Harwood Museum Returns to the Earth

WHEN VISITORS ENTER the Harwood Museum of Art, in Taos, for Unearthing Futures/Desenterrando Futuros, it won’t be through the museum’s usual front door. Instead, the exhibition, which opens June 27, transforms the outdoor entrance with high adobe walls and winding corridors—made from 3D-printed mud and straw—that feel at once ancient and futuristic. The entryway work by California-based artist and activist Ronald Rael perfectly encapsulates the meeting of past and future that’s highlighted in the exhibition, a collaboration between the Harwood and Colorado’s Fort Garland Museum & Cultural Center.

“[Adobe] has been used for over 10,000 years in every continent except for Antarctica,” says Harwood curator Nicole Dial-Kay, who worked with Fort Garland’s director Eric Carpio on the exhibition. “We wanted to focus on this as one of the oldest building technologies, but also in thinking about future possibilities as it opens conversations about sustainability, community care, and the future of architecture and housing.” 

Inspired by this idea, Rael, Gabriel Chaile, rafa esparza, Santino Gonzales, Christine Howard Sandoval, and Joanna Keane Lopez pitched site-specific installations, ranging from large-scale hornos to immersive works featuring multimedia. The collaboration between the two museums began four years ago, thanks to a shared regional history along the border of New Mexico and Colorado. “Adobe is a living practice that connects art, architecture, and ancestral knowledge across the Americas,” Dial-Kay says. 

The six artists also found inspiration in the museums’ architecture itself. Los Lunas–born artist Gonzales, for example, plans to reshape the buildings at Fort Garland into large-scale musical instruments “played” by the wind like a hands-free harp. A Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist, esparza evokes a Cold War–era fallout-shelter entrance leading to a traditional adobe vault as a way to explore the potentiality of climate crisis.

For Energetic Materials, Albuquerque’s Lopez commands the center of the Harwood’s gallery space with a foundation of stone and exposed adobe brick. Panels of traditional mud, sand, and straw feature graphite rubbings and photographs depicting aerial military photography as well as an inescapable symbol of New Mexico’s atomic past. In her work, Lopez, who teaches workshops at New Mexico Earth Adobes, in Albuquerque, entwines her familial history with that of White Sands Missile Range and the adobe homes found there. 

“Land can become shelter, but then they’re also doing testing on land that is made into homes,” Lopez says, describing the lingering effects of nuclear fallout and other contaminants from modern industry. 

Her work draws from the story of a real-world adobe home seized by the government in 1942. “They actually assembled the plutonium core of [the Trinity bomb] in the bedroom,” Lopez says, noting how this single example combines themes of home, land, power, and violent repurposing.   

“These are ancestral technologies—traditions that are still very much living and also provide potential for speculative futures,” Dial-Kay says.