New Mexico Museum of Art | May 2026

The Museum is focusing on how the historic Plaza Building and the Vladem Contemporary form a dynamic continuum, one that not only reflects on the region’s artistic legacy but actively shapes its future.

Trustees are encouraged to learn more about the below exhibitions and to consider investing in the shared storytelling of this lesser-known part of New Mexico’s history.

Reclaiming the Future: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration

Exhibition opening: September 5, 2026

Vladem Contemporary

Reclaiming the Future: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration brings together a multigenerational group of Japanese and Japanese American artists whose work confronts one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history: the forced incarceration of over 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II, including at four camps in New Mexico. Featuring work by eleven contemporary artists, including Ruth Asawa and David Horvitz, this groundbreaking exhibition centers on contemporary art practices that confront and illuminate stories of immigration, racial injustice, forced displacement, intergenerational memory and resilience across photography, painting, installation, sculpture and video work.

Legacies on the Land: Photographs by Joan Myers and Patrick Nagatani

Exhibition opening: October 17, 2026

Beauregard Gallery, Plaza Building

Coinciding with Reclaiming is Legacies on the Land: Photographs by Joan Myers and Patrick Nagatani. This exhibition sheds light on the New Mexico-based artists’ independent 1990s travels to what were then largely unmarked sites of World War II Japanese American incarceration camps. Through Myers’ and Nagatani’s works, Legacies reflects on what is left behind and powerfully demonstrates photography’s role as witness and reckoning.

Invest in Shared Storytelling at the Museum of Art

Your generous contribution to the Exhibition Development Fund or Education Fund enables us to provide socially engaged, culturally relevant exhibitions that address our histories, speak to our present societies and consider paths forward. Thank you for investing in these stories and for continuing the museum’s mission of “art is for everyone.”

To learn more about Reclaiming, Legacies or other upcoming projects at MOA and ways to support, please visit nmartmuseum.org or contact Angelique Kuenstler at angelique@museumfoundation.org or 505.216.1199.

Photo Credits:

  1. Aisuke Kondo, Reconstruction of Ansel Adam’s Photographs of Japanese-American Incarceration at Manzanar-2, 2020, archival pigment print. © Aisuke Kondo.
  2. Patrick Nagatani, Manzanar, Japanese-American Concentration Camp, California, August 13, 1994 / MA-17-20-67, August 13, 1994, chromogenic print, 10 ¼ x 12 ¾ in. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Patrick Nagatani, 2017 (2017.12.98). © Patrick Nagatani Estate. Photo by Kevin Beltran.