Judy Tuwaletstiwa: Incantations : Opening Saturday, June 13, 2026
  • Overview
    Judy Tuwaletstiwa, Incantation 5, 2025, kiln fired glass and acrylic on canvas 13 x 13 in.
    Judy Tuwaletstiwa: Fracti.Totum, A Patterned Language 4, 2025

    Judy Tuwaletstiwa: Incantations

     
    OPENING RECEPTION:  JUNE 13,  4-6 PM
    ARTIST IN CONVERSATION:  JUNE 27,  4-5:30 PM
    With her new series Incantations,  Judy Tuwaletstiwa  explores full passages of color through sheets of kiln-fired glass. Following visits to James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Tuwaletstiwa was deeply moved by the hues revealed through the oculus at the site. 'Incantations' is her quest to once again bathe in a spectrum of colors.
    In this body of work, Tuwaletstiwa expands her longstanding visual language through a luminous exploration of color, rhythm, and materiality. Departing from the reds, blacks, and whites that have long been her primary palette, she turns toward indigos, violets, and earth-tones, creating works that feel deeply meditative and elemental. Drawn from lingering impressions of desert light and expansive skies, these saturated passages of color unfold as both landscape and atmosphere.
    Repeating horizontal passages move across the surface with subtle irregularities and dissolving edges. Some sheets appear to cascade or trickle downward, while others seem to rise and accumulate, creating a continual sense of movement across the compositions. In their layered blues, purples, and mineral tones, the works evoke both sky and land: shifting horizons, expansive landscapes, and the fleeting chromatic point in the evening that is l’heure bleue, the brief moment between daylight and darkness when the sky becomes saturated in blue light.
    Within this series, Tuwaletstiwa pushes further into experimentation with kiln-fired glass and acrylic paint. In her mastery of the medium, she uses the properties of glass as a central part of the work itself, allowing color and opacity to reveal varying facets of each passage. Shaped equally by the artist’s vision and the behavior of the glass, these works truly feel in motion.
     
    An artist, writer, and teacher, Judy Tuwaletstiwa, received her BA in English Literature from UC, Berkeley in 1962, and her MA in Teaching English from Harvard University in 1963. A celebrated artist with a long career of residency fellowships, exhibitions, and collections to her name, she was the recipient of the New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2023. Her art lives in private, public, and museum collections. Tuwaletstiwa's publications include The Canyon Poem (1997), Mapping Water (2007, Radius Books), Glass (2017, Radius Books) and Chaco Series (2025, Tia Collection). Special editions of her monographs reside in libraries such as the Corning Museum of Glass' Rakow Library and Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
     

    ARTIST IN CONVERSATION: JUNE 27,  4-5:30 PM 

    On Saturday, June 27, from 4 to 5:30 pm, join us at the gallery for a conversation between Artist Judy Tuwaletstiwa and William Gassaway, assistant curator at the Albuquerque Museum.

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