Beginning tonight, the adobe walls of the art space SITE Santa Fe will house a re-creation of an illegal 19th-century New Mexico gambling den, complete with dealers staging rounds of the Spanish card game known as monte. Inspired by the casinos that cropped up during the 1830s New Mexican gold rush, it’s part of a multipronged piece by the artist Pablo Helguera, one of 45 artists in “Unsettled Landscapes,” the latest edition of SITE Santa Fe’s contemporary art biennial, opening this Sunday.

The biennial has built a cult following since its founding in 1995, thanks to its captivating Southwestern backdrop and brainy programming. (Previous curators included Dave Hickey, who soon after received a MacArthur “genius” grant.) After canceling the biennial two years ago, chief curator Irene Hofmann has rebooted it, with the goal of avoiding the cookie-cutter biennial approach that’s been “duplicated by the hundreds,” as Hofmann puts it. (These days, Dhaka, Singapore and even Bushwick, Brooklyn all have biennials.)

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Liz Cohen’s “Rio Grande,” 2012.Credit Courtesy of Salon 94, New York

In fact, SITE Santa Fe was an early pioneer of what’s become standard biennial practice: “hiring a star curator and bringing in the international art world,” in Hofmann’s words. The team hopes that its new endeavor, SITELines, can rejuvenate exhibition practices. Teams will replace solo curators and artists will get more time to make work. (Helguera spent the past two years developing his piece.)

SITELines will focus on the Americas. While organizing the show, Hofmann traveled everywhere from to Buenos Aires to Cuba. Another curator, Candice Hopkins, visited an artist in the Arctic Circle, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut. “She gets the prize for the most remote studio visit,” Hofmann says with a laugh. She explains that her decision to emphasize the Americas is interconnected with her life in Santa Fe. The a-ha moment came while driving on Highway 25, when she realized that a stretch of that route was also the Pan-American Highway — “a road which, in our romantic imaginings,” she says, “connects Alaska to Argentina.”

“Unsettled Landscapes” runs July 20 through Jan. 11, 2015 at SITE Santa Fe, sitesantafe.org.