Who are real New Mexicans? Drawn from the collection of the Albuquerque Museum, the show “Common Ground” gives a richly inclusive answer. Virtually without exception, the works score high for sheer aesthetic appeal as well as for the stories they tell. Received commentary frames the New Mexican experience in terms of three cultures: the Native American, the Spanish/Mexican, and the Anglo-American. But the polyphony—now dissonant, now harmonious—is vastly more complex. Exhibited by the entrance, the 2020 triptych Guerra y Tierra (War and Earth), by Brandon Maldonado and Vicente Telles, fuses Aztec and Colonial imagery in a blazing memorial of the clash between Moctezuma and Cortés but does not take sides. Elsewhere, paired pieces hung without regard to timelines or “schools” strike sparks across centuries and cultures, never making the same point twice. There’s one Georgia O’Keeffe, a masterpiece that may be new to you. There’s more than one lovingly carved San Isidro Labrador, the peasant’s friend. Over here, a nobly sentimental portrait in oil of a coyote keeps company with a funky glassy-eyed coyote of rough, painted wood. Over yonder, an austere, even forbidding portrait by Andrew Wyeth (dating to the year of Christina’s World) contrasts with another, more fanciful yet no less mysterious, by his sister Henrietta Wyeth. Elsewhere, depictions of Southwestern landscapes, towns, and personalities startle the eye with incidental or perhaps deliberate intimations of El Greco, Cézanne, Magritte, Van Gogh, Manet, Dalí, Benton, and Grandma Moses. Wall texts exemplary for content, clarity, and brevity alert the reader to expats like D. H. Lawrence and his colorful female entourage of three. Be on the lookout, too, for three studly, intertwined “Graces” in denim. A boldly metallic “Atomic Thunderbird” hurtles the timeless Indigenous symbol into the nuclear age. For the record, the Trinity Site, where the first A-bomb went off, lies just a short 120 miles from this place. —Matthew Gurewitsch