Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light) is now open at the Phoenix Museum of Art through June 28, 2026. Organized by the Hood Museum of Art, is the first major solo exhibition exploring the narrative artistic practice of the Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero, presenting more than 50 works Romero created between 2013 and 2025. The exhibition features new and never-before-seen photographs, site-specific installations, large-scale photographs, and iconic views across five thematic sections.

Abundance/Excess: A Contemporary Eye on Still Life will gather works by 10 contemporary artists who draw on the legacy of still life painting in their practice. Still life has a long reputation as a genre for aesthetic experimentation, and the artists in Abundance/Excess continue in this tradition of exploration and play while also incorporating still life’s thematic emphasis on time, impermanence, and the politics of bounty. 

The first section of the exhibition, Abundance, will feature contemporary artworks that interrogate the forms and distribution of wealth in American history, and to question how we buy and sell in the present. The second section of the exhibition, Excess, considers the environmental and social impacts of overconsumption. Many of the featured artworks incorporate discarded and repurposed materials, including bath towels, trash-picked toys, and collaged grocery flyers. As a whole, the artists in Abundance/Excess use representations of fish, fruit, meat, and flowers to consider larger questions about the effects and consequences of industrial extraction and production.

The history of Indigenous Peoples performing cultural dances and practices for international and colonial audiences is an important aspect of Indigenous art generally, and performance art specifically. The Indigenous performers known as ‘Indians’ faced the conundrum of maintaining traditional cultural practices by performing them on stage while also having that performance fulfill the desires of a colonial imaginary. In Sovereign Acts, the artists contend with the legacy of colonial representations. Drawing on the depiction of the imaginary Indian – the ahistorical, pre-contact ‘primitivism’ in popular and mass culture – they recover and construct new ways of performing the complexity of Indigenous cultures for a contemporary art audience. Their work returns to the multi-levelled history of ‘Performing Indian’ to recuperate the erased and objectified performer as an ancestor, an artist, and an Indigenous subject.

Artists: Rebecca Belmore, Lor Blondeau, Demian DinéYahzi, Martine Guttierez, Robert Houle, James Luna, Alan Michelson, Kent Monkman, Shelley Niro, Cara Romero, Jeff Thomas, and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie

Motherboards explores the foundational contributions of women’s work to the technology industry. From the first human computers and programmers, to the women working at electronics factories in Silicon Valley and beyond, to today’s global network of ghost workers, women have been deeply involved with the technologies that undergird our daily lives. Yet their contributions are often left out of official histories of technology.

Featuring artists from California and beyond, the exhibition maps an extensive network of women’s work in technology, connecting Silicon Valley’s laboratories and garages to vital work performed at looms, desks, kitchens, and assembly lines across the globe. Motherboards features installations, videos, textiles, and more by Sarah Buckius, Tania Candiani, Priyageetha Dia, Rhonda Holberton, Ahree Lee, Amor Muñoz, Hương Ngô, Mimi Ọnụọha, Sonya Rapoport, Cara Romero, Sarah Rosalena, Analia Saban, Marilou Schultz, the Superkilogirls (Camila Galaz, Ana Meisel, and Lua Vollaard), and Mika Tajima, as well as archival objects from the Computer History Museum.