Laura Wilson’s photographs of Mexico

The Meadows Museum, SMU in Dallas, will kick off its 2025–2026 exhibition season with Roaming Mexico: Laura Wilson, opening September 14, 2025, and running through January 11, 2026. This personal and visually rich exhibition will feature nearly 90 photographs — most never before published — by the celebrated Texas photographer. While Wilson is already well known for her captivating images of the American West and striking portraits of renowned authors, her latest exhibition presents photographs taken over the past four decades during her travels across Mexico, from the U.S. borderlands to Oaxaca and San Miguel de Allende.

Laura Wilson (b. 1939), an internationally esteemed documentary photographer, has published six books and contributed work to The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, London’s Sunday Times Magazine, and The Washington Post Magazine, among other publications. Roaming Mexico will be the first presentation of Wilson’s Mexican photography.

“Laura Wilson is a truly gifted artist who has so eloquently captured the story of the American West. It seems only right that she should have turned that penetrating lens toward Mexico,” Amanda W. Dotseth, The Linda P. and William A. Custard Director of the Meadows Museum and Centennial Chair in the Meadows School of the Arts, SMU said. “Roaming Mexico speaks to Wilson’s admiration for and deep ties to Mexico, but does so in ways that are at once sensitive, beautiful, challenging and complex. Mexico is part of the American experience. The Meadows Museum is committed to fostering cross-cultural understanding through Spanish art and its global connections. This exhibition offers a rare and moving look at Mexico through the eyes of one of Texas’ most compelling visual storytellers.”

Laura Wilson’s ‘Roaming Mexico’

At age 85, Wilson continues to capture the human experience with unmatched curiosity and grace. In Roaming Mexico, she offers an expansive, often intimate glimpse of Mexican life — from colorful festivals and quiet village scenes to religious rituals and enduring traditions. A number of the images were created as recently as 2024 and especially for this exhibition.

“It’s not every person’s Mexico — it’s my Mexico,” Wilson said. “Much as in the American West, the Spanish influence is elemental in Mexico. Things we consider icons of Western culture — the horse, the longhorn — came from Spain and gave rise to the vaquero or cowboy. Mexico is culturally vibrant — the literature, the art, the sculpture, the architecture. The architects, the writers, and even the collectors that I have focused on are as much a part of modern Mexico, and of my appreciation of Mexico, as the laboring paisano or the fire-breather.”

Wilson’s photographs present not a singular narrative, but a colorful tapestry of contrasts, depicting a Mexico that is equally rural and urban, religious and secular, timeless and evolving. The images exemplify Wilson’s gift for capturing the poetic in the everyday, from manual labor to street festivals.

While her early published work focused on life along the Mexico-U.S. border, Roaming Mexico will introduce viewers to a more comprehensive, if deeply personal, vision of the U.S.’s southern neighbor. It brings together 40 years’ worth of images documenting Wilson’s sojourns across Mexico and areas just beyond its northern border.

The nearly 90 photographs offer a unique perspective of a multifaceted Mexico seen through Wilson’s eyes. They capture colorful festivals, traditional farms, and the poetry of everyday life. The viewer is therefore presented not with one Mexico—defined, for example, by its northern border, its religiosity, or rural populations—but with a nuanced, often contradictory view of a land of dynamic contrasts.

Wilson was closely involved in curating the exhibition and overseeing its installation, working in collaboration with Dotseth and her longtime collaborator, designer Gregory Wakabayashi. The photographer credits Wakabayashi’s thoughtful approach for bringing an added layer of intimacy and narrative clarity to the exhibition and to the fully illustrated book that accompanies it. The book, produced in association with Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd., will be available for purchase in the Meadows Museum’s gift shop.

About Laura Wilson

Laura Wilson was elected to the Philosophical Society of Texas and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, which bestowed upon her the Carr P. Collins Award for Avedon at Work, a publication also named book of the year by the Royal Photographic Society. She was inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 2019.

Her work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Booth Western Art Museum and the Meadows Museum.

A native of Massachusetts, Laura Wilson has lived in Dallas since 1965 and is the mother of three sons: Andrew, Owen and Luke.

About the Meadows Museum

The Meadows Museum is the leading U.S. institution focused on the study and presentation of the art of Spain. In 1962, Dallas businessman and philanthropist Algur H. Meadows donated his private collection of Spanish paintings, as well as funds to start a museum, to Southern Methodist University. The museum opened to the public in 1965, marking the first step in fulfilling Meadows’s vision to create “a small Prado for Texas.”

Today, the Meadows is home to one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside of Spain. The collection spans from the 10th to the 21st centuries and includes medieval objects, Renaissance and Baroque sculptures, and major paintings by Golden Age and modern masters.

For more information visit meadowsmuseumdallas.org.