UNM Art professor featured in prestigious National Gallery of Art exhibit

The National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C, is currently featuring photography by Subhankar Banerjee, professor of art and founder and director of The University of New Mexico's Center for Environmental Arts & Humanities, in the Beneath the Surface: Mining and American Photography exhibit.

The exhibit features 150 photographs by more than 100 artists. The photographs tell a story spanning nearly 200 years of resource extraction history through American photography and examine how photographers have approached the challenge of capturing the significant yet often hidden processes and impacts associated with mining the planet's resources, such as minerals, coal and fossil fuels.

"To have two photographs acquired by the National Gallery of Art for its permanent collection, and then to have one placed on display, I consider this the highest accomplishment of my life as an American artist to date," said Banerjee. "It is very special to have work permanently acquired by the NGA, because unlike other art museums, the NGA will never deaccession it."

Banerjee's piece, which is a large-scale photograph titled Caribou Track on Coal Seams II (2006), is on display in the installation's Now gallery.

Beneath the Surface also includes photographs by Will Wilson (Diné), an UNM MFA photography alumnus, and a photograph by the late UNM Professor of Photography Patrick Nagatani. Both artists' works are featured in the Environmental Concerns gallery.

The exhibition is set to tour three galleries across the country. After opening at the National Gallery of Art, it will move to the Milwaukee Art Museum from Oct. 23, 2026, to Jan. 18, 2027, and then to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art from Feb. 14 to May 9, 2027.

"By traveling the exhibition across the nation, the National Gallery of Art is making this expansive exhibition and its timely message accessible to people in two regions, hopefully inspiring those communities to take note and organize their own exhibits that showcase the human-caused climate and biodiversity crises," Banerjee said.

Banerjee is a multi-talented art faculty member who specializes in photography and writing; he is also a curator and a longtime environmental historian. He has focused his creativity, research, and curatorial efforts on biodiversity and the climate crisis.

In this light, one of his more noteworthy contributions was founding and directing UNM's Center for Environmental Arts & Humanities, where he and his colleagues focus on sharing and fostering research-based creative practices to show the world the biological extinction and climate crises and to effect change in these areas.

His photographs have been exhibited in more than fifty museum exhibitions around the world. A few include Seasons of Life and Land, which was on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (where it was censored), as well as at the American Museum of Natural History, California Academy of Sciences, and other venues between 2003 and 2005. His piece, Resource Wars, was on display at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.

Currently, a selection of Banerjee's Arctic and New Mexico desert photographs is on display at three other museums. He is featured in UNM's Art Museum's opening exhibit, Abundance: New Acquisitions from 2016-2026, NMSU's Mapping Spaces: Selections from the Lannan Art Collection at NMSU and the Oklahoma City Art Museum's exhibit Abstract Photography.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago recently acquired five of his large-scale Arctic photographs.

Visit the Beneath the Surface exhibit webpage to learn more about this photography exploration.

To learn more about Professor Subhankar Banerjee's work, visit his faculty profile webpage.