In 2020 the Albuquerque Museum welcomed Nicola López as its Visiting Artist as part of the museum’s annual program that invites contemporary artists with New Mexico connections to activate the space in new and compelling ways. Haunted, López’s ambitious site-specific installation, transformed the museum’s lobby into a layered experience of place, memory, and human impact — and Kim Richardson was there to capture it in all its subtle complexity.
A Landscape Both Beautiful and Troubled
Haunted invites viewers into a hybrid landscape that feels both familiar and uncanny. López layered printed, collaged, and hand-drawn elements directly on the museum walls to evoke the colors, textures, and geological forms of the Southwest. Over these static surfaces, she projected moving imagery — often documentary footage blended with constructed visuals — creating a haunting interplay of stillness and motion.
An Exhibition Rooted in Place
Born in Santa Fe and working in Brooklyn, López’s artistic practice has long explored the intersection of landscape, architecture, and human intervention. Haunted brought these investigations to the Albuquerque Museum in a way that was at once site-responsive and universal.
Through Kim Richardson’s lens, we see not just an installation, but a meditation on how places bear the traces of presence — geological, human, and environmental. Her photographs underscore the layered complexity of López’s work and highlight the haunting beauty of landscapes that are always remembered, always altered.
