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At the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, we believe that contemporary art has the power to connect us to the world around us—its complexities, its beauty, its contradictions, and its possibilities. As we look ahead to the 2025–2026 academic year, I’m excited to share a season of exhibitions and programming that reflects the dynamic creativity of our region, while also welcoming new energy and vision with the arrival of our new Senior Curator, Andrés Payán Estrada.

We begin our fall season with two exhibitions that showcase the strength of our community and the value of art as both personal expression and public dialogue. The 2025 UTEP Department of Art Faculty Biennial fills our Rubin and L Galleries with vibrant work across disciplines—drawing, sculpture, ceramics, murals, and more—offering a unique chance to see the creative work of the artists who teach at UTEP. Curated by longtime KTEP radio host Marina Monsisvais, and supported by student researchers from the Department of Art, this exhibition highlights the connections between teaching, making, and community.

In the Project Space, Witness Nothing brings together work from the Lannan Foundation’s recent gift to UTEP. This exhibition invites reflection on the desert, marginality, and the spaces between—both physical and psychological. The artists use photography, sculpture, and installation to challenge us to see presence in absence, to consider how we complete the experience of art simply by showing up and looking closely.

Praise Sonogram,  a special performance by Julia Barbosa Landois this October, developed in collaboration with Houston-based Diverse Works and supported by UTEP Dance Professor Sandra Paola López Ramírez, brings these ideas into live space through a deeply personal and courageous performance exploring reproductive rights and border realities.

Spring 2026 brings two exhibitions that affirm our ongoing commitment to place-based storytelling and cross-border creativity. Ni De Aquí, Ni De Allá: Designs that Cross the Line showcases the bold work of ten UTEP Graphic Design alumni who are reshaping the visual language of identity, technology, and culture. These designers—raised on the U.S.-Mexico border and now working on national and international stages—use posters, books, murals, illustration, and digital media to explore hybridity and belonging. Co-curated by Ana Gabriela Becerra and Andrés Payán Estrada, the show is both celebration and challenge: a reminder that the border is not a limit, but a generative space of innovation.

Alongside it, we are proud to present Desert Futures: Art and Storytelling from La Semilla, a new exhibition developed in collaboration with the La Semilla Desert Cultural Fellowship. Curated by Henry Alfonso Schulte, this show centers the desert as both inspiration and collaborator, exploring themes of environmental justice, ancestral foodways, and regional resilience. Through community-based art practices and grounded storytelling, it invites us to imagine sustainable, just futures rooted in the particularities of our borderland home.  We will also present Deconstruct-Reconstruct, a solo exhibition with Cynthia Gutierrez Krapp in the Rubin Center Project Space. Known for her evocative installations and hand-crafted objects, Gutierrez-Krapp brings together glass, natural materials, and intricately formed clay beads to create delicate yet grounded works that speak to cultural memory and personal lineage. Rooted in a practice of repair and recovery, her pieces offer poetic meditations on the landscapes and lives of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, bridging ancestral knowledge and contemporary experience through tactile form.

The Rubin Center is very happy to welcome Andrés Payán Estrada as our new Senior Curator. An accomplished artist and curator, Andrés returns to UTEP—where he earned his BFA before getting his MFA at California Institute of the Arts—with a wealth of experience and a deep commitment to the borderlands. His work explores materiality, identity, queerness, and place, and his curatorial practice is known for elevating underrepresented voices and embracing experimental approaches to craft and contemporary art. As Senior Curator, Andrés will lead the Rubin Center’s exhibition program, bringing his visionary thinking and deep roots to bear on the next phase of our growth.

As always, we invite you to join us—on campus, in conversation, and in community. Whether you’re a student seeing contemporary art for the first time, a longtime supporter of our programs, or a visitor curious about the border through the eyes of artists, there’s a place for you here. At the Rubin Center, where contemporary art meets contemporary life.

Sincerely,

Kerry Doyle