From Director Arif Khan: Reflecting on 2024 at UNMAM
As 2024 draws to a close, we reflect on another outstanding year at the University of New Mexico Art Musem (UNMAM). We honor how creative partnerships between museum staff and our campus community enhanced students’ academic success while sharing our collaborative spirit with visitors.
In 2024, we welcomed 9,219 visitors to UNMAM, including 3,286 visits from UNM students, continuing to set new records for student attendance.
These numbers include 1,668 visitors to the Beaumont Newhall Study Room across 156 class and research visits. In addition to scheduled visits, we hosted recurring class visits utilizing UNMAM’s collection throughout their curriculum. Outside of engaging students through the museum, two of our staff members accepted teaching positions within the College of Fine Arts.
We hosted 37 events to connect with our community, with a total of 1,375 attendees as well as an increase in the average number of guests per event compared to years past. Finally, we celebrated six new exhibitions with 679 guests at our opening receptions.
These numbers only reveal a small part of the impact that UNMAM has on the campus community.
The museum space serves as a hub for learning, discovery, and community building across the University. By fostering a collaborative environment, where students, faculty, and the community connect, UNMAM creates opportunities that challenge and build upon traditional academic experiences.
This commitment to building connections extends to honoring our institutional past and celebrating the legacy of those who have shaped our shared history. In this spirit, the UNM Art Museum was honored to host the memorial of Thomas Barrow (1938 – 2024), Associate Professor of Art and former Associate Director of the Art Museum. Alongside Van Deren Coke and Beaumont Newall, Tom and his colleagues combined academic excellence with the museum’s esteemed art collection, creating a foundational program that inspired multiple generations of UNM students to become rigorous and thoughtful scholars, artists and museum professionals. We extend our deepest condolences to the Barrow family, friends, and colleagues.
As we honor the legacy of those who have contributed to the museum’s history and mission, we also celebrate the voices of our students and alumni who continue to shape its future. Their experiences demonstrate how the UNM Art Museum bridges the gap between academic learning and professional practice:
“This past summer and fall with UNMAM has been such a fantastic introduction into working in the art world. Getting to work directly with the staff and artists at the museum has been a unique experience that has taught me skills about installation and exhibit design that I’m not sure I could have learned any other way. I’m grateful for all the support and encouragement that I’ve received in my role here and I’m excited to continue working with UNMAM in the new year!”
—Bre Kappel
Programs Assistant, UNM Art Museum
BALA in Science Communication and Museum Studies, The University of New Mexico, 2025
“UNMAM for me is a place of possibility. Throughout the length of my master’s program, I worked with the museum as a research assistant and co-founded their first Student Advisory Board—a student-led organization that provided direct interaction and collaboration between the museum and the university’s student body. In this role, I gained valuable experience with community engagement, programming, and budgeting which are essential skills for any future museum professional. Moreover, the organization gave me a chance to step up as a leader and to see the positive impact institutions like UNMAM can have on students.”
—David Saiz
PhD Student, Princeton University
MA in Art History, The University of New Mexico, 2021
As UNMAM continues to redefine the role of university art museums, I invite you to join us in our year-end fundraising campaign.
Your support is essential to ensuring that UNM students benefit from professional development opportunities, mentorship, and transformative experiences with the visual arts. Together, we can foster a lifelong appreciation of arts and culture.
I invite you to continue reading about our achievements in 2024 at the UNM Art Museum.
As we emphasize the value of integrating students into our work, I am happy to acknowledge the following UNMAM Marketing Assistants who contributed to this year-end article: Adrian Ricca Lucci, Alayah Fierro, Cassie Kaplan, Idris Parker, and Morgan Tracy.
On behalf of the UNMAM staff, we wish you happy holidays and look forward to seeing you at the museum in the new year. Go Lobos!Arif KhanDirector, The University of New Mexico Art Museum
In 2024 we welcomed 9,219 visitors to the UNM Art Museum. We are thrilled to see student engagement increase across multiple measures: student visitors to the galleries and Study Room, along with the number of attendees at Student Advisory Council events. Over 1,000 students visited the museum, outside of their class time, to engage with exhibitions and pursue their own interests. In the spirit of making the museum an extension of the classroom, UNMAM staff connected with faculty to integrate the museum’s exhibitions and collections into students’ coursework. An additional 693 students attended class visits to our exhibitions.
1,668 students and guests across 156 visits were welcomed to the Beaumont Newhall Study Room. This year we have had a busy schedule, with visits from the Department of Art, Museum Studies, Latin American Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, American Studies, Architecture, Interdisciplinary Arts, Theater & Dance, and Mathematics & Statistics. We also continued to welcome students, faculty, collectors, and researchers from numerous other institutions.
In total, 3,286 UNM students visited UNMAM in the past year.
We hosted 37 events to engage with our community this year, including welcoming 679 guests at our opening receptions.
Our programming featured impactful initiatives, such as “Exploring Pathways in Museum Careers“ and “BioSymposium.” These events expanded professionalization opportunities across disciplines by inviting students to attend panels, present research, and network with others of similar interests. We also highlighted artists with talks by Rachel Cox and Gail Wight, presentations by student artists featured in Hindsight Insight 4.0, a STEAM-focused tour of Hindsight Insight 5.0, as well as Majel Connery’s performance of Elderflora.
To further connect with our local community, we organized several Art Days with different family-friendly focuses, including the printmaking techniques of Gustave Baumann and Andy Warhol, as well as photographs of microscopic images. Across these workshops that accompanied our exhibitions, 105 guests joined us to create art. Thank you to Programs Assistant Justine Witkowski for helping develop these events.
Across all events and programming, we welcomed 1,375 guests.
Thank you to Marketing Assistants Morgan Tracy and Adrian Ricca Lucci for contributing to this section.
In 2024, UNMAM organized six exhibitions that focused on collaboration, inviting faculty, students and alumni from a wide variety of disciplines. We are grateful for these relationships that allow us to expand UNMAM’s role as a teaching museum across and beyond campus.
We were pleased to continue Pelton and Jonson: The Transcendent 1930s, which will be on view when we return in January. The exhibition celebrates the friendship of Transcendental Painting Group members Agnes Pelton and Raymond Jonson. Pelton and Jonson will close in March 2025. After Cottonwood Tassels: Gustave Baumann’s Prints, Proofs, and Process closed in March, we opened Swimming In It, The University of New Mexico Department of Art’s 31st Annual Juried Graduate Exhibition. The exhibition featured the work of fifteen artists enrolled in the MFA Program and working in all mediums – painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, sound and video installation.
UNMAM Curator of Collections & Study Room Initiatives Angel Jiang developed Print in Action: Lithography and the Modern World with Dr. Susanne Anderson-Riedel, Associate Professor of Art History, and her Spring 2024 “History of Print II” class. The exhibition surveyed the history of lithography as an agent of social, cultural, political, and artistic change. Undergraduate and graduate students in Art History, Museum Studies, and the Tamarind Printer Training program helped select works on view in the exhibition.
Jiang also curated Graphic Art and Revolution: Latin American Political Posers 1968-2000, which will be on view through May 17, 2025. The exhibition features Latin American political posters from two major repositories on campus: The University of New Mexico Art Museum and the Sam L. Slick Collection of Latin American and Iberian Posters at the Center for Southwest Research. The opening reception featured research presentations related to the exhibition by alumni and current students from UNM’s Latin American Studies department.
We concluded our multi-year Hindsight Insight series, opening 4.0 in February and 5.0 in August. Both exhibitions complimented curricula and provided opportunities for students to contribute artwork, responses, and presentations that emphasized the museum’s role as an extension of the classroom.
Hindsight Insight 4.0 examined photography’s role in constructing identity and persona, while also focusing on interconnection between humans and the natural world. Visitors were able to use an in-gallery portrait studio to take self-portraits that were electronically displayed outside the museum and post written responses to the exhibition on the gallery’s wall.
Hindsight Insight 5.0 was created and curated by a wide variety of artists, faculty, students, and UNMAM staff members. The exhibition imagined the galleries as a laboratory, demonstrating how research and experimentation are put into action through projects at the intersection of art and science.
Further exploring the themes of Hindsight Insight 5.0, we also featured Notes on Care: Photographs by Rachel Cox. Displaying photographs from the series Portrait of a Woman, this highly personal body of work chronicles Cox’s experience accessing fertility treatment to start a family. Thank you to KUNM for interviewing the artist and highlighting the exhibition.
We’d like to take a moment to thank all of our collaborators in Hindsight Insight 4.0 and 5.0:
- Fiona Bell
- Kaitlyn Bryson
- Rachel Cox
- Susan Hyde Holmes
- Steven Hurley
- Megan Jacobs
- Bre Kappel
- jessamyn lovell
- Joseph McKee
- Amy Pilling
- Andrea Polli
- Mary Statzer
We invite you to read the following section, Student Engagement, to learn about how students were involved in UNMAM’s 2024 exhibitions.
Thank you to Marketing Assistants Alayah Fierro and Adrian Ricca Lucci for contributing to this section.
This year, we focused on providing professional development and engaging opportunities for UNM students through all areas of our operations. Many of our student-focused projects were funded by a generous grant from the Creative Industries Division, New Mexico Economic Development Department.
An average of fifteen student employees worked at UNMAM in marketing, communications, collections, education, and programming as well as exhibition planning and installation. UNMAM’s Museum Assistant program is vital to our everyday operations, and we would like to thank our students for ensuring that the museum is a welcoming space for all.
We’d also like to take a moment to congratulate the following students who graduated this year: Laura Olson (Spring 2024 – MA in Musicology), Alejandra Rodriguez (Fall 2024 – MA in Art History), and Morgan Tracy (Fall 2024 – BA in English and Psychology). Thank you for your service to UNMAM and we wish you the best in your future endeavors!
To give students the opportunity to build upon their education and expand their professional network, we provided funding for students to attend conferences related to art and museums. Overall, we sent five students to the College Art Association conference, one student to the Southwest Popular/American Culture Association conference, two students to the American Alliance of Museums annual meeting, three students to the Association of Academic Museums & Galleries virtual conference, and two students to the New Mexico Association of Museums conference. We were pleased to see many of our students give presentations during these conferences as well.
UNMAM’s Student Advisory Council (SAC) gave space for students to present responses to our exhibitions and develop professional skills through the release of two zines centered around themes in Hindsight Insight 4.0 and 5.0. SAC is a group of undergraduate and graduate students from across the university dedicated to promoting an inclusive, accessible, and welcoming UNMAM space for students. Each semester, students contributed their own art and creative research as zine content. This allowed students to gain experience in design, copyediting, publishing, and marketing that ultimately led to the creation of each zine.
Many of our Museum Assistants contributed to each zine as well, including a music composition by Laura Olson in the Spring edition, collaborative artwork and poetry of Marketing Assistants Idris Parker and Morgan Leanor in the Fall edition, along with articles written by Study Room Assistant Hannah Cerne in both editions.
UNM ART MUSE/ZINE: Responses to Hindsight Insight 4.0
UNM ART MUSE/ZINE: Responses to Hindsight Insight 5.0
In our exhibitions, students contributed artwork, wrote extended labels, assisted with curation, and presented their own research. The Hindsight Insight series invited students across disciplines to participate. During Hindsight Insight 4.0, students enrolled in “Social Transformation Through Art” with Megan Jacobs installed artwork in the gallery and presented their projects at the 2024 Undergraduate Research Opportunity Conference. We also displayed 45 self-portraits made by students in jessamyn lovell and Ellen Babcock’s “Art Practices II” class. In the Fall, students enrolled in Kaitlin Bryson’s class “Art & Ecology: Materials Practice” created bio-art materials for Hindsight Insight 5.0 and presented their final projects in the museum.
Using the Beaumont Newhall Study Room as a research space, students also participated in exhibitions in the Clinton Adams Gallery. Throughout the spring semester, students in Dr. Susanne Anderson-Riedel’s “History of Print II” class met with Curator Angel Jiang to select and research artwork for Print in Action: Lithography and the Modern World. Students in Mariana Sabino Salazar’s “Latin American Film: New Millenium Identities” class also conducted research and selected artworks to be included in Graphic Art and Revolution: Latin American Posters 1968-2000. Their research and writing are presented in the exhibition.
Outside of engaging students through the museum, two of our staff members accepted teaching positions within the College of Fine Arts. During the Fall semester, Associate Director Devin E. Geraci taught “Leadership for Creatives,” a course offered through the Arts Leadership & Business program. With a focus on effective leadership in the arts and cultural sectors, this course provided students the opportunity to understand and develop their own leadership potential.
Also in the Fall, Curator Angel Jiang taught “Abstraction on Paper: Curating Postwar American Prints and Drawings.” Meeting weekly in the Beaumont Newhall Study Room, students gained familiarity with Postwar American art and American printmaking, learned how to analyze, interpret, and research prints, and worked closely with the museum’s holdings in this period. Their work will be featured in our upcoming Spring exhibition, Push and Pull: The Prints of Helen Frankenthaler and Her Contemporaries. Both Geraci and Jiang will teach different courses in the Spring.
You can read more about student experiences at UNMAM by exploring the “Student Voices” tag of Here to Inspire: The UNMAM Journal.
Thank you to Marketing Assistants Cassie Kaplan, Idris Parker, and Adrian Ricca Lucci for contributing to this section.
Marking the end of her first semester at the museum, Andrea Perez-Martinez joined our team as our new Collections Manager in September. Coming to UNMAM from the Los Angeles area, Perez-Martinez’s years of experience in the field and enthusiasm for her work has brought valuable insight to our collection. “As a new staff member and Collections Manager at UNMAM, I was easily welcomed and integrated into the team,” said Perez-Martinez. “I would say my accomplishments in my first few months have been observing, learning, and documenting museum procedures to better understand the roles of my colleagues and the many functions that keep UNMAM up and running. A lot of this is groundwork for student involvement in the collection, which I hope to develop into a program of student-led stewardship in UNMAM’s permanent collection in the new year.”
Manager of Visitor Experience Ethan Aronson recently completed his first year of employment at UNMAM. During this time, Aronson hired and trained eight new student employees, while serving as a mentor to the full Museum Assistant team. He led student employees in renovating the Museum Assistant break room, as well as assisting in updating our emergency procedures and conducting staff trainings to ensure that everyone is prepared in case of emergency. He also planned and organized the opening reception for Hindsight Insight 5.0. In the Fall, Aronson worked with students to develop and implement strategies to increase museum visitation during shows at Popejoy Hall. This initiative has already shown success, demonstrating an increase in the average number of visitors during performances this semester.
Associate Director of Operations Devin E. Geraci completed the administration of her first grant, “Workforce Development in Creative Industries,” sponsored through the New Mexico Creative Industries Division. She used this opportunity to expand professional development opportunities for student employees and host “Exploring Pathways in Museum Careers: A Symposium for Professional Development.” She has been an active speaker across the museum industry, participating in panel discussions at the Association of Academic Museums & Galleries (AAMG) Virtual Conference, New Mexico Association of Museums Annual Conference, and most recently, at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Throughout the year, Geraci has supervised a Museum Studies practicum project to explore accessibility needs across the museum’s digital and physical spaces. In the Fall, Geraci taught “Leadership for Creatives,” a course offered through UNM’s Arts Leadership and Business program. Currently, Geraci is working closely with the AAMG to prepare the 2025 Annual Conference, which will be held at UNM.
Coordinator of Exhibitions Steven Hurley continued to play a vital role in the installation of our exhibitions. Throughout this year, he has been involved in numerous special projects, including overseeing the upgrade of technology in the Media Gallery and coordinating important facilities and storage projects. Additionally, Hurley assisted in moving artwork from UNM’s Public Art collection from the Humanities building to the Economics Department. He continues to mentor students learning about exhibition design, installation, and construction.
Curator of Collections & Study Room Initiatives Angel Jiang continues to welcome students, faculty, collectors and researchers to view works from our permanent collection in the Beaumont Newhall Study Room. She collaborated with partners in the Department of Latin American Studies (LAS) and the Latin American and Iberian Institute (LAII) to produce Graphic Art and Revolution: Latin American Political Posters 1968-2000, on view in the Clinton Adams Gallery. Jiang also taught an Art History class, “Abstraction on Paper: Curating Postwar American Prints and Drawings,” which was designed to complement our upcoming exhibition on the prints of Helen Frankenthaler and her contemporaries. Throughout the year, Jiang has worked closely with student employees to provide hands-on experience in curation, research, and exhibition development.
As Administrative Assistant to the Director, Heather Kline has spent the year assisting Arif Khan with balancing the many priorities and responsibilities of being a museum director. She has played an important role with UNM’s Museum Council, scheduling meetings, taking minutes, and setting agendas. Currently, she is preparing materials for UNM’s museums to be represented at UNM Day at the State Capital. Outside of her work with UNMAM, Heather volunteers with local organizations and has become a dedicated foster parent for puppies.
Coordinator of Student Engagement & Technology Joseph McKee planned 37 programs, including Saturday Art Days, artist talks, class engagements, and “BioSymposium.” Their work served to bridge the gap between artists, exhibitions and audience—making our artworks more accessible to the broader community on and off campus. McKee also organized the Student Advisory Council, which gave students the opportunity to create research projects and have their work published as researchers, authors, and artists. To give guests the opportunity to directly engage with Hindsight Insight 5.0, they developed a touchscreen system that allowed users to flip through a virtual copy of a nineteenth century album of microscopic photographs.
Curator of Prints & Photographs Mary Statzer collaborated directly with more than 100 UNM students, faculty, and post docs this year. She also made new strides in positioning UNMAM as a tool for academic scholarship by participating in UNM-wide efforts at the Undergraduate Research and Opportunity Conference. Statzer also collaborated with Joseph McKee, jessamyn lovell, and Megan Jacobs to create new opportunities for visitors to participate in our exhibitions with the in-gallery portrait studio, microscopic image capture, and exhibition feedback wall in the Hindsight Insight series. Over the summer, Statzer supervised a Museum Studies Practicum, serving as a mentor in curation and exhibition design. She is currently working on acquisitions from three donors that we are looking forward to announcing in the new year. Our contemporary photography holdings are about to get even more exciting!
Director Arif Khan continues to serve as a national board member for the Association of Academic Museums & Galleries (AAMG). He serves as co-chair of the AAMG Conference Committee and secured UNM as the host site for the organization’s annual conference in 2025. It will be the first time the conference has been held in New Mexico. Khan continues to prioritize outreach to UNM alumni and 2024 was spent researching and connecting with alumni in the arts and culture field. This network will serve as a resource for current students and for alumni to stay connected with the UNM Art Museum. As a fellow alum, he is very proud of the number of alumni who hold prominent positions in arts institutions across the country.
Thank you to Marketing Assistants Idris Parker and Adrian Ricca Lucci for contributing to this section.