe figure rooted in horno traditions and the zoomorphic ceramic lineages of northern Argentina, scaling the earthen oven into a vessel for gathering, nourishment, and collective dignity. Chaile's work has been presented internationally, including at the Venice Biennale.
• rafa esparza (California/Mexico) builds a large-scale adobe tunnel formed through collective labor-an immersive passage that folds histories of land, migration, and care into a speculative architecture of survival. esparza has been featured in major U.S. institutions, including the Whitney Biennial, and his work has been exhibited at museums such as the Hammer Museum and MASS MoCA.
• Santino Gonzales (New Mexico) transforms adobe into a medium of transmission, embedding radio and sound technologies within earthen forms so memory and signal move through space and distance. A Dedalus Foundation Fellow, Gonzales's installation and video works have been exhibited internationally and explore connections between land, technology, and speculative futures rooted in the New Mexican landscape.
• Joanna Keane Lopez (New Mexico) presents Energetic Materials, a multimedia installation combining adobe construction, archival research, and video to examine the legacy of land use and militarization in New Mexico's Tularosa Basin. Keane Lopez has exhibited nationally, including at SITE Santa Fe and The Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and has received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
• Ronald Rael (Colorado/California) debuts LIMINAL, a site-specific threshold that reorients the Harwood's entrance through robotically 3D-printed adobe-a contemporary fabrication method rooted in generational earthen building knowledge. Rael is a professor at UC Berkeley, and his work has been exhibited at institutions including Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and LACMA, and includes major public commissions such as Desert X.
• Christine Howard Sandoval (Canada/California) works adobe by hand to trace the intertwined histories of the acequia, mission, and dam as colonial infrastructures-allowing the material to crack and shift as an assertion of land as living rather than fixed. Howard Sandoval has exhibited internationally, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery and El Museo del Barrio, New York, and is represented by parrasch heijnen.

To learn more about this exhibit, visit the Harwood Museum's exhibition webpage.