Three exhibitions to see in Albuquerque

Three exhibitions to see in Albuquerque

Nov 30, 2025

Beedallo

at Lapis Room

According to her official bio, the artist known as Beedallo grew up “on the barren east mesa of Valencia County,” surrounded by an “endless sprawl of tires, furniture, newspaper stacks and the occasional animal carcass or dry rotted jacuzzi.” Rather than romanticizing such dismal trashscapes — or turning away from them out of shame — Beedallo transfigures them into allegorical scenes, similar to the 20th century painter Giorgio de Chirico’s “Metaphysical Town Square” paintings.

Like de Chirico, Beedallo paints featureless buildings in one-point perspective, but instead of a warm, Mediterranean palette, she gives us icy cool colors, along with blood-red and black. De Chirico’s empty streets exude loneliness, whereas Beedallo’s are more openly hostile. Gangsters with guns appear alongside martyred saints, and even Beedallo’s saints look world-weary and sardonic, cigarettes dangling from their featureless mouths.

In “This Neighborhood Kinda Sucks,” a young female giant who resembles the Utz potato chip mascot is pinned to the earth by boxy buildings, a network of powerlines and enormous crucifixion nails. The image recalls illustrations of Gulliver from Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” who was pinned to the earth by the tiny inhabitants of Lilliput. But the figure in Beedallo’s painting — perhaps a stand-in for the artist — doesn’t have to travel halfway across the world like Gulliver to feel alienated or attacked. Her hometown is miserable enough.

Beedallo paints flat blocks of unmodulated color with little to no shading, which reminded me, initially, of the work of contemporary Chicago-born painters Nina Chanel Abney and Lilian Martinez — and even the cut-out look of the animated characters in Comedy Central’s “South Park.” But Beedallo’s color blocks do not merely sit on the surface like stickers. She achieves a remarkable depth of field through shape alone, much as Henri Matisse did. From a technical perspective, she’s absolutely on his level.

I’ve encountered Beedallo’s work at multiple local galleries recently, including Secret Gallery and Kukani Gallery, both in Downtown Albuquerque. But if you want to see a whole wall of her art, check out Lapis Room in Old Town.

Beedallo’s current suite of paintings at Lapis Room are not part of a dedicated exhibition with a definitive end date, but the artist said she expects them to remain on view through the spring of 2026, or until they sell. I wouldn’t be surprised if they sell quickly, so go see them before they’re gone.

Lapis Room is located at 303 Romero St. NW, Unit 107. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday-Wednesday, and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. For more information, visit lapisroom.com.

‘Matthew McConville and Olivia Munroe: Beyond the Looking Glass’

at Richard Levy Gallery

Matthew McConville’s “Flowers of the Anthropocene” series at Richard Levy Gallery look like 17th century Dutch still lifes that have been invaded by alien parasites. Some of the floral buds are encased in translucent cocoons of goo that resemble gummy worms or tardigrades viewed under a light microscope, giving the feel of extraterrestrial menace. But the real menace comes not from the stars, but from ourselves.

The reason McConville’s paintings look like 17th century Dutch still lifes, apart from his luminous technique, is that he paints many of the same flowers they did, including candy-striped “broken” tulip varietals, which have since gone extinct.

Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, who practically invented the floral still life genre, worked during the height of Tulipomania, the world’s first speculative asset bubble, when the price for a single rare tulip bulb in the Netherlands could exceed the annual salary of a skilled artisan. It was sometimes cheaper to buy a painting of flowers than the flowers themselves, although both markets — art and flowers — rose together, and master painters like Bosschaert did quite well for themselves. When the bubble finally burst in the early 18th century, the rarest of tulips became practically worthless.

The history of tulips provides a cautionary tale about the dangers of treating living things as luxury goods or fads while failing to protect the natural habitats which sustain them. McConville links that history to present-day problems of deforestation, pollution and genetic engineering, which are transforming life on this planet as never before. His beautiful paintings are deeply unsettling, in the best possible way.

“Beyond the Looking Glass” is billed as a two-person show, but it feels more like two solo shows.

McConville’s “Flowers for the Anthropocene” paintings contain "otherworldly imagery" all right, but they are far more pessimistic than an exhibit press release suggests. Olivia Munroe’s concentric dot paintings, on the other hand, contain no recognizable imagery at all. Some viewers may see flowers or fireworks or subatomic particles in them, but Munroe simply calls them “circles.”

As recently as 2017, Munroe presented a series of near-monochrome collage paintings of simple concentric squares at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York City. The new work — an efflorescence of colors — marks an interesting new direction for the artist. Unfortunately, it’s not an interesting new direction for art in general, as many artists have trod similar ground in decades past. Alma Thomas began making brightly-colored concentric dot paintings in the late 1960s, and Polly Apfelbaum — only two years younger than Munroe — made similar work in the early 1990s. By the end of the ’90s, Apfelbaum’s dot paintings had mutated into massive installations covering entire floors and walls of galleries like an indomitable lichen. Compared to those immersive installations, Munroe’s paintings feel tepid.

Munroe and McConville both make beautiful paintings, but only McConville pulls us beyond beauty, making us confront the monster in the mirror.

“Matthew McConville and Olivia Munroe: Beyond the Looking Glass” runs through Dec. 6 at Richard Levy Gallery, 514 Central Ave. SW. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday-Saturday. For more information, visit levygallery.com.

‘SPIRIT HOUSE’ by Chaz John

at 516 Arts

New Orleans frequently tops lists of the “Most Haunted Cities in America,” and Chaz John (Mississippi Band Choctaw, Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska and European) explores those haunted histories in “SPIRIT HOUSE.”

John’s cast aluminum sculptures of jack-o’-lanterns with carrot noses may seem playful or creepy-cute, like children’s Halloween cartoons or Ugo Rondinone’s “Moonrise” sculptures, but dig a little deeper and the narrative gets dark fast. His hollow pumpkin-heads are inspired by ancient Mississippian head-shaped jugs, which act as stand-ins for John’s own Mississippian ancestors. By impaling them on branches, he reenacts generations of settler colonial violence.

“When I stuck the pumpkin on the tree, it had rabbit ears and became a reference to the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in Mississippi,” John said.

The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek ceded 11 million acres of Choctaw land to the United States government. Signed in the wake of President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, it marked the start of what many historians consider one of the first state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing campaigns in the history of the world. John’s “Effigy to a Dancing Rabbit” memorializes this tragedy in a work that appears humorous on its surface.

In addition to his Mississippian/Choctaw-inspired aluminum sculptures, John explores his French ancestry in a series of small paintings made in the style of early 20th century French expressionism. John applies the same luscious impasto and spatial warping of artists like Chaïm Soutine and Georges Rouault to dreamlike vignettes of characters wearing big-nosed commedia dell’arte masks. Such masks have long been a staple of Mardi Gras culture in New Orleans, but in John’s work, they become symbols of colonialist duplicity. Viewed alongside his carrot-nosed aluminum figures, they enact a fractured pantomime of contested histories.

Olivia Amaya Ortiz, 516 Arts curator, worked closely with John to determine how best to present “SPIRIT HOUSE.”

“As we shaped the exhibition, we were careful to make his ideas accessible without weighing down the show with too much text,” she said. “My hope was to find a nice balance in giving viewers context without over explaining — which felt very true to his trickster spirit, as well.”

They succeeded admirably. The show, which includes a short video of John in his studio, gives just enough context for visitors to feel empowered to interpret the work on their own. The Halloween and Mardi Gras references provide easy access points, John’s painterly technique invites closer looking and anyone who wants to delve more deeply into the origins of his enigmatic characters can follow the artist down rabbit holes of research, learning as much as we are willing to, about our spirit-haunted past.

“SPIRIT HOUSE” runs through Jan. 31, 2026, at 516 Arts, 516 Central Ave. SW. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday. For more information, visit 516arts.org.