Joanna Keane Lopez

Adobe, UV cured acrylic pigment print, two channel video projection, 19:07 , min. 2026.

On view at the Harwood Art Museum, June 27, 2026 - February 28, 2027.

Joanna Keane Lopez examines land use, militarized occupation, and ranching culture through adobe as architectural material, craft practice, and archive.

Energetic Materials explores how land-based practices and militarized spatial regimes coexist within the same terrain at White Sands Missile Range in south-central New Mexico.

Lopez's Montoya-Apodaca family has ranched in the Tularosa Basin since 1846, long before the U.S. government appropriated the land through eminent domain to establish the nation's premier open air weapons testing site. This historical rupture anchors the project's central inquiry into how land becomes simultaneously a site of dwelling, ranching, U.S. military surveillance and ballistic experimentation. Through repeated field visits to family ranches located adjacent to and within White Sands Missile Range, and through multigenerational oral histories, Lopez traces the lived experience of a landscape governed by overlapping jurisdictions. These stories reflect vernacular epistemologies in which knowledge of the land is carried through lived experience, oral narrative, embodied labor, and environmental memory over generations.

The installation centers a foundational distinction. Ranchers experience land directly through touch, weather, maintenance, and intergenerational craft. In contrast, the U.S. military engages the same terrain indirectly through aerial mapping, surveillance grids, and detonation coordinates, transforming lived land into state managed territory.

Adobe is central to this divide. As the primary vernacular building materials of the Tularosa Basin, adobe and stone have long defined ranch architecture across the region. Before White Sands Missile Range was established, the vast majority of ranches were built from these materials, and historic ranches remain within what is now WSMR. The U.S. military later repurposed existing adobe buildings for military training and ballistic experiments. Today, the same soil is used as a substrate for missiles and open air detonation exercises, leaving lasting ecological and human consequences for downwinder communities.

Through adobe, UV acrylic pigment prints, archival imagery, and projected video, Energetic Materials articulates the Tularosa Basin as a site where ancestral land use, militarized occupation, environmental trauma, and competing relationships to land converge.

The Oral History Project of Early Ranch Life on White Sands Missile Range, originally collected in 1993 by Human Systems Research and now stewarded by the NMSU Library Archives and Special Collections, served as a foundational archive for the development of Energetic Materials. The archive contains oral histories, photographs, and historical documents documenting the lives of ranching families who homesteaded the Tularosa Basin prior to the establishment of White Sands Missile Range and were later displaced through eminent domain as the federal government assembled more than two million acres for military testing and weapons development.

These records provide rare firsthand accounts of a landscape transformed by militarization while preserving forms of knowledge rooted in ranching and land stewardship. The archive offered a critical lens through which to understand the human histories embedded within a landscape more commonly defined by military occupation, weapons testing, and scientific research.

The Tularosa Basin occupies a singular place in American history. It is the site of the Trinity Test in 1945, the world's first atomic detonation and the beginning of the nuclear age. It later became home to White Sands Missile Range, the largest overland military testing range in the United States and a central site for missile, rocket, and weapons development throughout the Cold War and into the present. At the same time, the basin represents one of the last regions settled during the westward expansion of the American frontier, where ranching communities established enduring relationships to land that continue today.

Within the Tularosa Basin, the histories of ranching, westward expansion, the nuclear age, and contemporary military testing converge upon the same landscape.

Adobe, pine, paper, linen. 116.5” x 77”. 2023.

Concoctions of soil, wheat straw, textiles, paper and pine, define the vernacular adobe architecture of New Mexico, particularly the artist’s great grandfather’s home in Socorro, New Mexico. Ghost spell is a traditional remedy that uses these ingredients to restore the loss of architectural traditions and heal fragmentation.

In the permanent collection of the Albuquerque Museum.

Photos by Yunfei Ren

Adobe earth, UV cured acrylic pigment print, maple frame

1274 Library Street, Detroit, MI

January 24-March 18, 2026

Library Street Collective is pleased to announce a two person exhibition of work by Jordan Ann Craig and Joanna Keane Lopez opening at 1274 Library Street. Jordan Ann Craig and Joanna Keane Lopez: A Heart and a Land considers the formal and conceptual connections between Jordan Ann Craig’s (Northern Cheyenne) and Joanna Keane Lopez’s practices and shared communities, which are both rooted in New Mexico and the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Emerging from an invitation to deeply connect to Detroit’s histories, including museum collections, infrastructure, environments, and more, A Heart and a Land includes paintings Craig developed while researching Cheyenne and Northern Cheyenne objects in the Detroit Institute of the Arts’ (DIA) collection and new adobe works by Lopez that center on the Nike missile program as the historical link between Detroit and southern New Mexico, two places the artist has familial connections.

Jordan Ann Craig is a Northern Cheyenne artist who develops large-scale, visually-stunning, hard-edged, geometric paintings that explore the histories of color, shape, repetition, and form within Indigenous abstraction across space and time. To develop this new body of work, Craig spent time researching Cheyenne and Northern Cheyenne objects in the Detroit Institute of the Arts’ (DIA) collection, and developed paintings in response to a series of objects including moccasins, a beaded knife case, weathering buckskin and a tobacco bag. The design of Still, Still (2025) directly references a section of intricate beadwork on the surface of a rawhide, deerskin, and glass bead knifecase from c.1875. Selecting a portion of this design to dialogue with, Craig’s paintings question notions of ownership and value while connecting to traditions deeply embedded in her practice. 

Familial connections to Detroit inspired the work of Joanna Keane Lopez. This new body of work centers on the Nike missile program as the historical link between Detroit and southern New Mexico. In the 1950s, Nike missiles were produced and deployed at sixteen sites around Detroit as part of the Cold-War air-defense network and tested at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Nike Missile sites in Detroit include Belle Isle, Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and Rouge Park. The surfaces of these maple-framed, hand-cast adobe works include archival images of mid-twentieth century Nike sites in Detroit alongside graphite rubbings of the horse corrals and stone well of Lopez’s family ranch leased on White Sands Missile Range. The title Energetic Materials (2025), a vertical work with images of an explosion at White Sands is a reference to substances that have significant chemical energy. While ‘energetic materials’ is a term often used to describe explosives and other propellants, Lopez also identifies adobe as an energetically charged material that is the embodiment of care and the histories of adobe building, noting that the same landscapes that can be used to build homes have also been used for ballistics testing. 

The invitation to Craig and Lopez comes out of an interest in considering the formal and conceptual connections between their practices and shared communities, which are rooted in New Mexico and the San Francisco Bay Area. Lopez, who grew up in Albuquerque, spends her time working between Galisteo and San Francisco. Craig, who is Northern Cheyenne, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and lives in Pojoaque Valley, New Mexico. Within the desert landscape, interdependence is necessary for survival. The curatorial invitation to include an earthen vessel created by Brandon Adriano Ortiz-Concha and a photograph by Maryssa Chávez–taken from an adobe-building workshop led by Lopez–is a reference to how interdependence manifests in Craig and Lopez’s creative circles in New Mexico and beyond. 

Jordan Ann Craig and Joanna Keane Lopez: A Heart and a Hand, curated by Allison Glenn, Artistic Director-At-Large, is on view January 24-March 18, 2026 at 1274 Library Street, Detroit, MI. 

Adobe, ponderosa pine, colcha embroidery, churro wool, linen, natural dye, tin, digital print. 2024.

On view at 12th SITE Santa Fe International, Once Within A Time, June 27, 2025 - January 12, 2026

On July 13, 1945, a group of military personnel and scientists congregated together in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto desert basin to assemble the plutonium core for the first ever nuclear weapon. The assembly did not occur within expected sites of warfare, like a military base or laboratory, rather these men gathered in the master bedroom of an adobe home that once belonged to the McDonald family. The Atomic Age was thus born from within what was once a familial site of intimacy and domesticity. The multimedia installation, Batter my heart, three-person'd God, contends with the legacy of the Trinity Test upon the land and nearly half a million predominantly Latine and Indigenous people that live in the 150-mile radius of the detonation. The artist, whose ancestral land is only 35 miles northwest of the Trinity site, reveals how the insidious forces of displacement, colonial violence, land contamination, and nuclear terror converge here within the intimate space of a local family’s adobe home. 

In the installation, the bed—a place of rest, birth, love, sex, and death—symbolizes a contact zone wherein the local and domestic are invaded by the occupying forces of the US military industrial complex. This private site of tenderness, therefore, absorbs an apparatus of colonial violence inflicted upon the region; much like the soil and earthen-adobe structures in the Jornada del Muerto absorbed the poisonous remnants of plutonium and radiation after the Trinity blast. However, the bed is not simply a reactive object that exists passively within the installation, rather it can also be interpreted as agential and vital—an active site of recovery. In fact, by resituating the bed within the home, Keane Lopez rehumanizes and reclaims the site of nuclear assembly, foregrounding the space as a place of intimacy, not war. This restorative practice is particularly reflected in the traditional techniques that Keane Lopez uses to construct the handmade bed and weave the colcha embroidery that ornaments it. Through craft, adobe brick, and experimental installation, Batter my heart, three-person'd God reorients the gaze to local histories that have been written out of the grand narrative of the Atomic Age and reclaims these sites as places of domesticity and belonging that carry the weight of US colonial violence within them.

-Sofía Silva, PhD Art History

SF-88 Nike Missile Site // Red Canyon Range Camp. Adobe from New Mexico, quartzite stone, UV cured acrylic pigment print, two channel video projection, 8:49 min. 7.75’x4’x6’. 2025. 

Watch film here

On view at Headlands Center for The Arts from September 7 - November 2, 2025.

SF-88 Nike Missile Site (CA)  // Red Canyon Range Camp (NM) is an installation that brings to light the relationship between the Nike Missile Site of Marin Headlands and White Sands Missile Range of New Mexico. During the Cold War, between 1953 to 1979, Marin Headlands was one of 300 Nike missile sites around the country that acted as the last line of defense against nuclear Soviet Union hydrogen bombs. None of the Nike missiles were ever deployed. Yet, they were tested at the Red Canyon Range Camp in the Northeast corner of the White Sands Missile Range, 16 miles West of Carrizozo, New Mexico. Over 3,000 Nike Ajax missiles were fired  into the desert landscape by air defense troop units. Beginning in 1957, the Red Canyon Range Camp had a camp mascot, a wild burro the army men caught and raised, and named Nike. Nike, the burro, would run around the ballistics testing camp at free range, walking into the mess hall, the barracks, the chapel and became fond of beer that the army men would give him. 

Through film, archival image, and physical materials of adobe and rock, this project takes a critical and historical look into ballistic testing networks and coastal defense sites implemented by the U.S. military. It also brings to light the relationship of ballistics testing and launch sites and its occupancy of wilderness areas and consequent impact on land and animals of the regions. Marin Headlands with its foggy coastal beaches shares the same military invasion of Nike-Ajax and nuclear-capable Nike-Hercules missiles as the arid desert cactus-filled landscape of White Sands Missile Range. They are interconnected sites of U.S. warfare.

Adobe, ponderosa pine, quartzite stone, sabanilla churro wool.

Decorative wooden thresholds, like the one seen here, are found all across the American Southwest and feature prominently on the balconies of California’s Spanish-style homes. This ornamental screen, called a mashrabiy’ya, was used in traditional North African and Middle Eastern architecture to create a boundary between inside and outside spaces. It offers privacy while still allowing air and light through, enabling both visibility and concealment, control and openness. Traditionally, they were used in the practice of protecting or covering things considered sacred.

In The Veil, artist Joanna Keane Lopez reinterprets this form through ponderosa pine and bolsters the design with earthen adobe, quartzite stone, and woven sabanilla textiles-substances that trace a history of architectural movement from Western Asia and North Africa to Spain and the Americas. These components are shaped by colonial expansion, Indigenous traditions, and the layered connections between craft and construction that emphasize the sanctity of natural resources. The built environment of the “American West” is a legacy that spans continents, and these aspects of the installation each evoke a component of this story.

By transforming structural features into sculpture, The Architectural Veil asks how materials contain cultural memory and how the spaces we inhabit shape our understanding of belonging and separation. This exhibit opens a space for reflection, urging us to consider how the built world, both industrial and handcrafted, is never a given but always the result of long processes of migration, adaptation, and transformation.

Curated by William Hernandez Luege

On view until July 2025 at the City of Berkeley Cube Space Gallery — a contemporary art gallery located in the heart of downtown Berkeley at 2010 Addison Street. Unlike traditional galleries, its curated exhibits are always visible to the public through three glass walls in a 200 sq. ft. space.

Adobe, pine, viga, linen, alíz. 16.5’x1’x11’ with varied dimensions

SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA

September 14, 2023-October 6, 2023

The Hurt and Love of Chamisal explores the immediacy of material, craft and scale of earthen architecture and is an installation made of adobe, pine, viga, linen and alíz. The work is a dreamscape of the architecture of my family land known as Lopezville in Socorro, New Mexico, a dusty piece of land holding a handful of homes belonging to various López family members throughout multiple generations. Lopezville was originally known as Chamisal, according to family documents outlining the 1815 land grant given to my great great great grandfather Rafael López y Luna. Importantly, the territory of Socorro was originally the Native land of the Piro Pueblo with its own place names of Teypana and Pilabó. With the United States acquisition of New Mexico in 1912 and the post WWII mass push for industrialized building materials in the 1950s —- anglicized assimilation took root in the Spanish language and the subsequent replacement of place names, hence Chamisal to Lopezville. Material choices for the construction of shelter in Chamisal also changed with the passing of time. The oldest buildings are made of adobe, the following are a combination of adobe and cinder block, next is wood frame and stucco and finally the most recent are trailers. What defines vernacular changes with time and what materials are most readily and cheaply available can be seen walking down the dirt road of Chamisal today. Throughout the 1800s and into the 1950s, the clay rich dirt gathered in my family’s yard and wood timbre from ponderosa pine trees from the nearby mountains were the most readily available materials for building a home. After WWII and its mass push for industrialization and the birth of the Nuclear Age in the 1950s, there was a sharp decline in adobe architecture being the favored vernacular building method. This is due to a number of factors including the loss of family and community connectedness to support one another in shared labor for adobe construction. Young people left small towns for upward social mobility and elders died to common ailments of cancer, heart disease and diabetes and with them the knowledge of the how to source, make and build with adobe. An easily assembled wood frame house or affordable trailer take the place of an age old stylistic architectural tradition of land within one generation — my father’s generation. The Hurt and Love of Chamisal is a meditation and dreamscape of these histories.

Adobe, ponderosa pine, and two channel video projection, 18:23 min. 2025. 

Watch film here

On view at the San José Art Museum, Young Bay Mud, July 11, 2025 - February 22, 2026

Keane Lopez looks to architectural histories and land use of the American Southwest as a starting point for her interactions with place. She inherited the practice of working with adobe, a mixture of mud and straw, from her family in New Mexico and continues the traditional craft of creating earthen architecture in her artistic practice.  

Roadtrip Adobe Theatre weaves together footage from her visits to the adobe homes, community centers, and mission churches that stretch from Monterey to the Marin Headlands. Her film is projected on large hand-cast adobe panels that the artist has converted into film screens. The video collage moves into, through, and outside the adobe buildings, also moving among the walking paths surrounding the buildings and the land separating them—forming a road trip that connects the artist’s various encounters with adobe architecture. While acknowledging the Spanish colonial mission system that brought adobe buildings to Northern California in the late eighteenth century, these films also reveal the deep resonance the constructions retain with the environment they were made from.

Adobe, UV cured acrylic pigment print. 27”x30”. 2024.

Thrice Layered traces, blurs and layers the historical and contemporary colonial power of the U.S. nuclear industry's impact upon land in New Mexico. These ideas are examined in relation to archival documents—aerial perspective maps, diagrams, architectural plans and eye witness drawings—specific to the region that identify nuclear industrial cartographies and fallout locations from the world's first nuclear bomb, the Trinity Test, in south central New Mexico. 

Utilizing adobe and acrylic pigment, Keane Lopez transforms these cartographies, drawings and maps into layered collages of abstracted photography. The photos were taken during research trips to the McDonald adobe ranch house, the Trinity site and surrounding ranching communities impacted by the 1945 radioactive fallout, such as Carrizozo, New Mexico. Along with archival imagery and the documentation of the architecture of weapons testing, the series gestures toward the violent nuclear narratives that lie unassumingly within the contemporary American built landscape.

The artist’s family is from Socorro, 35 miles from Trinity. Her father Damacio was 2 years old at the time of the detonation. Watch the film, First We Bombed New Mexico by Lois Lipman, and visit the Tularosa Downwinder Consortium website to learn more.

The exhibition is currently exhibited at the de Saisset Museum of Santa Clara University in California. Curated and organized by Dr. Ciara Ennis, Lauren Baines and Chris Sicat.

October 2, 2024 - Spring 2025

This work is dedicated to all of the people whose lives have been negatively impacted by the development of nuclear weapons. Special thank you to musician and downwinder activist Paul Pino, Myrriah Gómez; author of Nuclear Nuevo México, spokeswoman of Tularosa Downwinder Consortium; Tina Cordova, and her niece Mackenzie Cordova.

Adobe, UV cured acrylic pigment print, maple. 2025.

The Valley is thrilled to present Tierra, Lumbre y Leña, a solo exhibition of new works by Joanna Keane Lopez that explore the sacred significance of earth, fire, and wood in New Mexico’s vernacular architecture. 

On view from July 19 – August 30, 2025

The works in Tierra, Lumbre y Leña draw from a rare and largely unseen collection of photographs, slides, and documents held by the Earthbuilders Guild. The archive, created by the New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology, is an account of the various uses of adobe across the state of New Mexico from the 1970s to the 1990s. Keane Lopez spent months studying and organizing this archive, uncovering intimate scenes of adoberos (adobe makers) and enjarradoras (mud plasterers) engaged in traditional and novel building practices. 

In this body of work, Keane Lopez sought to unite material processes of photography, drawing, print and adobe mud plastering with communal historical inquiry. Working with Magnolia Editions, a print studio in Oakland, California, Keane Lopez printed delicate colored pencil drawings and digital collages of the archival photographs and slides with UV-cured acrylic ink onto hand-cast adobe panels framed in maple. The resulting artworks form a tender visual interpretation, spaces where past and present converge. Keane Lopez transforms the archival images into tactile earthen objects that recall traditional alíz (a clay slip paint) through their innovative printing processes. 

In Tierra, Lumbre y Leña, Keane Lopez focuses on selected historical photographs from the archive that depict hornos (mud ovens) and fogones (adobe fireplaces) from Indo-Hispano villages of New Mexico, particularly La Cienega, Chamisal and Velarde. In the images, the fogones often act as sacred spaces within the home; they are altars and spaces for prayer. The hornos are located outside the home and are built for traditional foodways, they are intrinsic in Indigenous and Indo-Hispano communities alike throughout New Mexico. These hearths and ovens are more than architectural features; they are vessels of memory, craft legacies, connection with land, sites of prayer, and repositories of cultural continuity. ✣

A special thank you to the Earth Builders Guild, a New Mexico based non-profit organization that promotes, preserves, and expands the building methods of adobe, rammed earth, and compressed earth block construction. ✣

Adobe, land sourced color clays (San Luis, CO, Taos, NM, Terlingua, TX) & mica. 2022.

18’x1’x6 1/2’

This site-specific installation rethinks the idea of resolana, a new mexican architectural term that Lopez describes as a “sunny side of a wall where people come together to create community”. The artist designed this sculptural installation made of adobe and alíz (colored clay slip paints) as a threshold that explores land-based traditions as a form of medicine, blessing, and a spell toward future reimaginings. The mud-plastered façade is finished with clays ranging from southern colorado, northern new mexico to west texas and mixed with a glittery silicate mineral called mica. Handmade adobes from albuquerque constitute the core of the sculpture.

In keeping with the tradition of resolana, Lopez staged a one time performance with artist Guadalupe Maravilla and Monique Carr to activate the installation while it was on display. The performance brought together song, storytelling, percussive and vibrational instrumentation, and movement as a poem for healing and play. The sculptural installation became a landscape that ignited childhood games to transform into a dance, the healing songs of the harmonica, a story of a woman along the river, the braiding of hair, song and an embrace.

This work is a part of the State of The Art 2020: Constructs traveling exhibition that originally began at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and is currently on display at the Sarasota Art Museum.

Adobe, dirt, wheelbarrow, shovel, screen, wooden forms, creosote, manta de techo, liquor bottle shards, calcimine paint on adobe, tumbleweeds, archival photographs, maps & documents.

On view at 516 ARTS from February 19, 2022 - May 14, 2022

Among the assemblage in Joanna Keane Lopez’s Lópezville, Socorro is a manta de techo, the dried branches of jediondia/creosote, and at least five generations of remnants — shards of liquor bottles, barbed wire, and old cans — evidence of past generations of López family members who made their lives on the same sprawling plot of land. The artist’s father Damacio gifted her one adobe house from Lópezville, part of a Spanish land grant awarded to 70 families in 1815, and now largely abandoned by most of the López family. Much of what she brings into the gallery emblematizes that which has been left behind.

The manta de techo comes from the home of Lopez’s great grandfather Abelino López, who built the adobe around the turn of the century. The muslin hung beneath the ceiling, catching dirt that fell from the roof. For decades, however, it’s dangled from the vigas, forgotten. The creosote comes from the wider landscape where it grows abundantly. It has been said by traditional healers to clean out the body from environmental toxins. Socorro has seen the radioactive ballistic investigations of the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology involving the testing of depleted uranium penetrators in the Socorro mountain. The artist brings both the remnants from the land, homes and lives lived into the gallery, along with adobe bricks crafted by hand from earth derived from Lopezville. Lópezville, Socorro asks viewers to contemplate the site as an axis of land use, traditional practices, pollution and contamination of land, and other histories of place, including the original presence of the Piro Pueblo of Teypana and Pilabó.

Curated by Alicia Inez Guzmán & Ric Kasini

Adobe, land-sourced colored clays (from San Luis, Colorado, Terlingua, Texas; and Algodones, New Mexico), and mica. 18’x1’x7’. 2022.

On display at Akron Art Museum from November 11, 2022- February 26, 2023

The Spanish word resolana can refer to many things, including sunshine or a place to rest. In New Mexican culture, a resolana is the south-facing side of a building where people gather together. Here in this gallery, Joanna Keane Lopez spent two weeks building a unique resolana out of adobe and land-sourced colored clays from New Mexico, Colorado, and Texas, as well as local materials from Ohio. Handmade adobes from Albuquerque constitute the core of the sculpture and its mud-plastered surface glitters with a mineral called mica. In keeping with the tradition of la resolana, Lopez invites performers to activate the installation while it is on display. The artist intends for her work to function as a blessing or a spell, providing healing as well as an opportunity to reimagine land-based traditions and ensure their continuation into the future.

Adobe, mica, land sourced colored clays (Taos, NM, Terlingua, TX, Lajitas, TX), mineral pigment, casein. 27.5’x9’x7’. Individually 9’x1’x7’. 2021.

SITE Santa Fe

October 1, 2021- January 9, 2022

Artist Joanna Keane Lopez creates work that looks both forward and backward through time. ​​Integrating large-scale installation, earthen architecture and land-sourced materials, Keane Lopez embraces wild crafting and adobe architectural practices, continuing the legacy of the adobera and enjarradora (women who are masters at constructing and preserving earthen buildings).

Land Craft Theatre includes two large-scale installations: one made of adobe, plastered with colored clays and hand-harvested alíz (a clay slip paint), and the other of paper and wire, brought to life using plant and insect dyes. Keane Lopez’s colorful adobe sculptures invite visitors to move freely around and between them, inspiring reflection and playfulness while reveling in the simplicity and strength of mud as material, and revitalizes the traditional language of adobe architecture and uses it to build understanding of, and connection to, the land. Suspended from the ceiling are vibrant cloud-like sculptures. Their lightness and transparency produce dramatic billowing forms that capture the hues of the landscape through the botanical dyes used to stain them. Together, these two installations highlight the theatrics of land and sky.

​​Adobe is a connective force with the power to bring communities together and build relationships to land and place. To build with adobe requires many hands. For this project Keane Lopez invited Issac Logsdon, adobero and Assistant Program Director of Santa Fe, New Mexico’s Cornerstones Community Partnerships, to join her in teaching a two-day workshop to ten volunteers. Carrying on the traditional forms of instruction, they worked together to teach in a hands-on process of showing and doing, just as their teachers taught them. Throughout this exhibition, Keane Lopez enriches our understanding of land-sourced materials, bringing into focus every aspect of the creative process and the intimate dialogue between artist, medium, form and color.

Land Craft Theatre was organized by Curator Brandee Caoba. Special thanks to ​​Exhibitions Manager Max Holmes, Sandro Canovas, Joe Foreman, Will Geusz, Sarah Habib, Alhelí Harvey, Amie LeGette, Drew Lenihan, Issac Logsdon, Kateri López, Candice Moya, Ronald Rael, Donaji Ramirez, Kaitlin Schramm, Christie Stidham, Karima Walker, Ruben Zuñiga

SITE Santa Fe’s exhibitions are made possible by contributions to our Exhibition Fund.

Paper, wire, chamisa flowers, marigold, indigo, cochineal, acacia, walnut hull, casein. 2021.

SITE Santa Fe

October 1, 2021- January 9, 2022

Artist Joanna Keane Lopez creates work that looks both forward and backward through time. ​​Integrating large-scale installation, earthen architecture and land-sourced materials, Keane Lopez embraces wild crafting and adobe architectural practices, continuing the legacy of the adobera and enjarradora (women who are masters at constructing and preserving earthen buildings).

Land Craft Theatre includes two large-scale installations: one made of adobe, plastered with colored clays and hand-harvested alíz (a clay slip paint), and the other of paper and wire, brought to life using plant and insect dyes. Keane Lopez’s colorful adobe sculptures invite visitors to move freely around and between them, inspiring reflection and playfulness while reveling in the simplicity and strength of mud as material, and revitalizes the traditional language of adobe architecture and uses it to build understanding of, and connection to, the land. Suspended from the ceiling are vibrant cloud-like sculptures. Their lightness and transparency produce dramatic billowing forms that capture the hues of the landscape through the botanical dyes used to stain them. Together, these two installations highlight the theatrics of land and sky.

​​Adobe is a connective force with the power to bring communities together and build relationships to land and place. To build with adobe requires many hands. For this project Keane Lopez invited Issac Logsdon, adobero and Assistant Program Director of Santa Fe, New Mexico’s Cornerstones Community Partnerships, to join her in teaching a two-day workshop to ten volunteers. Carrying on the traditional forms of instruction, they worked together to teach in a hands-on process of showing and doing, just as their teachers taught them. Throughout this exhibition, Keane Lopez enriches our understanding of land-sourced materials, bringing into focus every aspect of the creative process and the intimate dialogue between artist, medium, form and color.

Land Craft Theatre was organized by Curator Brandee Caoba. Special thanks to ​​Exhibitions Manager Max Holmes, Sandro Canovas, Joe Foreman, Will Geusz, Sarah Habib, Alhelí Harvey, Amie LeGette, Drew Lenihan, Issac Logsdon, Kateri López, Candice Moya, Ronald Rael, Donaji Ramirez, Kaitlin Schramm, Christie Stidham, Karima Walker, Ruben Zuñiga

SITE Santa Fe’s exhibitions are made possible by contributions to our Exhibition Fund.

Adobe, land sourced colored clays (San Luis, CO, Talpa, NM, Taos, NM, Tijeras, NM Lajitas, TX, Terlingua, TX, Urique, México, Ojinaga, México), casein & mica. 9’x1’x7’. 2021.

The Adobe Color Laboratory exhibition at Blue Star Contemporary is a new project by Joanna Keane Lopez. The exhibition unfolds around a centerpiece sculpture composed of adobe bricks, a form indicative of Lopez’s signature methods. Surrounding the architectural sculpture in the gallery are fragments of field experiments, “sketches,” “polaroids,” “tools,” “raw materials of mica and straw,” “land sourced earthen colored clay pigments,” and adobe bricks themselves investigated as paintings. All of these materials point us to some of the possibilities of the process, situating adobe as building, sculpture, and painting practices in the context of contemporary art methods.

The samples and studies illustrate the alchemic qualities of adobe. In these subtle references to the laboratory environment Lopez also hopes the experimental, collaborative, and living nature of the process becomes more visible. Adobe building relies on communities of artisans and craftspeople along with intergenerational teaching and mentorship to pass along its methods. Lopez works to continue these traditions and histories and draws from a well of familial connections to adobe architecture. Her work also explores new possibilities and futures for the medium.

Lopez’s centerpiece sculpture distills what we find in her laboratory. An arched wall rich with glistening mica flakes and tinted with land sourced colored clays simultaneously references interior and exterior space — the natural adobe hue often most visible on exteriors and pigmented washes on interior walls. Lopez’s play with material, color, and architectural form point to a theme of balance and dichotomies, which are perhaps inherent to living in an earthen structure. To occupy earthen clay is to be both inside building and inside earth. It is both natural and human made. This balance is where Lopez engages the viewer through methods steeped in both tradition and innovation.

-Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray, Curator of Blue Star Contemporary

Adobe brick, mirror, lime wash & mica. 15'x5'x8'. 2017.

A public art installation for T.I.M.E. "Temporary Installations Made for The Environment" Edgewood 2017 w/ New Mexico Arts: Art in Public Places. 

Expanding Sequences is a site-specific installation commissioned by the Harwood Art Center of Albuquerque, NM for their community celebration, Encompass. 

Adobe bricks, mirrors, lime wash, mica. 18'x5'x8'. 2018.