The Wow Gallery is exactly what its name states, WOW! You will find yourself saying wow for many if not all the pieces in this extraordinary gallery. Filled with minerals, petrified wood, fossils, a meteorite and art work. 

Minerals

The smallest part of the Zuhl Geological Collection, but nonetheless of great quality, are minerals and rocks from throughout the world.

Particularly impressive are specimens of rhodochrosite, malachite, and rutilized quartz.  Many of the rocks were ground and polished into spheres ranging in size from a few centimeters to a meter in diameter.

Petrified Wood

We have a whole gallery dedicated to petrified wood. However, this gallery houses some of our favorites that really speak to the beauty and uniqueness of this fossilized wood. 

ANCIENT COSMIC SEAS

Christine Nguyen
Medium:
Archival pigment inks on Entrada Moab rag paper
Inspired by a week-long residency conducted at the Zuhl Museum and throughout the city of Las Cruces, Ancient Cosmic Seas is a materialization and unearthly response to her own real-world observations and records of natural phenomena.
Nguyen’s selection of contemporary art media becomes an art-based strata of geological time and a description of her personal practice of collecting.
Evident in this installation, the artist imagines that the depths of the ocean reach into outer space, that through an organic prism, vision can fluctuate between the micro- and macroscopic.
This piece is on permanent loan from the University Art Museum Collection.