Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art to Showcase MARK + MAKING Exhibition in March 2026

Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) will open MARK + MAKING on March 21, featuring works drawn from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibition will explore how artists use mark-making and linework to construct form, communicate ideas, and reveal artistic process.

SMoCA’s collection includes more than 2,000 artworks spanning a wide range of cultures, time periods, and media, including painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture, and other contemporary practices. The exhibition is curated by assistant curator Keshia Turley, who developed the show while researching works from the museum’s holdings.

“While researching pieces for other exhibitions, I began noticing how many artists were using line and mark-making in strikingly varied and conceptually rich ways,” Turley said. “I became really intrigued by the idea of focusing an exhibition from SMoCA's collection around how artists use mark-making and linework—not just as formal elements but as a way of thinking, exploring, and communicating.”

Mark + Making brings together drawings, paintings, prints, and sculptural works that emphasize the physical and conceptual processes behind mark-making. The exhibition highlights approaches ranging from gestural marks that convey immediacy to repetitive or methodical actions that build dense textures and patterns. In some works, marks remain visible as evidence of labor and process, while in others they evolve into refined systems that blur distinctions between drawing, painting, and sculpture.

“The works in the exhibition show that marks can operate as much more than just visual elements,” Turley said. “Some pieces communicate labor through repetition or the slow build-up of material, while others capture a quick, expressive gesture tied to emotion or movement.”

Mark-making is one of the earliest artistic practices, appearing in cultures across history from prehistoric cave drawings to contemporary digital forms. By focusing on these elemental gestures, the exhibition shifts attention from finished objects to the processes that generate them. Turley noted that organizing the exhibition revealed new relationships among works that had not previously been shown together.

“One of the most rewarding aspects of working with a collection-based exhibition is seeing all the new ways works can resonate with one another when they are brought into dialogue for the first time,” Turley said.

Mark + Making is organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and curated by Keshia Turley, assistant curator.

SMoCA is located at 7374 East Second Street in Scottsdale, Arizona. The museum is open Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and Thursdays from 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m.