Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Public Art, Textiles, Performance
Website: joannakeanelopez.com
Joanna Keane Lopez (b. 1991, Albuquerque, New Mexico) is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco whose practice spans sculpture, site-specific installation, photography, and the vernacular craft traditions of the American Southwest. She received a BFA in Studio Arts, summa cum laude, from the University of New Mexico in 2016, and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2024. While pursuing her undergraduate degree, she sought the mentorship of master enjarradoras Carole Crews and Anita Rodríguez in Taos, New Mexico, learning traditional adobe preservation techniques that became foundational to her practice. She also participated in the Land Arts of the American West program through the University of New Mexico.
Keane Lopez inherited the practice of working with adobe — a mixture of mud and straw — from her family, who constructed, maintained, and lived in earthen homes across multi-generational lands in Socorro, New Mexico known as Lópezville. In the early 1800s, her family received a Spanish land grant in the region, a place whose layered histories of Indigenous presence, colonial settlement, and nuclear fallout animate her work. She holds a California Visual Graduate Fellowship (2024–2025) at the Headlands Center for the Arts and has completed residencies at A-Z West, Ucross Foundation, and Herekeke Arts Center.
Keane Lopez has been supported by the Fulcrum Fund of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award at Stanford University, and was included in the Americans for the Arts Public Art Year in Review Award. Her work has been exhibited nationally at institutions including Lisson Gallery, SITE Santa Fe, The Momentary of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum, Akron Art Museum, and Sarasota Art Museum, and was featured in The New York Times in connection with her installation at the 12th SITE Santa Fe International.
Keane Lopez works primarily with adobe, alíz (a clay slip paint), paper, wood, textiles, plant- and mineral-based dyes, and song, creating large-scale installations that blur the boundaries between contemporary sculpture and vernacular earthen architecture. Her practice restores the loss of land-based building methods through the teachings of enjarradoras and adoberas — women who specialize in traditional earthen architecture — weaving collaborative performance, storytelling, and hands-on educational workshops into the fabric of her exhibitions. In keeping with the tradition of la resolana, she invites performers to activate her installations while on view, intending her work to function as a blessing, a spell, and an opportunity for healing.
Her more recent bodies of work incorporate archival research and inkjet printing onto hand-cast adobe panels, layering aerial maps, architectural plans, and eyewitness drawings related to Indigenous territories, Spanish land grants, and nuclear testing sites in New Mexico. Mirrors appear in her installations as symbols of fragmentation and wholeness in relation to identity. Throughout, the work draws deeply from her family’s multi-generational ties to Lópezville in Socorro, New Mexico, addressing land contamination, cultural loss, and the enduring consequences of nuclear testing in the Southwest.
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