OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, September 18, 2026

6:00pm - Cocktails with Hors d’oeuvres by Ruthie at Black Fig Food

6:45pm - Gallery Talk with artist, Jack Craft

7:15pm - Gallery Talk with artist, Hills Snyder

AMoA Members FREE, Non-Members $15

ON view august 29 - december 13, 2026

Hills Snyder was born in Lubbock, Texas and currently lives and works in Magdalena, New Mexico. Prior to moving to New Mexico, Hills was an integral part of the visual arts scene of San Antonio, where he worked as an artist, exhibition designer, curator, writer, and was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas, San Antonio. Hills’ work is included in numerous public museum collections including the San Antonio Museum of Art; Ruby City, San Antonio; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; El Paso Museum of Art; the Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas; Nicolaysen Art Museum, Casper, Wyoming; Montana Arts Council, Helena, Montana; among others.

Strays are one-off works, which, like sudden love, come over night from fugitive circumstance or perhaps made in response to random stimuli, as was the case with Ode (2008), which came about when the artist saw a San Antonio Express-News front-page photo of a Challenger landing. The opened drag chute that was catching high velocity wind in the photo caught Snyder’s eye, as he recognized in it a work by Odilon Redon, The eye, like a strange balloon, mounts toward Infinity (1882), that had featured on the cover of an Edgar Allan Poe paperback he had been carrying around since the mid-seventies.

A Little Known Fact About The Oregon Trail (2010), was made at the invitation of curator Andy Benavides, for an exhibition in a San Antonio hotel titled Invading Spaces, in which artists were asked to make work out of the physical constituents of the hotel itself.  Snyder chose to work in the western-themed bar, which featured an intricately detailed model of a covered wagon which was just crying out for the character from the video game Space Invaders to be sewn onto it. 

Double Slit (I and I) (2011), was a response to coming across I Am Not I, by Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, combining its implications with the double slit experiment in which it is shown that light exists as both particle and wave when directed through a lead plate featuring two slits.

Some of the works in Strays were part of specific bodies of work, conceptual wholes that have since broken apart through the passage of time and from the components being separated into collections. These are not one-offs at all, but provide a thread of connection through the disparate “strays.” The exhibition includes many works made since the artist moved to Magdalena in 2019.