A Creative Excuse

Julianna Kirwin

Printmaker and educator Julianna Kirwin presents a window installation combining hand-pulled prints with the woodblocks used to make them. Informed by her experiences along the Camino Real, the work highlights printmaking as a bridge between cultures, revealing process, lineage, and Pan-American identity through image and material.

Moira Garcia

Moira Garcia is a New Mexican-Chicana multidisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural practitioner whose work bridges ancestral knowledge and contemporary visual language. A native of New Mexico, she holds a BFA in Studio Arts with a focus in printmaking from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MA in Latin American Studies with concentrations in Art History and Indigenous Studies from the University of New Mexico. Garcia’s art draws deeply from Nahuatl language, Mesoamerican cosmologies, and personal experiences, using symbol, color, and metaphor to explore themes of identity, memory, and cultural continuity. Her practice moves fluidly across printmaking, painting, fiber art, and mixed media, creating multilayered narratives that honor ancient visual traditions while engaging present-day concerns. Recent work, including her exhibition Xochiyotl: Florescence at Hecho a Mano, probes the essence of floral life as a metaphor for transformation and resilience. Garcia also teaches, advocates for art as social change, and champions indigenous and borderland perspectives in contemporary art.

Sam Hawley, Oskar Petersen & Pearl Hesselden

Sam Hawley and Oskar Petersen artists live and work in their hometown of Albuquerque. They describe their way of living as a process of constant collaboration: "We both end up living among our work, for better or worse, talking about it over dinner and coffee and as we watch TV," they write. "We are very fortunate to spend our time discussing whether or not a goose should have teeth in a painting or what a certain palette is evoking."
Pearl Hesselden is the founder of the Ranch Residency in La Madera, NM. The Ranch Residency offers a distinctive opportunity for artists to immerse themselves in the unique landscape of the La Madera Mountain Range and their own art practices. "Our mission is to offer a respite where artists can explore, experiment, and devote time to their practice in a setting that is both inspiring and nurturing.” www.ranchresidency.com

Alfonso Barrera & Mirel Fraga

Mirel Fraga and Alfonso Barrera are a creative couple based in Oaxaca whose practices intersect across drawing, printmaking, and independent publishing. Barrera, originally from Mexico City, works in graphite, charcoal, oil, and printmaking, weaving together human–nature relationships, art history, and fantastical imagery; his work has exhibited in Mexico, the U.S., and Japan. Fraga, from Puebla, moves fluidly between illustration, graphic arts, and mural painting, often centering nature, cosmos, and feminist themes. Together they co-founded Polvoh Press, an editorial project dedicated to small-edition artist books and printmaking, reflecting their shared commitment to experimentation, community, and the handmade.

George Rodriguez

Born and raised in the border city of El Paso, TX, George Rodriguez creates highly ornamented, figurative ceramic sculptures, often underlined by a connection to the sociopolitical issues the artist explores. Rodriguez holds a BFA from the University of Texas El Paso and an MFA in ceramics from the University of Washington, Seattle. His world curiosity grew as a recipient of a Bonderman Travel Fellowship where he traveled the world through most of 2010. George was featured on PBS Craft in America "Storytellers" episode and has created a large public sculpture for the new Kansas City Airport which opened March 2023. George currently resides in Philadelphia and teaches at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.

Sound & Vision with Kat Kinnick, Eliza Lutz, & Martha Traer

This episode is with curator Martha Traer of our current exhibition Sound & Vision and two artists in the show, Kat Kinnick & Eliza Lutz. They talk about the process of turning a song into a piece of visual art and the influence of music in their creative lives. 
For this show, each artist was asked to choose a song and create an 11 x 14-inch piece of work inspired by the music. With artists working in a wide variety of media and styles, Sound and Vision is a kaleidoscope of memory embedded in music. 
Listen to the playlist of all the songs chosen here.

b. brown

b.brown grew up in Los Angeles and New York City, and is currently settled in Santa Fe. Her work history includes dance, film, design and production ceramics. Dance formed her early years as an artist; she began studying at age 5 and continued a rigorous practice over the next 17 years. Although her serious aspirations to make dance her life's work led to enrollment and training in some of New York’s most prestigious institutions, she did not feel at home within the narrowly defined criteria for "fitting in” that was de rigueur at the time.When she turned her attention to clay, her love of honing technique and experiencing communion via somatic “dialoging” led to discovering an innate understanding of the material, and a propulsion to know more. Like dance before it, clay afforded brown a means to explore and experiment - to investigate seemingly-at-odds pairings such as discipline and rule-breaking, methodology and abandon, refinement and elaboration.Now, some 30+ years later - and having ridden the many and various rides that life has thrown her way - brown’s unwavering studio practice is both prolific in creative articulation and rich with offerings.

Daniel McCoy Returns!

Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and surrounded with the arts from an early age, Daniel McCoy (Muscogee Creek/Potawatomi) was welcomed into a household of Artisans, Farmers, Music and Subculture.
McCoy began entering Native Art Competitions at age fifteen under the direction of Cherokee Artist, Mary Adair while attending boarding school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He received his formal Art Training at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. At the Institute, Daniel McCoy jr. was able to study and work with some of the best Native Artists in the field.

Jerome Nakagawa

Jerome T. Nakagawa is a Navajo and Japanese silversmith and photographer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in December 2022, majoring in Studio Arts with an emphasis on jewelry and metals. Nakagawa has completed jewelry-based apprenticeships with Keri Ataumbi of Ataumbi Metals and Cody Sanderson. Raised in Hayward, California, Nakagawa earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. He completed his graduate-level photojournalism coursework at the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University in 2007. Prior to enrolling at IAIA, Nakagawa worked as a photojournalist for over ten years and was the inaugural recipient of the Sandy Colton Memorial Award at the Eddie Adams Workshop. His photojournalism was published in the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Arizona Republic, Time Magazine, and Sports Illustrated.
UPDATE: As of 1/20/2026, Congress has approved fiscal year 2026 funding for IAIA after proposed elimination.

Terran Last Gun Returns!

Terran Last Gun, Saakwaynaamah’kaa (Last Gun), (b. 1989, Browning, MT) is an enrolled citizen of the Piikani (Blackfeet) of Montana and a visual artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The Piikani Nation is one of four nations that make up the Blackfoot Confederacy, collectively called the Niitsitapi (Real People). Born and raised on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, Last Gun works across media to explore color, form, and abstraction. Drawing inspiration from land, cosmos, cultural narratives, and experiences, Last Gun pushes the boundaries of Piikani modernism.
He has exhibited at venues including the Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass Village, CO); Glacier Art Museum (formerly the Hockaday Museum of Art) (Kalispell, MT); Missoula Art Museum (Missoula, MT); Bates Museum of Art (Lewiston, ME); Newberry Library (Chicago, IL); The 8th Floor (New York, NY); Museum of the Plains Indian (Browning, MT); Contemporary at Blue Star (San Antonio, TX); and the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe, NM), among others.
Last Gun received his BFA in Museum Studies and AFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2016. He has received awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation 2024 Biennial Award, First Peoples Fund 2020 Artist in Business Leadership Fellowship, Santa Fe Art Institute 2018 Story Maps Fellowship, and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture 2016 Goodman Aspiring Artist Fellowship. Last Gun was named one of the 2022 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now in Southwest Contemporary.