ABOUT [CONTAINER]
Acquisition-funded art institution meets commercial gallery meets private collection, [CONTAINER] introduces an innovative vision for art exhibitions. [CONTAINER] brings touring museum exhibitions to the artistic heartland of Santa Fe, New Mexico, offering collectors an opportunity to purchase artworks by sought-after artists directly from its institutional exhibitions.
[CONTAINER]’s mission to work with artists and institutions and foster touring museum exhibitions has been wildly successful. [CONTAINER] exhibitions have toured the US and abroad: Swoon’s exhibition traveling to museums and art centers in Virginia, Texas, and Thailand, portions of our Nadya Tolokonnikova exhibition has shown at the Dallas Contemporary and OK Linz Museum in Austria, and our FAILE exhibition is continuing to the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. [CONTAINER] continues to evolve as a curatorial entity, with its next stop being Italy, as a base for Turner Carroll’s collaborative exhibitions in Europe
[CONTAINER] was located at 1226 Flagman Way in Santa Fe, New Mexico from October 2022 to May 2025.
Instagram |1226 Flagman Way, Santa Fe, New Mexico
March 7–June 8, 2025. Curated by Charles Moore. Through visual expressions that capture the unique approaches to making art and the emotions and experiences of each artist, the exhibition Hood Ornament showcases the enduring strength of Black America that is often overlooked. By portraying these journeys of self-discovery and empowerment, the exhibition encourages audiences to reflect on how these new “hood ornaments” influence their lives, communities, and relationships.
November 15, 2024–February 21, 2025. FAILE is Patrick Miller and Patrick McNeil, who focus on play, wonder and satire in their work. Visitors can expect to be transported to a wonderland of color and coolness as FAILE transforms the space in their unique, experiential style.
August 10–November 6, 2024. Virgil Ortiz is an award-winning artist from Cochiti Pueblo who brings his vision of the future to life through ceramics, projection mapping, and augmented reality.
June 29–July 28, 2024. Freedom of Choice confirms and extends beyond the fundamental human right women possess in making decisions about their bodies via the voices of women artists. Each artwork showcased in the exhibition is accompanied by a statement from the curator, publisher, or collector who selected it, explaining how the work expanded their perception in an unexpected way.
January 19–April 21, 2024. Master printer and publisher Jack Lemon started Landfall Press in 1970 in Chicago after his training with the well-known artist, Thomas Hart Benton. Lemon became one of the top printmakers in the U.S., and his expertise drew the attention of major artists of the 20th and 21st Century. Lemon eventually moved Landfall Press to Santa Fe, and brought luminary artists such as Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Kara Walker, and Judy Chicago, to Santa Fe. Turner Carroll was granted the honor of managing the Press’ Archive.
May 3–July 28, 2024. Featuring some of our time’s most influential political and street artists, including Shepard Fairey, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Douglas Miles, Swoon, and Clarence Heyward. The exhibition explores the humanity of these artists, how they found similar forms of expression despite their different backgrounds, and the resulting sublime beauty of their artworks.
September 8–November 5, 2023. Curated by Han Santana-Sayles. Matt King painted with light. Although King is best known for his role as Meow Wolf’s co-founder, a maximalist immersive maze, his personal work lay bare his complicated psyche through hyper-personal abstract expressionism. King experimented with the power of light by affixing delicate custom-built neon sculptures to his paintings as brush strokes. The effect is a playful interaction of color that gives his work a uniquely “alive” feeling.
Jess T. Dugan: I Want You to Know My Story
November 17, 2023–January 5, 2024. Drawing from their experience as a queer, nonbinary person, Dugan’s work is motivated by an existential need to understand and express themself and to connect with others. This immersive exhibition includes new photographs from their ongoing series Look at me like you love me, an audio soundtrack of their voice reading personal, diaristic texts, and the debut of a new video, Letter to My Daughter.
May 26–June 23, 2023. This installation and exhibition, Cash Crop, depicts the horrors of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and seeks to create a connection between human rights violations of the past and the present. Hayes’ goal for the exhibit was to create 15 life-size models to symbolize the 12.5 million Africans imported to the Americas from 1526 to 1867 during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. In Hayes’ words, “Through the mending of materials, this exhibition brings a new dynamic to the history of the slave trade for modern-day visitors. Cash Crop is not only about the transporting of people as commodities, but it is also about how America still benefits from outsourcing and sweatshop labor in developing countries. Sweatshops today are mirror images of slave ships from the past—people have just enough space to produce as many goods as possible.”
June 30–August 19, 2023. Pussy Riot’s Putin’s Ashes was initiated in August 2022, when Pussy Riot burned a 10 x 10 foot portrait of the Russian president, performed rituals, and cast spells aimed to chase Putin away. Twelve women participated in the performance; most of the participants were Ukrainian, Belarusian, or Russian. Nadya Tolokonnikova bottled the ashes of the burnt portrait and incorporated them into her objects that are being presented alongside her short art film Putin’s Ashes.
March 31–May 15, 2023. Featuring over 40 paintings, sculpture, drawings, and lithographs, Mokha Laget: Perceptualism surveys the last ten years of an artistic practice devoted to exploring perception and space. Through a playful and illusionistic use of color and implied dimensionality, Laget’s work references her multicultural influences, particularly the unique landscape and architecture of the places where she has lived, ranging from Northern Africa through Washington, DC to her current home in Santa Fe. The stunning shaped canvases for which Laget is best known celebrate abstraction’s capacity to respond to the complexities and ambiguities of contemporary life; the work’s visual hybridity manifests as “gentle” optical chaos.
May 21–May 21, 2023. [CONTAINER] hosted the Master’s in Fine Arts final exhibition for IAIA students.
October 28, 2022–March 15, 2023. Selected from the Albright Knox exhibition. Caledonia Curry, also known as Swoon, has transformed Container into an open and meditative environment featuring a number of her large-scale sculptural installations as well as her first stop-motion animation video. Beyond these individual objects, the artist is interested in establishing spaces of empathy with a compassionate eye toward greater understanding and creating positive impact in the lives of her audiences. In Seven Contemplations, the artist infuses often difficult aspects of her personal journey with a spirit of generosity to offer a model of how pushing through the discomfort of challenges may lead toward healing.
February 10–March 7, 2023. “From early self-portraits in clown makeup to more recent works featuring portraits of others and her own reflections on the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition illuminates the arc of McIver’s artistic career while also touching on her personal journey. Her self-portraits explore expressions of individuality, stereotypes, and ways of masking identity, while portraits of family members provide glimpses of intimate moments, in good times as well as in illness and death. The exhibition includes McIver’s portraits of other artists and notable figures, recent work resulting from a year in Rome with American Academy’s Rome Prize, and new work in which McIver explores the juxtaposition of color, pattern, and the human figure.
PRESS
Santa Fe Magazine writes:
“Veteran gallery owners Tonya Turner Carroll and Michael Carroll are reinventing the old museum/gallery paradigm, working as institutional peers, constantly pivoting from gallery to collector to institutional venue. What that looks like is a new, 5,000 square-foot shipping container art space in the Baca that will be a venue for traveling museum exhibitions, that will show curated exhibitions from their collection, and that will be a creative exhibition space for invited artists from around the world. As Tonya puts it, “This is a new and radical concept space, following the European art house approach, but where the artwork will be for sale, as well.”
[CONTAINER] opened to the public October 29, with mega-artist and filmmaker SWOON at the helm. Her Seven Contemplations exhibition, which premiered at the Albright Knox Museum in New York, consumes the entire building, along with elements of her street art career, installations, eidophones, and video works. SWOON has had solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Detroit Institute of the Arts, and numerous other institutions. She was present for [CONTAINER]’s grand opening, introducing her feature length film and signing copies of her new book published by Drago in Italy.
[CONTAINER]’s programming is agile and responsive as a private venture, showing exhibitions at the forefront of contemporary artistic dialogs. It will bring unforgettable art experiences to a community of like-minded, art-loving, curious people through partnerships with such institutions as SAC Gallery in Bangkok, and CAM Raleigh in North Carolina.
[CONTAINER] is a function of Turner Carroll Gallery in Santa Fe. For the past three decades, the Turner Carroll family has dedicated itself to championing visionary artists, and developing meaningful relationships with public institutions around the world. [CONTAINER] is a celebration and amplification of these partnerships and their deeply-held belief that Art Transforms.”
Pussy Riot Founder to Do LA Prison Cell Performance
New York Times, March 15, 2025
Hood Ornament at Container a well-curated selection of Black art, Logan Beitman, Albuquerque Journal, March 19, 2025
FAILE: A Riot of Existence @ [CONTAINER], Santa Fe
Juxtapoz, November 19, 2024
Nadya Tolokonnikova’s Feminist Artwork Vandalized in Austrian Chapel
Jo Lawson-Tancred, artnet, December 10, 2024
Virgil Ortiz: Revolt 1680/2180 Daybreak of the Resistance
Southwest Contemporary, August 6, 2024
June 20, 2024
Alex De Vore, Santa Fe Reporter, April 3, 2024
Russia Arrests Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova in Absentia
Elaine Velie, Hyperallergic, November 22, 2023
Matt King: King of rainbows
Brian Sandford, PasaTiempo, September 1, 2023
Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova on bringing her punk protest art and a prison cell to New Mexico
Maurita Cardone, The Art Newspaper, July 11, 2023
New Santa Fe Art Space Container Saves Artwork from Storage—and Destruction
Lauren LaRocca, Southwest Contemporary, February 21, 2023
Blowing Up the Art World
John Miller, Santa Fe Magazine, August 9, 2022