The Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award is given to an MFA student of unusual caliber with great artistic promise. Edwin Anthony and Adalaine Boudreaux Cadogan both experienced financial challenges as art students and understood the great difference scholarships can make in the early phase of an artist’s career. The winners of the Murphy and Cadogan scholarships each receive support for their MFA studies. All the students benefit from participation in a professionally curated exhibition at SOMArts Cultural Center and mentorship from curator Kevin B. Chen.

2023 Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Awardees

Murphy Awardee

Joanna Keane Lopez, Stanford University

Cadogan Awardees

Salimatu Amabebe, University of California, Berkeley

Jonathon Bout, San Francisco State University

Xianghan Cheng, California College of the Arts

Lynse A. Cooper, California College of the Arts

Cynthia Gonzalez, San Jose State University

Valencia James, University of California, Berkeley

Leah Koransky, San Francisco State University

Wendy Liu, Stanford University

Nivedita Madigubba, University of California, Berkeley

Jessica Monette, Stanford University

Lucía Moreno Nava, San Francisco State University

Yunfei Ren, Stanford University

Chelsea América Torres, San Francisco State University

The 2023 Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Awards Exhibition is on view September 15–October 6, 2023 at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco. An opening reception and awards ceremony will be held on Thursday, September 14, 6-9pm.

USC Roski Art Gallery, LA Arts District

Curated by Tracy Fenix, USC MA & MUP

William Camargo, Alyssa Chandelle, Sandro Canovas, Jazmin Garcia, Camille & Melinda Hoffman, Joanna Keane Lopez, Carlos Jaramillo, Ozzie Juarez, Arlene Mejorado, Reyes Padilla, Ronald Rael, Daisy Quezada Ureña, Ernesto Yerena Montejano, Jose Villalobos, and Cougar Vigil.

A contemporary cohort of Indigenous, Latinx, and Immigrant artists and activists working in the southwestern United States are engaging with ancestral adobe structures and construction to resist artistic, cultural, and ecological assimilation. Predominant expressions of land-based art and environmental activism in the US have historically ignored Indigenous and Latinx contributions, and at the same time, acquiring critical reception or scholarly notice has been tied to the whitewashing of cultural signifiers. These artists and activists preserve ancestral adobe and ecological practices to keep its roots within Indigenous heritage while promoting its inclusion to canonical land-based artworks and also promoting its environmental sustainability in the deserts of the Southwest. Through the creation and care of adobe-based art and ecological infrastructure, they are staging interventions against displacement and a loss of cultural memory caused by settler colonialism and other oppressive regimes of power. Fenix's MA thesis exhibition narrates their ancestral native adopted frontera relationality alongside their family to chart how these artists use adobe to create physical and imagined homes of resistance, threading within it a subjective narrative through the ancestral lands of First Nation and Mexican people in the southwestern United States, to reorient future scholarship on land-based art and activism toward its ancestral, Indigenous coordinates--those of community belonging and ecological sustainability. It’s also one component of a larger “Mud Kin” ongoing project that will encompass an archive of interviews and photographs and other interventions that express Indigenous placekeeping, as well as an exhibition, a publication, and an ArchGIS mapping tool.

Curated by César García-Alvarez

Marcel Pardo Ariza | Felipe Baeza | rafa esparza | ektor garcia | Frieda Toranzo Jaeger | María de Los Angeles Rodríguez Jiménez | Joanna Keane Lopez | Maria Maea | Hélio Oiticica | Edgar Ramirez | Carlos Reyes | Analia Saban | Vivian Suter | Sarah Zapata

Lisson Gallery is pleased to present Distribuidx, a group exhibition conceived as a conversation between the late Hélio Oiticica and a group of intergenerational artists with varying relationships to Latin America. The presentation is curated by César García-Alvarez, the Executive & Artistic Director of The Mistake Room in Los Angeles.  

For Latinx Heritage Month, Cultured and Banana Republic present a new series, Mundo Makers, which highlights a roster of contemporary artists around North America that are reimagining Latinx identity.

Read here

Solo exhibition Joanna Keane Lopez: Land Craft Theatre at SITE Santa Fe opening October 1st, 2021 - January 9th, 2022. Curated by Brandee Caoba.

A feature written by Maria Manuela for the July edition of New Mexico Magazine.

“Between the clay and the art, she says, her work looks forward and back. “It goes back to the family,” she says. “It’s a rebuilding of something and looking back toward memory or tradition or history. But at the same time, it builds toward something new or a healing.”    

At 28, with only four years of working in this medium under her palms, Keane Lopez has drawn national attention. 

She was recently featured in American Craft magazine and was chosen to show work at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, in Bentonville, Arkansas, in an exhibit that featured 60 artists hailed by the museum as the future of contemporary art. The Harwood Art Center, in Albuquerque, holds one of her permanent installations.”

Opening February 22, 2020 — I will be creating a site specific adobe sculptural installation for the upcoming State of The Art 2020 exhibition taking place at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and The Momentary in Bentonville, Arkansas.

Lauren Haynes, curator of visual arts at the Momentary and curator of contemporary art at Crystal Bridges, is leading State of the Art 2020, along with Alejo Benedetti, assistant curator of contemporary art, Crystal Bridges and Allison Glenn, associate curator of contemporary art, Crystal Bridges. The team visited studios across the country, resulting in the selection of a diverse group of 60 artists, from varied backgrounds and at different points in their careers.

More than 100 artworks will be featured in State of the Art 2020— most created in the last three years. A number of artists are making site specific works in response to the interior architecture of both spaces as well as the histories of this region. At both the Momentary and Crystal Bridges, artwork will include paintings, sculpture, photography, video, performance, and mixed media.

The 60 individuals in State of the Art 2020 represent a cross-section of artists working today and their artwork will be organized into thematic sections including world-building: creating real and fictional spaces; sense of place: investigating ideas of home, family, immigration, and more; mapping: connections to and relationships with landscapes and power, and temporality: the concept of time and how we perceive it.

American Craft magazine published a four page spread feature entitled, “Legacy of The Land: A conversation with Joanna Keane Lopez on the architectural traditions that inform her adobe art” written by Emily Freidenrich for their Home Issue of Feb/March 2020.

“Keane Lopez says her work “takes on this quality of being an echo, a ghost, a memory of land based lifestyles, something lost and fragmented and reaching to recover or reconnect or find some kind of inkling of continuity.”

Read here

I will be having a pop-up exhibition entitled Women + Mud in conjunction with the grand opening of Judy Chicago’s, Through the Flower Art Space in the Old City Hall of Belen, New Mexico through July 20-21st. The pop-up group exhibition is juried by Judy Chicago.

The Through The Flower Art Space, originally established in 1978, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that counters the erasure of women’s achievements through art by providing educational resources and artistic opportunities.

Joanna Keane Lopez is one of the first scholars to receive the new Creative Placemaking Leadership Summit scholarship to attend the West CPL Summit in Albuquerque next month. The scholarship program seeks to bring artists, students, civic volunteers to the three-day events for creative placemakers. The summits attract key decision makers and from arts administration, philanthropy, planning, design, community development, economic development and architecture. The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking created the program to give people from under-represented communities a chance to contribute and be heard at the gatherings.

The NCCP produces the summits with ArtPlace America across the country.

Creative placemaking happens when artists and arts organizations join their neighbors in shaping their community’s future, working together on place-based community outcomes. It’s not necessarily focused on making places more creative; it’s about creatively addressing challenges and opportunities. Success is measured in the ways artists, formal and informal arts spaces, and creative interventions have contributed toward community outcomes.  We believe creative placemaking at its best is locally defined and informed and about the people who live, work, and play in a place. ​

T.I.M.E (Temporary Installations Made for the Environment) Edgewood 2017 of New Mexico Arts: Art in Public Places, a project I was a part of in 2017, was awarded through the juried selection of the Public Art Network Americans for the Arts Year in Review!

The other artists include Allyson Packer, Joshua Willis, Sara Cummings and Jodi Miller. 

Each year, New Mexico Arts partners with a local community to commission up to ten temporary, visually engaging, and conceptually rich environmental artworks to be displayed for a short term exhibition in that community. The opening of the exhibit is often tied to another important community event. The artworks relate to a designated theme, and New Mexico Arts challenges artists to create environmental pieces that inspire, question, engage, and otherwise influence the citizens of and visitors to the host community. New Mexico Arts is interested in interactive art that encourages an audience response and transforms participants into active contributors to the creative process. The artworks are displayed for the length of the exhibit, and at the end of the exhibition they are disassembled and removed, leaving no trace of ever having existed. TIME was inspired by the emerging public art trend to engage artists interested in creating more spontaneous and immediate artworks with short life-spans. New Mexico Arts hopes that this kind of project will engage both communities and artists in the public art process. Projects and project details can be viewed at http://nmarts.org/2017-edgewood-persistence/

New article, "Brick by Brick: Artist Joanna Keane Lopez makes contemporary installation with traditional techniques" written up on my practice in The Weekly Alibi by arts editor, Maggie Grimason. 

https://alibi.com/art/55991/Brick-by-Brick.html

T.I.M.E. Edgewood 2017 encompasses five public temporary environmentally based artworks exhibited in various locations in Edgewood, New Mexico. This year's theme is persistence. The work is made possible by Art in Public Places Program of New Mexico Arts, Route 66 Arts Alliance, and City of Edgewood. 

Persist, Repeat, Reflect by Joanna Keane Lopez is a sculptural installation that celebrates the persistence of the human being’s interaction with the landscape of Edgewood, New Mexico. The work engages the memory and nostalgia of materials such as adobe mud for building, earthen plastering techniques and architectural forms unique to the region. The work mirrors back the viewer and backdrop of the environment in contemplation, examination and reflection.

Opening Reception: July 1, 2017 

Plantcraft is an inquiry into the natural environment of the Southwest. The work encompasses plant and insect dyes, hand harvested aliz (a traditional clay plaster) and botanical paintings of regional medicinal plants. Plantcraft investigates place, the human being's relationship with flora & natural materials, the southwestern landscape's interaction with architecture and the mystique & stories of plants that heal. 

Harwood Art Center, Front Gallery, 1114 Seventh St. NW, Albuquerque, NM

May 5th - May 25th, 2017

Hours: Monday-Thursday, 9am-5pm & Thursday, 9am-4pm

Opening Reception: May 5th, 2017 at 5pm-8pm

Conrad Wilde Gallery

101 West 6th St. #121, Tuscon, Arizona

Conrad Wilde Gallery presents High Fiber an exhibition featuring innovative fiber based abstraction and installation by local and national talent. 

CFA Downtown Studio

113 4th St NW, Albuquerque, NM

This exhibition presents a diverse body of creative works that employ art as a critical voice aimed at generating dialogue and awareness around social and environmental justice issues. The artists in this exhibition spent weeks in the field participating the UNM Land Arts of The American West Program while investigating Resource Extraction as a toxic legacy for Navajo communities, as well as learning about the Gila River and its potential diversion. This exhibition shares these artists' inquiries through art. 

LAND ARTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST

John Sommers Gallery

University of New Mexico, Art Building, 2nd floor, #202, Albuquerque, NM

Land Arts of the American West is an interdisciplinary, field-based studio art program at the University of New Mexico. During the program the students travel extensively throughout the Southwest while camping and investigating environmental sites, human habitation systems, and questions facing the region. This exhibition presents the work of these artists as each shares critical and creative insights into the ecology of place. 

HILO

INPOST! ART SPACE @ THE OUTPOST PERFORMANCE SPACE 

210 Yale S.E., Albuquerque, NM

HILO is an exhibition of contemporary textiles artists from across the country. Textiles have the power to draw us in: reminding us of the familiar and functional, reflecting communities and surroundings. The five artists - Season Evans, Katie Ford, Rachel Hayes, Sarah Vosmus and Joanna Keane Lopez - play with these connotations through diverse and innovative methods of making. From weaving rom hand-spun wool, to constructing translucent vinyl banners and elegant bed-sized compositions, the artists draw from traditions in ways that are decidedly their own. 

BFA Honors Thesis Exhibition "Oda a la fuente" with the honors of Summa Cum Laude. 

John Sommers Gallery, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM