By History Colorado

An ambitious and sprawling cross-border exhibition exploring the art of adobe is opening at History Colorado’s Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center in the San Luis Valley and the Harwood Museum of Art in the high desert of Taos, N.M.

“Unearthing Futures / Desenterrando Futuros” is a sprawling, immersive exhibition exploring adobe as a living practice that connects art, architecture, and ancestral knowledge across the Southwest.

Through unique adobe installations at both museums, artists show how adobe endures not through permanence but through renewal – its survival bound to the annual acts of maintenance, ceremony and reciprocity.

“Unearthing Futures” brings together some of the more significant artists working with earthen architecture and land-based practice today. Creations by Ronald Rael, Santino Gonzales and Joanna Keane Lopez are featured at the Fort Garland Museum, while works by those artists in addition to Gabriel Chaile, rafa esparza and Christine Howard Sandoval are on display at the Harwood Museum of Art. These installations examine how earth, water and fiber, shaped by hand and sustained through communal care, embody both tradition and transformation.

Rael is building a Fort Garland-specific installation of “Casa Desenterrada/Exhuming Home,” previously shown at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. The installation fills a large black wooden structure with adobe bricks, each unique. Some are painted with the names of Indigenous captives listed in an 1865 census or embedded with images or small objects, including items from an abandoned adobe home in the San Luis Valley town of Conejos that Rael rescued from the threat of demolition in 2018. The adobe home once served as the office of the first Lieutenant Governor of Colorado, and the headquarters of the Ute Indian Agency.

Gonzales is creating “Skyharp,” an installation turning the Commandant’s Quarters, one of the original adobe buildings at Fort Garland, into an aeolian harp – an instrument activated by the wind. Gonzales is also crafting “The Disc at Fort Garland (for Nana),” an outdoor earth sound mirror inspired by New Mexico’s Very Large Array and the Sound Mirrors employed by the British military as pre-radar tools to detect distant aircraft. This adobe sound mirror invites opportunities for deep, quantum listening, turning the attention of visitors towards the landscape and the sky.

Lopez is creating “A Raven Croaked like a Witch from a Dead Pine,” a film projected onto a mud-plastered wall that traces the lived experience of the southwestern landscape where ranching, myth and memory coexist with the ongoing presence of military occupation.

“’Unearthing Futures’ aptly bridges the borderlands of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico as it also builds connections between past/future, earth/sky, humanity/technology and our ancestors/our descendants,” History Colorado President/CEO and State Historic Preservation Officer Dawn DiPrince said. “History Colorado is honored to collaborate with the Harwood Museum of Art on this place-based exhibition that uses the land to remind us where we are rooted.”

“Unearthing Futures” extends well beyond the museum galleries, offering a road-trip experience guided through a website and phone app developed in collaboration with the computer science department at the University of Colorado. The app offers six curated road trips organized by location and theme, highlighting historic and contemporary adobe structures dotting the landscape between the southwestern towns of Fort Garland and Taos. The app also includes a playlist compiled by the exhibition’s artists to set the mood as visitors drive between locations. This expansive engagement with adobe artworks, homes churches, and community spaces serves as a living archive of memory, labor and cultural continuity.

As Colorado reflects on 150 years of statehood and 250 years of nationhood, “Unearthing Futures” offers visitors a timely opportunity to examine histories and cultural practices that predate state and national borders, while fostering meaningful dialogue about our shared future.

The Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center in south-central Colorado’s San Luis Valley is a fitting location for this immersive experience.

Fort Garland was built on the homelands and sacred spaces of Indigenous communities, including the Ute, Jicarilla Apache and Navajo (Diné). The area was claimed by Spain in the 16th century and later governed by Mexico until the region became part of the U.S. in 1848. Fort Garland was established in 1858 as a U.S. Army outpost – a decade after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the U.S.-Mexico War.

The Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center makes this historic place accessible for visitors to explore life in a 19th-century military fort by walking the parade grounds and touring five of the original adobe buildings. These adobe buildings require ongoing maintenance. Historic photographs from the History Colorado collection show how traditional artisans known as adoberas helped restore Fort Garland’s adobe buildings in the 1950s and 60s.

“’Unearthing Futures’ amplifies the deep connections of land, history and culture that unite southern Colorado and northern New Mexico,” said Eric Carpio, Director of Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center. “This partnership honors shared stories and traditions while inviting communities to reflect on a landscape and heritage that transcends state borders. Fort Garland Museum is thrilled to collaborate with the team at the Harwood to bring to life a project spanning roughly 80 miles across two states and centuries of history.”

The Fort Garland Museum is celebrating the opening of “Unearthing Futures” with an event featuring artist meet and greets, live music by the Arellano Brothers, food baked in a traditional adobe horno and interactive activities for all ages. The opening celebration is free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Sunday.

The Harwood Museum of Art’s opening Saturday marks the occasion with an artist panel followed by a celebration and after party.

“Unearthing Futures” will be on view at both museums through Feb. 28.

History Colorado is also offering a Tours & Treks excursion departing Denver in late September to explore both museums and a few historic adobe structures along the way. Registration for this excursion closes Aug. 18.