TAAOS, NM.- Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros explores adobe as a living practice linking art, architecture, and ancestral knowledge across the Americas. Bringing together artists 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 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 spatial experience of the museum itself.
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 traces 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, and 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.
The installations began with the artists gathering in Taos, entering into sustained time together and with those who continue adobe practices every day. Through visits to San Francisco de Ass 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.
Across sculpture, architecture, installation, sound, and moving image, the participating artists position adobe not as something fixed in the past, but as a living material through which communities continue to build, repair, gather, resist, and imagine. Monumental earthen forms become spaces for gathering, speculative architectures, acts of hand-built repair, and investigations of memory, sovereignty, extraction, technological change, and collective futures.
Two community-rooted guest curators shape major sections of the exhibition. Guadalupe Tafoya—archivist of San Francisco de Ass 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. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication with Radius Books featuring essays, artist conversations, and community voices developed through the project's collaborative research process.
