History Colorado's Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center and the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico, have opened a cross-border exhibition titled "Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros." The show explores adobe as a living practice connecting art, architecture, and ancestral knowledge across the southwestern United States. Artists Ronald Rael, Santino Gonzales, Joanna Keane Lopez, Gabriel Chaile, Rafa Esparza, and Christine Howard Sandoval present installations that examine how earth, water, and fiber, shaped by hand and sustained through communal care, embody both tradition and transformation. Highlights include Rael's Casa Desenterrada/Exhuming Home, Gonzales's Skyharp and The Disc at Fort Garland (for Nana), and Keane Lopez's film A Raven Croaked like a Witch from a Dead Pine. The exhibition also features a road trip experience guided by a website and phone app developed with the University of Colorado Boulder.
This exhibition matters because it reframes adobe not as a static historical material but as a dynamic, living practice tied to renewal, ceremony, and reciprocity. By bridging the borderlands of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, it connects past and future, earth and sky, and humanity and technology, while centering Indigenous and land-based knowledge. The collaboration between a state historical society and a university art museum, along with the digital road trip component, models how museums can engage audiences beyond their walls and foster deeper connections to place and heritage.