Exhibition Runs: March 5 – April 11, 2026
Community Celebration: Saturday April 11th, 4:30pm – 7:30pm
Harwood Art Center is pleased to present Encompass, a unique multi-generational art event that takes place annually. Featuring multiple invitational exhibitions, open studios, hands-on art-making projects, live music, food trucks, and activities for all ages, Encompass is both a reflection of and an offering to our community; this year’s theme is Rituals of Practice & Memory.
Reception + Community Celebration
Encompass is Harwood’s capstone celebration for the year. We invite everyone to this free event as we come together in community! You are invited to the Exhibition Reception + Open Studios on Saturday, April 11th from 4:30-7:30pm at Harwood Art Center.
All of the featured Encompass exhibitions will be displayed March 5 – April 11, 2026 at Harwood Art Center.
Public Gallery Hours
Thursday – Saturday from 10am-3pm
Rituals of Practice & Memory
Rituals of Practice & Memory includes five commissioned installations by Yarelis Alvarez, Jen H Doolittle, Kelsey Kilcrease, Enchanted Matter and Denise Zubizarreta, artists whose work illuminates identity, remedy, and truth.
About the Artists
Yarelis Alvarez was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico and was always drawn to the arts. Inspired by her late grandfather, an artist himself, she dove into making her own work from a young age. Almost born in a bowling alley, Yarelis began to bowl leagues at the age of eight before eventually enveloping herself in the world of competitive bowling. Yarelis journeyed to New Orleans to pursue a Bachelor of Arts as well as an athletic career at Tulane University. Now, she uses both of her passions as fuel for creative expression.
Jen H Doolittle is a photo-based artist who incorporates metal leaf and thread into her photographic work, creating layered pieces that explore identity, memory, and emotion. Having moved frequently throughout her childhood, Jen has lived in the United States, England, and Saudi Arabia. Photography became a way for her to connect with the people and places around her, a practice that continues to shape her artistic voice. Her work has been included in two online group exhibitions and has been shown locally at Central New Mexico Community College, The Albuquerque Press Club, and 1415 Gallery in Albuquerque. Her pieces are held in private collections across the United States. In 2024, Jen was awarded the Marion & Kathryn Crissey Award as part of Harwood Art Center’s SURFACE: Emerging Artists of New Mexico. Jen is currently pursuing her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico.
Kelsey Kilcrease is a visual artist based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her primary focus is painting, with work ranging from digital illustrations to large scale murals. Her work is a celebration of the rich diversity of the Southwest, with a particular emphasis on family and identity. Through intentional use of color and an exploration of cultural motifs, she strives to capture the essence of this region and its unique aesthetic. With each brushstroke, she invites my viewers to immerse themselves in a visual odyssey of the Southwest. Kelsey’s work is dedicated to portraying the vibrancy and beauty of this distinctive realm and all that it encompasses.
Enchanted Matter is a design research studio by Carlos Sabogal García and Alaa Quraishi in Albuquerque, NM. Working across installation, intervention, and spatial storytelling, the studio asks how matter might hold memory, fracture typologies, and open rituals of belonging. Their ethos is defined by Work, Myth, and Edge; Work insists on the politics of making; Myth reassembles typologies into speculative rituals; Edge explores thresholds; disciplinary, geographic, and cultural. Merging computational craft with hand processes, Enchanted Matter examines how pattern, reflection, and material thickness can become tools for spatial storytelling. Geometry is treated as framework; ornament as resistance. Each artifact is both experiment and memory; a vessel through which belonging and fracture are inscribed in matter. The studio approaches making as research; what matters is not mastery but translation; between algorithm and hand, digital and analog, dream and labor.
Denise Zubizarreta is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work examines colonial power, identity, and the emotional afterlives of empire. Drawing from critical autoethnography and decolonial theory, her practice explores how systems of domination are internalized and reproduced through culture, belief, and everyday life. Working across installation, sculpture, mixed media, and text, Zubizarreta creates immersive environments that engage themes of ancestry, religion, medicine, and institutional authority. Personal history functions as evidence rather than confession, connecting lived experience to broader structural analysis. She is the creator of the framework Colonial Stockholm Syndrome, the author of Descansa en el Poder: A Sacred Guide to Ancestral Communion and Artful Resistance, and the founder of The Colonial Condition. Zubizarreta holds a B.F.A. in Fine Art and an M.A. in Arts Leadership and Cultural Management and is currently pursuing a PhD in Applied Social Justice.