Exhibition Runs: August 7 – September 13, 2025
Reception & Artist Talks: Saturday August 23, 4:30pm – 6:30pm
Artist Panel Talks
We invite you to join us for an exhibition reception and artist panel talks at Harwood Art Center by the artists on Saturday, August 23, 2025 from 4:30p – 6:30p with the artist panel talks starting at 5:00pm. This event is free and open to all ages.
Gallery Hours:
Thursday – Saturday, 10am-3pm
Practice // Portal
Featuring Aziza Murray, MB Ramos, Natalie Voelker and Chelsea Wrightson, past and present Harwood Studio Artists, with installations that investigate memory, explore elemental nature, and offer meditation.
aziza murray
home
Originally from Washington, DC, Aziza Murray has proudly called Albuquerque, NM home for thirteen years. In 2015 she graduated with an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico. Since then, Aziza has worked in the film industry in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, piquing her interest in cinematography and the industry as a whole.
Aziza’s work stems from a desire for permanence. At a young age she experienced tragic loss, and it was through creating that she learned to process emotions and events. The materiality of photography is the catalyst that has, and continues to enable Aziza in her recording of important people and life experiences, from growing up biracial in a racially polarized city, suffering additional losses in young adulthood, traveling far from home, or finding refuge in beautiful objects and still moments. She has shown her work in DC, Albuquerque, Austin, TX and Portland, OR.
A long time ago I asked my mom whether she had ever considered moving back to her tiny hometown of Salisbury, Maryland to raise my sister and me. I believe her answer was, “hell no.” Her reasons all made sense to me: too small and provincial, too racist, not enough art and culture. When she and my dad returned from a few years of living in Europe, they settled in Washington, DC where my sister and I were eventually born. Despite her reasons for leaving, my mom, sister and I always enjoyed our drives back to the Eastern Shore to visit family. I usually dj’ed and sat in the front seat on the way there and on the way back my sister and I switched places. All three of us appreciated the rural scenery going by. Part of me was excited to arrive, anticipating fun times with my cousins and the typical shenanigans of our family. Another part of me felt like I could keep going, looking out the window at the landscape forever. Mom would sometimes reminisce about her childhood as she gazed over the steering wheel, recalling the time her older brother accidentally smashed an ice cream cone into the freshly washed window of the family car, or when she got to ride a horse named Sam that her family was keeping for a friend over the summer. She seemed to have resolved any complicated feelings she had for Salisbury a long time ago. She was content to go back for a visit, appreciating the landscape and landmarks of her youth.
Recently I was asked to consider what “Home” means to me. I don’t remember when DC stopped feeling like home, or maybe like a jumpsuit that I had outgrown, feeling tight and uncomfortable. Years ago, before Alzheimer’s robbed me of my mother, I told her if she didn’t live in DC I probably wouldn’t go back. She said that made her sad, but she loved that I had found community in New Mexico, always singing the praises of my friends she had the pleasure to meet, and the beauty of the landscape. It was strange to feel so at home here while half of my heart was back in DC, being held by my mom. After her passing last year, I have had many moments of feeling untethered, metaphorically unmoored and unattached to any place. Home isn’t just a physical location, a busy city, a mountainous desert, or an open sky. Sometimes home is a community, sometimes a person. My video essay is a love letter to my mother, and moments with her on the road, in between places, but when I felt home.
mb ramos
knit two together
MB Ramos is a multidisciplinary artist based in Albuquerque, NM whose practice includes painting, sculpture, and metalworking with foundations in traditional craft trades.
Fine silver, copper, steel, plaster, wood, wax, legacy items, fossil, bone, stone, salt.
Knitting, a life long practice, becomes both method and metaphor: one continuous thread of precious metal transformed into protective structures through accumulated crossings, mirroring how memory and consciousness operate through repetitive gesture. Stitch by stitch. Knit Two Together houses wearable objects (amulets) that function as intimate vehicles for inherited knowledge and sites of connection.
The circular nature of knitting speaks to cyclical rhythms—how we return again and again to the same territories, each time with a slightly different understanding. Our experience revisits us: not linear, not concluding, but spiraling through time, accumulating meaning with each revolution, forming a network of connection to our past, present and future.
The work operates at a scale between geological time and human time, where material and process are a meditation on corporeal histories of survival, displacement, and resilience. Crossing oceans, finding shore, and making home.
natalie voelker
wolves
A Helene Wurlitzer Foundation fellow and international BP Portrait Award exhibitor, Natalie Voelker creates paintings, drawings, murals, and art installations that investigate complexity and transcendence found within the ordinary.
Her painting, “Davetta,” has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London as well as the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and the Ulster Museum in Belfast, Ireland. Her work has been featured in multiple publications including the anthology, BARED, and the French-English magazine, VolUp. Voelker has produced commissioned works for the Harwood Art Center, 508 Mural Festival, the City of Albuquerque, and various private collections – both nationally and abroad. She has a BFA from the University of Wisconsin and currently lives and works in Albuquerque, NM.
wolves.
self-defense. instinct.
fairytales are real? oh. I didn’t know. beneath skin
blood slick fur
gnashing teeth
yellow eyes.’
the past is with. on. under. in.
blood slick fur.
teeth.
yellow eyes.
.
.
(how did you survive?)
like this.
like this.
chelsea wrightson
Chelsea Wrightson is an Albuquerque, NM based artist and mother whose practice includes painting, drawing, sculpture and ceramics. Wrightson creates compositions that combine imagery from her vivid dreams and meditations. Her work moves towards symmetry and balance yet she celebrates imperfection because she sees it as a portal; without it, she would have no cause to continue dreaming. Putting a contemporary perspective on transcendentalism, Wrightson is inspired by artists Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint and Agnes Pelton. Wrightson has exhibited nationally in Albuquerque, Taos, NM, Seattle, WA and New York, NY.
In recent bodies of work she explores expansion through experience – in body, emotions, mind, and soul. At the most microscopic level humans are atoms comprised mostly of empty space. Like a new star bursting forth with energy in the vast universe, she creates portals to fill empty spaces with abundant joy, gratitude, care and connection.
Recently I was peeling potatoes and I stumbled into a flow of thought about how miraculous it was to be standing there with lungs made for breath, heart for blood, holding nourishment grown on this watery planet among billions of stars, made up just the way I am. Upon re-entry into my surroundings the world around me glittered like mica. Peeling potatoes was a portal, moving me from the mundane to the miraculous by a small shift in perspective.
For one year I have written down my dreams and patterns began to emerge. In these linked dreams I am an architect, I am building something or looking to fix broken things in houses or in my environment. I’m fixing and healing both physically and spiritually, using water and fire, earth and air. I have intentionally used the building materials clay plaster, plaster of Paris and lime paint in these artworks to connect to my dream state. I have embedded these wall sculptures with meaningful gems formed by the planet to remind us of how the earth uses its voice. I have embedded single-use plastics as well to remind us of the messages we are leaving behind long after we’ve said our last words.
What are we collectively dreaming right now? How does your creative expression heal you?
