Life on Mars
June 14 - September 14, 2025
Artists Erika Lynne Hanson and Steven J. Yazzie present works that link physical and metaphysical realities of nature, humanity, geology, and cosmology to position Earth as the endgame.
SMoCA Exhibition History
Michael Afsa: Suburban Paradise
June 14 - September 14, 2025
In Suburban Paradise, artist Michael Afsa reduces the visual language of the Southwest to its most elemental forms through minimalist sculpture and photography.
This Just In
March 8 - September 21, 2025
This exhibition highlights recent acquisitions to our ever-growing collection and celebrates the unexpected connections between works spanning a wide range of media.
• Squidsoup • Infinite •
June 28, 2025 - Aug 30, 2026
Enter 𝘐𝘯𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘦 and be surrounded by hundreds of illuminated spheres that form a symphony of notes.
Alida Sun: Biophony
Mar 8 - Sep 7, 2025
Biophony is a hand-coded generative synesthesia environment created by Berlin-based artist Alida Sun.
There are other skies
February 22 - June 1, 2025
There are other skies brings to light a multiplicity of urgent, pressing, and ongoing topics faced by female-identifying people worldwide.
Entrainment 718
September 21, 2024 - February 16, 2025
Entrainment 718 by Phoenix-based artist Shomit Barua explores spatial and temporal perception through video and sound techniques.
Cybele Lyle: Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms
August 24, 2024 - August 24, 2025
Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms is a site-specific installation that reimagines deserts of North America as liminal expanses and positions architecture through the lens of queer space, a responsive site to the natural evolution of identity and environment.
Brains and Beauty: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience
August 17, 2024 - January 19, 2025
Brains and Beauty: At the Intersection of Art and Neuroscience is a visual exploration of neuroaesthetics, the new and rapidly expanding field of research that combines neuroscience and psychology to study the neural processes of aesthetic experience.
Exploding Native Inevitable
August 10, 2024 - January 5, 2025
Exploding Native Inevitable is an exhibition of the work of twelve contemporary Indigenous artists and two collaboratives, accompanied by a program of dance, film, music, performance, readings, storytelling, and video by Indigenous artists from a land we now call America.
poetics of dissonance
August 10, 2024 - February 16, 2025
Situated on the cusp of another pivotal election, poetics of dissonance presents eighteen artists from the SMoCA collection whose work navigates the tumultuous landscape of socio-political discourse.
Roadside Attraction: Challenging Reality Now @SMoCA
May 1 - May 31, 2024
ArtFarm Phoenix is an artist collective with the goals of creating exhibition opportunities for artists and supporting initiatives that make art accessible to everyone.
Tiffany Trenda: Beyond Performance
March 27 - June 23, 2024
Beyond Performance is an ongoing series of images by Tiffany Trenda that ventures into the realm of performance art and artificial intelligence.
Carolina Aranibar-Fernández: Oleaje
February 10 - August 4, 2024
Oleaje [Groundswell] features new large-scale installation works by Bolivian-born artist Carolina Aranibar-Fernández that map and memorialize the effects of a coercive global trade industry.
Dorothy Fratt: Color Mirage
February 3 - July 21, 2024
Color Mirage is the first major U.S. museum exhibition on the prolific, yet underrecognized, American painter Dorothy Fratt.
Roelof Knol: the space in between
September 23, 2023 - July 24, 2024
the space in between is a playful, interactive, audiovisual installation that invites the viewer to explore their relationship with digital and physical spaces.
Earth and Sky
September 23, 2023 - July 7, 2024
Earth and Sky highlights artworks primarily from the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art Collection that touch on how humans inhabit, construct, or perceive various natural, artificial, or ethereal environments.
Kenaim Al-Shatti: Dreams Don’t Have Time
September 22, 2023 - August 25, 2024
In this new large-scale video installation, Kenaim Al-Shatti transforms physical space into a colorful, dreamlike environment, wherein you can immerse yourself.
Roelof Knol: paper shapes
September 22, 2023 - July 28, 2024
Roelof Knol’s dynamic small-scale installation paper shapes responds when viewers interact with it by placing shapes within the projection.
Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures
September 16, 2023 - Jan 7, 2024
Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures brings together the artist’s most important bodies of works for the first time, allowing audiences to discover the threads that connect them, both formal and conceptual.
Language in Times of Miscommunication
March 4, 2023 - August 27, 2024
Through the formats of exhibition, catalog, and special projects, Language in Times of Miscommunication acts as a platform to question how social fictions are created, interpreted, and, often, miscommunicated.
The Air Around Us
November 4, 2022 - February 16, 2023
The Air Around Us is an arts and engineering initiative that aspires to increase the visibility of poor air quality conditions across the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Phillip K. Smith III: Three Parallels
October 29, 2022 - January 14, 2023
Southern California artist Phillip K. Smith III creates experiential art that highlights changes in perception as related to light, color, time, and space.
Inside Job: Staff Selections from the SMoCA Collection
October 20, 2022 - April 30, 2023
Inside Job offers unique perspectives on the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art Collection by those who work most closely with it.
In Our Time: Selections from the Singer Collection
October 1, 2022 - February 12, 2023
In Our Time: Selections from the Singer Collection includes a selection of paintings and works on paper collected by Iris and Adam Singer over the span of 16 years.
Teresa Baker: Capturing Space
April 16, 2022 - October 9, 2022
Los Angeles-based Mandan/Hidatsa artist Teresa Baker features seven large-scale hanging works in Capturing Space.
Brad Kahlhamer: Swap Meet
February 26, 2022 - October 9, 2022
New York and Arizona-based Native American artist Brad Kahlhamer first exhibited at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) in 2004 with his hugely successful Let’s Walk West show.
Beverly McIver: Full Circle
February 12, 2022 - September 4, 2022
Beverly McIver: Full Circle presents a survey of more than 50 works that demonstrate the diversity of the artist’s thematic approach to painting over 25 years.
Pixel-by-Pixel: Interventions by Luke Murphy
October 30, 2021 - April 10, 2022
Luke Murphy subverts and liberates technology through repurposing and recontextualizing it to reveal its innate humanity.
SMoCA Collection / Recent Acquisitions
October 30, 2021 - Aprril 3, 2022
A selection of the newest works acquired for the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) collection within the past year.
Forever Becoming: Young Phoenix Artists
September 11, 2021 - January 23, 2022
Forever Becoming: Young Phoenix Artists presents new work by artists under, or near, the age of 30 who are based in Phoenix, Arizona. The works in this exhibition speak to the resilience and determination of a new generation of artists.
Mimi O Chun: It’s all cake
September 4, 2021 - January 23, 2022
New York-based artist Mimi O Chun’s soft sculptures act as moments in which we are most accurately able to glimpse ourselves and the world in which we live.
And It’s Built on the Sacred
May 8 - October 17, 2021
And It’s Built on the Sacred is an installation by Jacob A. Meders (Mechoopda/Maidu) that reflects on the gentrification of Indigenous land and the handling of unwanted Euro-American religious objects.
Voice-Over: Zineb Sedira
March 4, 2023 - August 27, 2024
In her solo-exhibition Voice-Over, Sedira creates a new iteration for SMoCA of Standing Here Wondering Which Way to Go, an installation first shown at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2019.
Diedrick Brackens: ark of bulrushes
February 20 - August 22, 2021
ark of bulrushes presents a new body of work by artist Diedrick Brackens that includes handwoven tapestries and sculptural weavings.
Division of Labor: Women Shifting a Transnational Gaze
February 20 - August 22, 2021
The Museum invites Arizona-based artists M. Jenea Sanchez and Gabriela Muñoz to participate in a critical engagement with the SMoCA Collection, a first in the Museum's history.
Urban Mapping: Public Space Through the Lens of Contemporary Iranian Artists
October 3, 2020 - January 17, 2021
An exhibition that explores aspects of the Iranian experience through photography and video art by ten artists focusing on using urban space as a nexus of social communication and political transformation.
BEYOND: Works by Nellie King Solomon and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon
October 3, 2020 - April 18, 2021
For the exhibition at SMoCA, and for the first time, the work of mother and daughter artist is shown in proximity.
Nina Katchadourian: Monument to the Unelected
October 3 - December 3, 2020
Created specifically for the Museum's 10th anniversary exhibition Seriously Funny, Nina Katchadourian’s installation Monument to the Unelected takes the form of signs resembling those typically displayed on street corners during political campaigns.
Gohar Dashti | Land/s
October 3, 2020 - April 18, 2021
Influenced by human-geographical narratives, Land/s questions the physicality of borders within nature and instead attempts to make connections between two versions of “home.”
Kristin Bauer: Untitled Gestures #4 and #5
May 31, 2020 - October 17, 2021
Multimedia artist Kristin Bauer’s new series of text installations—Untitled Gestures (2020)—are poetic phrases that aim to facilitate a feeling of human connection within an atmosphere of concern about physical contact.
Intersection Series: Person and Dog/High Rise Building, 2002
March 10 - June 11, 2020
A John Baldessari artwork currently on loan to the Museum.
Unapologetic: All Women, All Year
February 15, 2020 - January 17, 2021
This yearlong collection show that highlights powerful works by women artists in conjunction with the national platform Feminist Art Coalition (FAC) is now available to view online.
Design Transfigured/Waste Reimagined
February 1 - September 6, 2020
An exhibition of international designers that position environmental concerns and sustainability at the center of their process.
Murmuration
November 7, 2019 - May 25, 2020
Squidsoup returns to SMoCA with a site-specific artwork that uses a networked data system to connect hundreds of lights and audio sources, creating a responsive data swarm around the Museum.
Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s – Now
October 26, 2019 - Jan 19, 2020
Counter-Landscapes: Performative Actions from the 1970s – Now presents a group of artists working in both natural and urban environments whose work exploits the power of place to address issues of social, environmental, and personal transformation.
Back Round by Aakash Nihalani
June 8, 2019 - October 13, 2019
This season, artist Aakash Nihalani brings an all-new work to SMoCA Lounge, transforming the space into a large interactive installation for the public.
Mutual Reality: Art on the Edge of Technology
June 8, 2019 - October 6, 2019
This exhibition presents the multiple ways in which we, as users, interact with an artwork and the response or output the artwork provides in return.
Divergent Materiality: Contemporary Glass Art
May 25, 2019 - October 13, 2019
Divergent Materiality: Contemporary Glass Art highlights contemporary glass artists—both masters and emerging—whose innovative approaches to using glass have advanced the medium’s discourse within contemporary art.
southwestNET: Shizu Saldamando
May 18, 2019 - October 13, 2019
SMoCA premieres new work by artist Shizu Saldamando as part of the eighteenth iteration of a series that presents mid-career artists from the Southwest region of the United States and Mexico. Sponsored by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Now Playing: Video 1999 – 2019
February 16, 2019 - May 19, 2019
To launch a yearlong 20th anniversary celebration, SMoCA premieres Now Playing: Video 1999-2019, an exhibition featuring video art sampled from the last 20 years.
Double Agents: Carla Fernández and Pedro Reyes
October 27, 2018 - February 3, 2019
Double Agents: Carla Fernández and Pedro Reyes is a collaborative exhibition that envisions an alternative future. The exhibition features recent works by two of Mexico’s most prominent artists who happen to be partners in life.
NKAME: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967-1999)
October 13, 2018 - January 20, 2019
The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art presents Nkame, a solo exhibition of the late Cuban printmaker Belkis Ayón (1967-1999), who produced an extraordinary body of work central to the history of contemporary printmaking.
Lydia Okumura: Situations
June 9, 2018 - October 14, 2018
This is the first solo museum exhibition of the Brazilian-born artist that showcases her dynamic installations, indoor and outdoor sculptures, and works on paper. The exhibition, spanning two galleries, is a survey of Okumura’s career, with work dating from 1971 through today.
Murals by James Marshall (a.k.a. Dalek)
May 30, 2018 - September 2, 2018
Artist James Marshall (a.k.a. Dalek), recognized for his colorful geometric abstractions and often associated with skateboard and graffiti subcultures, was commissioned by SMoCA and Scottsdale Public Art to create murals for the Museum.
Refik Anadol: Infinity Room
May 26, 2018 - September 30, 2018
In this immersive installation by Turkish-born, Los Angeles-based artist Refik Anadol, museum guests will step into a mirrored room that uses light, sound and technology to create a three-dimensional kinetic and architectonic space.
Wild Thing: Adventures with the Permanent Collection
May 19, 2018 - September 30, 2018
Featuring more than 130 artworks from SMoCA’s permanent collection, Wild Thing celebrates all things animal—a menagerie in print, paint and sculpture.
Today’s Norms Are Tomorrow’s Luxuries Luis Alfonso Villalobos
February 17, 2018 - May 13, 2018
The first US solo exhibition of Guadalajara-based artist Luis Alfonso Villalobos features painting, video, and installation that opens an inquiry into the functions of architecture and art, while also expanding into ideas of history and place.
southwestNET: Acid Baroque
February 10, 2018 - May 20, 2018
Mexican-American painter Claudio Dicochea works at the intersection of colonialism, art history and contemporary popular culture in order to re-examine the concept of mestizaje or mixed race identity as well as the issue of media stereotyping today.
Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait
February 3, 2018 - May 27, 2018
Mexican-American painter Claudio Dicochea works at the intersection of colonialism, art history and contemporary popular culture in order to re-examine the concept of mestizaje or mixed race identity as well as the issue of media stereotyping today.
Repositioning Paolo Soleri: The City Is Nature
October 14, 2017 - January 28, 2018
In October 2017, SMoCA unveiled an unprecedented retrospective of seminal American artist and architect Paolo Soleri (1919 – 2013). Over his sixty-year career, Soleri explored thousands of possibilities for the urban built environment in drawings, architectural models, sketchbooks, sculptures, prints and photographs.
Push Comes to Shove: Women and Power
October 1, 2017 - January 8, 2018
A cross-disciplinary collaboration between SMoCA and ASU Intermedia Professor Muriel Magenta, Ph.D., Push Comes to Shove: Women and Power aims to use art as a critical catalyst in rethinking and transforming the advancement of women.
Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists From Aboriginal Australia
September 23, 2017 - January 21, 2018
The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art presents Marking the Infinite: Contemporary Women Artists From Aboriginal Australia, featuring the work of nine contemporary women artists hailing from remote Aboriginal areas.
I’m Sorry But It’s Hard to Imagine
May 20, 2017 - September 10, 2017
Inspired by the spirit of the Fluxus movement, this exhibition experiments with shaping new experiences by provoking unexpected connections between artworks and embracing vulnerability through chance.
[dis]functional: Products of Conceptual Design
May 13, 2017 - September 24, 2017
This exhibition showcases a selection of objects that playfully question the expected utilitarian roles of “good design” and its relationship to art. The works ignore traditional views of mass consumption and emphasize non-essential luxury that straddle the territories of art and design.
Ocean of Light: Submergence – A Squidsoup Project
May 6, 2017 - September 24, 2017
Squidsoup’s installation uses light-based data visualization to create an augmented reality environment that challenges the spatial and the sculptural and provides a context for understanding just how immense data can be.
I Remember Not Remembering
February 11, 2017 - April 30, 2017
I Remember Not Remembering presents 12 internationally renowned artists who use personal home movies, photo albums and film footage as raw material for artworks.
The Kindness of Strangers: Recent Acquisitions and Conservation Projects
January 21, 2017 - April 23, 2017
In this exhibition, we highlight many of our exciting recent acquisitions and celebrate some of our intriguing conservation projects as we continue the important work of understanding, documenting and preserving all of the artworks in our care.
Architecture + Art: Everything Falls Into Place When It Collapses
October 15, 2016 - January 22, 2017
Architecture + Art: Everything Falls into Place When It Collapses is Borja’s site-specific project in response to the Casa Grande Ruins National Monument – a Southwest icon of Native American culture – and its complex history within the national cultural politics of the U.S. over the past 125 years.
southwestNET Sama Alshaibi: Silsila
January 4, 2016 - September 18, 2016
Silsila represents the joining of individuals to one another, humans with the natural world, and the self to the divine.
Public Trust: It’s About What We Do
January 4, 2016 - September 18, 2016
As part of SMoCA’s role in the strategic plan for Scottsdale Arts, we have pledged to find ways to more broadly disseminate our collection and a large part of this is to publish our collection online. In preparation, we are devoting this exhibition to the work necessary to achieving this.
Mel Roman: Coming Out Under Fire
May 21, 2016 - October 2, 2016
Artist, civil rights activist and clinical psychologist Mel Roman (American, 1927 – 2002) had an accomplished 50 year-career uniting provocative visual art, explicit political critique and the scientific study of the human psyche.
Permanent Collection / Impermanent Museum
May 14, 2016 - October 2, 2016
Permanent Collection / Impermanent Museum highlights the subtle places where a careful investigator can find small remembrances of the artworks and exhibitions installed, de-installed and re-installed within the museum’s walls and ruminate on the remnants of the exhibition process.
Betye Saar: Still Tickin’
May 14, 2016 - October 2, 2016
There is a touch of alchemy to Betye Saar’s artwork: transforming the simple and mundane into powerful art.
MetaModern
May 30, 2015 - August 30, 2015
The fresh and provocative artworks presented in MetaModern refer literally and conceptually to modernist design objects of the mid-century.
Afghan War Rugs: The Modern Art of Central Asia
January 24, 2015 - April 19, 2015
Afghan War Rugs: The Modern Art of Central Asia brings to the United States more than 30 large and small-scale contemporary weavings from Afghanistan.
southwestNET: Postcommodity
January 31, 2015 - April 26, 2015
Postcommodity—the transdisciplinary American Indian arts collective comprising Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, Kade L. Twist and Nathan Young
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins: The Collaborationists
June 6, 2015 - September 13, 2015
Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins: The Collaborationists showcases the ambitious kinetic sculptures, paintings, installations and sound art in the Canadian artists’ largest exhibition to date.
Kelly Richardson: Tales on the Horizon
September 12, 2015 - January 10, 2016
Drama and stillness, beauty and strangeness, hard science and science fiction—these dualities come together in the work of Kelly Richardson.
Architecture + Art Chris Fraser: Looking Back
October 3, 2015 - January 10, 2016
Architecture + Art furthers the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s mission to champion innovation in contemporary art, architecture and design.
Bruce Munro: Ferryman’s Crossing
October 3, 2015 - April 24, 2016
Shimmering rows of reflective compact discs lit by pulses of light comprise Bruce Munro’s "Ferryman’s Crossing," an installation that evokes sunlight bouncing off the surface of flowing water.
Collective Dissent: The SMS Portfolios
May 16, 2015 - September 13, 2016
Intended to sidestep the hierarchical system of museums and galleries, SMS offered collectors a bi-monthly portfolio of artwork by subscription.
The Five Senses: Janet Cardiff, Olafur Eliasson, Spencer Finch, Roelof Louw and Ernesto Neto
February 1, 2014 - May 4, 2014
The Five Senses begins with a simple premise: five senses, five works of art. However, as with many perceptual, cognitive and phenomenological questions, a more complex web of interrelationships emerges under closer examination.
Leslie Shows: Surfacing
February 8, 2014 - May 4, 2014
Rich with myriad details and varied textures, the surfaces of Leslie Shows’s collaged paintings reward careful study.
Olafur Eliasson: Beauty
May 6, 2014 - August 17, 2014
Olafur Eliasson’s exquisite and enigmatic installation of mist and fractured light
Bill Owens: Suburbia
May 17, 2014 - September 7, 2014
Bill Owens’s Suburbia (1973) is a series of strange and compelling photographs that reveal the complexities of the American middle-class landscape.
Linear Thinking: Selections from the Permanent Collection
May 24, 2014 - August 24, 2014
This exhibition presents artworks that employ line in a rich variety of ways. Sculptor George Rickey created straight lines in the form of hinged steel blades to explore motion.
Prologue: Covert Operations
September 2, 2014 - September 22, 2014
Want to spy on the curator? Check out the current events, news, politics and art she’s following while she prepares the fall exhibitions Prologue and Covert Operations.
Covert Operations: Investigating the Known Unknowns
September 28, 2014 - January 11, 2015
Covert Operations: Investigating the Known Unknowns is the first major survey of a generation of artists working in the violent and uncertain decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks to collect and reveal previously unreported information.
The Human Touch: Selections from the RBC Wealth Management Art Collection
Jan 19, 2013 - April 28, 2013
Stimulating. Challenging. Engaging. These are just a few adjectives that aptly describe RBC Wealth Management’s art collection.
Paolo Soleri: Mesa City to Arcosanti
Jan 26, 2013 - April 28, 2013
In 2010, SMoCA initiated a series of three exhibitions exploring the trajectory of Paolo Soleri’s art, architecture and philosophy. Paolo Soleri: Mesa City to Arcosanti is the second in the series.
MASHup: New Video Art
Feb 9, 2013 - May 19, 2013
What do you get when you combine a maudlin scene from Little House on the Prairie with the Thompson Twins’s 1980s pop hit Hold Me Now?
A mashup.
Learning to See: Josef Albers and The Interaction of Color
May 18, 2013 - September 22, 2013
In his publication The Interaction of Color, artist and teacher Josef Albers argued that there is no way to understand colors except in relationship to one another.
Stocked: Contemporary Art from the Grocery Aisles
May 25, 2013 - September 1, 2013
Stocked: Contemporary Art from the Grocery Aisles presents the work of contemporary artists who, directly and indirectly, take the grocery store and consumption of its products as their subjects.
DAVID MAISEL/BLACK MAPS: American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime
June 1, 2013 - September 1, 2013
DAVID MAISEL/BLACK MAPS is a survey of four chapters of Maisel’s larger ongoing series titled Black Maps.
Julianne Swartz: How Deep Is Your
October 12, 2013 - January 26, 2013
Surveying the past decade of Swartz’s career in all media, this exhibition gathers together for the first time a significant selection of her large-scale installations that invite viewer engagement in both subtle and overt ways.
Narrow Road to the Interior: Contemporary Japanese Artists
September 21, 2013 - January 12, 2013
The 17th-century Zen Buddhist masterwork of prose and haiku, Narrow Road to the Interior, takes readers on a pilgrimage—both worldly and immaterial.