Desert Perspectives is a yearlong, collection-centered exhibition that brings together a multigenerational group of artists working in—or regionally connected to—the Southwest whose practices engage deeply with the desert, not only as a physical landscape but as a layered site of ecological, cultural, historical, and political significance. Drawing from the museum’s permanent collection, alongside loans and new commissions, the exhibition traces more than a century of artistic responses to the deserts of the Southwest, examining how these landscapes have been represented, inhabited, transformed, and understood over time.

Structured around three sequential rotations, the exhibition unfolds through shifting thematic frameworks that reconsider the desert from multiple perspectives, including landscape representation, environmental change, and identity and lived experience. Through this rotational structure, historical and contemporary works are continually recontextualized in dialogue with one another, allowing new relationships and meanings to emerge over the course of the year. While each rotation of works from the collection introduces a distinct perspective, a core group of commissioned and loaned pieces remains on view, functioning as conceptual anchor points within an evolving conversation around land, ecology, memory, and perception.

Historically, the desert has often been represented within Euro-American landscape traditions as sublime, empty, or untouched terrain. These constructions frequently obscure the region’s ecological vulnerabilities as well as the layered histories of Indigenous presence, settlement, extraction, migration, and land use embedded within the landscape itself. By placing historical works alongside contemporary artistic practices, Desert Perspectives approaches the desert phenomenologically—as a lived and relational space shaped through embodied experience, memory, and ongoing interaction between human and nonhuman systems—while also questioning how visual culture has shaped collective understandings and imaginaries of the Southwest.

As historical and contemporary narratives intersect, Desert Perspectives invites visitors to reconsider approaches to landscape that move beyond traditions of passive representation toward questions of reciprocal meaning-making, ecological interdependence, and ongoing negotiation. In doing so, the exhibition foregrounds the desert as a dynamic and continually evolving terrain shaped through ongoing conversations around stewardship, placemaking, and futurity.

Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Keshia Turley, assistant curator. Support provided by Walter and Karla Goldschmidt Foundation.