On View: November 21, 2026–January 3, 2027
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 21, 1-3 p.m. RSVP
Meet Stella Maria Baer + live music by Erika Ryann

The land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of the land. In short, what we do to the land, we do to ourselves. - Wendell Berry

The freedom of the American mustang cannot be separated from the freedom of the land or our own freedom. In honor of 2026 being the Year of the Horse, Stella Maria Baer brings together paintings of horses, hawks, ravens, women, and landscapes of the American Southwest. At the heart of the exhibition is the mystic relationship between wild horses, the land, and our own ideas of what it means to be free.

Baer creates her paintings with earth and mineral pigments mixed with walnut oil, transforming rocks, soil, and minerals into images that are physically connected to the land they depict. Baer first worked with earth pigments in an iconography course taught by a Russian Orthodox monk in 2009, and her paintings are prayers. Some pigments come from stones gathered beneath the hooves of her own rescued horses, Moon and Stars and Sky, whose story of moving from a kill pen to open pasture appears throughout the exhibition. Other works pair women and wild horses, hawks and cattle, drawing out our relationships between freedom and the ways we care for the natural world.

?10% of painting sales from this exhibition will be donated to Return to Freedom and the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition.