By Sara Atencio-Gonzales, The Paper. – For an academic year, the galleries of the University of New Mexico Art Museum (UNMAM) looked different. Instead of exhibitions, the spaces became working areas filled with artwork, museum staff and students.
Now, after a year spent behind the scenes, the galleries are open to visitors again.
The UNM Art Museum reopened its exhibition spaces Aug. 18 following Collections Year, an initiative that paused exhibitions during the 2025-26 academic year so the museum could focus on caring for and improving its collection of more than 30,000 works.
Museum Director Arif Khan explains that the unusual project developed partly out of necessity. UNMAM was preparing to move its collection records into a new database when it learned it would receive two major gifts of artwork, including works from the Lannan Foundation collection.
Like many museums, UNMAM was already struggling with storage space. Staff needed somewhere to temporarily move existing artwork while reorganizing vaults and making room for new acquisitions. “We really needed the galleries to do this,” says Khan.
Rather than continue mounting exhibitions around the work, the museum decided to dedicate the academic year to its collection.
“We debated whether we should have one exhibition? Should we try to do exhibitions?” says Khan. “And I just said, ‘You know, an academic year flies by.’”
The decision gave staff something museums do not often have: large, open spaces and sustained time devoted to collections work.
Between July 2025 and May 2026, staff and student apprentices handled 2,822 artworks, inventoried 1,767 works and cataloged 245 new acquisitions. Nearly 5,000 digital images were renamed and cross-referenced. No artworks were damaged during the project.
The museum also trained 16 collections apprentices in art handling, with students contributing more than 2,844 hours of work.
The apprenticeships were paid positions rather than classes. Students learned skills including art handling, condition reporting, photography and digitization while working directly with objects in the collection.
For Khan, that direct encounter with artwork was an important part of the experience. “Even though you can have the history of art on your phone, there’s something different about encountering and engaging with these things as objects or pieces of paper, or canvas,” says Khan.
Although exhibitions were paused, the museum was not entirely closed. Its Beaumont Newhall Study Room remained available by appointment, and Khan emphasizes that around 1,900 students and guests visited the space during Collections Year.
The year also laid the groundwork for public digital access to UNMAM’s collection. The museum has transferred its records into a new collections management system that Khan explains will eventually connect to its website. The database is currently internal while staff clean records, with the museum loosely aiming to make some of the collection publicly accessible online around next year.
Collections work, however, did not end when Collections Year did.
“We got a good start on this,” says Khan. “We set kind of a baseline and a foundation for this work to continue moving forward.”
The museum is now welcoming visitors back with two exhibitions that draw heavily from its collections.
Abundance: New Acquisitions from 2016 to 2026, on view through Dec. 5, presents works acquired through gifts and purchases over the past decade. Senior Curator Mary Statzer explains that the exhibition grew naturally out of the previous year’s work.
“Everything that happened during collections year feeds into the ability to make a show that demonstrates the breadth and depth of the collection,” says Statzer.
The exhibition includes prints, photographs, paintings and sculptures by 44 artists. Some works have never previously been exhibited at UNMAM.
A second exhibition, Tamarind Goes Global (1985-2020), is on view through March 12, 2027. Curator of Prints and Drawings Angel Jiang emphasizes that the exhibition explores Tamarind Institute’s international collaborations and draws from UNMAM’s permanent collection, university archival materials and work with a graduate student.
“I think that in that sense, it’s a really wonderful show to reopen with,” says Jiang.
For Statzer, reopening also returns another essential part of a museum collection: the people who experience it. “We missed our students, faculty, staff, and community members who come to the museum,” says Statzer. “So it’s really all those people who activate this collection.”