Appearances Deceive: Embroideries by Policarpio Valencia
June 8, 2025 - March 30, 2026
Appearances Deceive: Embroideries by Policarpio Valencia Public opening on June 8, 2025 Appearances Deceive is the first retrospective of Nuevomexicano artist Policarpio Valencia (b. 1853 – d. 1931) whose embroidered textiles contemplate the serious subjects of morality and mortality with wit and whimsy.
Image Credit: Textile detail, 1925. Policarpio Valencia. Santa Cruz, New Mexico. MOIFA Collection, gift of Mary Cabot Wheelright and Historical Society of New Mexico (A5.2004.1)
Learn More
Sand Drawing: Tracing Kastom in Vanuatu
June 29, 2025 - April 30, 2026
More than an intricate and ephemeral artform, sand drawing in Vanuatu is a storytelling tradition, a means of communication, and an important method of knowledge preservation. Performed mostly in the northern islands of this South Pacific archipelago nation, sand drawing conveys folklore, histories, genealogies, rituals, and other forms of kastom (local, traditional knowledge). Narrators illustrate a story running a single finger through loose sand, ash, or fine dirt, often in continuous movements, forming complex geometric and symbolic patterns. Sand drawing is a UNESCO-designated Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.
Sand Drawing: Tracing Kastom in Vanuatu will be on display in the Mark Naylor and Dale Gunn Gallery of Conscience, marking MOIFA’s first exhibition focused on Oceania since 1960. This exhibition is a collaboration between The Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA) and the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta and National Museum (VKS). The project is an outgrowth of discussions regarding MOIFA’s ni-Vanuatu collection, the history of the collection, and a potential repatriation of kastom objects to the VKS. Together, staff from both institutions engaged in collections research and the development of the exhibition’s ideas, content, and design.
The exhibition will feature sand drawings to be created by Edgar Hinge, a sand drawing practitioner and cultural knowledge bearer who is originally from Pentecost Island. He is currently lives in Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, where he works as a museum educator and guide at the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta and National Museum.
This project is sponsored in part by the US Embassy in Vanuatu, the International Folk Art Foundation and Museum of New Mexico Foundation.
Image Credit:
Museum guide, Edgar Hinge, performs a sand-drawing story at the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta and National Museum, 2023
Sand-drawing by Edgar Hinge at the Vanuatu Cultural Center and National Museum, Port Vila, Vanuatu. 2023. Photo by Felicia Katz-Harris.
Learn More
Truths Be Told: Artists Activate Traditions
December 5, 2025 - January 27, 2027
Truths Be Told: Artists Activate Traditions highlights a dozen international artists who engage with folk traditions from their respective communities in order to critique social inequities, reverse erasure, and be a catalyst for social change. By pushing the boundaries of longstanding ceramic, basketry, and textile practices, regalia, or song, these artists propose more complex narratives of how traditions empower communities. Truths Be Told invites us to consider how traditions can function productively as agents of debate, awakening, change, cultural revitalization, and imagining a better future.
Learn More
Acoma Pueblo Figurative Pottery / Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026
June 7, 2026 - November 30, 2026
Gallery of Conscience
This exhibition is a community-curated project that focuses on figurative pottery from Acoma Pueblo. The show will examine ancestral Puebloan precursors to figuration in clay, as well as how the rise of tourism and the market for Pueblo pottery at the turn of the 20th century shaped the development of this practice. Included will be 80-100 objects with a focus on Acoma Pueblo women artists who have been at the heart of this tradition.
The exhibition is the Museum of International Folk Art’s contribution to the national Craft in America’s initiative, Handwork: Celebrating American Craft 2026, which marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. Handwork strives to tell some of the untold or undertold stories of American craft, including Indigenous art, calling for a more complex and diverse understanding of the handmade in the nation from past to present.
Learn More
The Art Underground: Fantasy Coffins of Ghana
July 26, 2026 - March 31, 2027
The Art Underground: Fantasy Coffins of Ghana features the works of five well-known fantasy coffin artists. “Fantasy” or “design” coffins are handmade figurative wooden coffins created by Ga communities of Ghana. The coffins honor the aspirations and achievements of the deceased through representations of the objects, ideals, or fantasies most important to them in life. The exhibition will feature two dozen fantasy coffins connected to the Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop located in Teshie-Nungua, Ghana. The exhibition will trace the evolution of this art form from its inception by Kane Kwei in the 1950s through its development as a funerary tradition, and its subsequent embrace by the international art market.
Learn More