Warren McArthur knows something about the tenacity of fiction. For the past quarter century, he has been trying to undo the popular one that presents America’s über-architect Frank Lloyd Wright as the designer of the Arizona Biltmore. “My uncle Albert [Chase McArthur] was the real architect, but I guess some…
Paul Bellanger, who died October 30 at age 68 after a long illness, probably wouldn’t have liked his memorial service. He hated people fussing over him. But the 200 or so friends — including many top Phoenix city officials — who came to Hansen’s Mortuary in Sunnyslope to remember him…
Phoenix wouldn’t be Phoenix without its illusions about water. All its boats and pools and golf greens, all its fountains, irrigated farm fields and backyards have helped to turn some fairly extravagant wet dreams into everyday occurrences. That may be why last week’s formal opening of Tempe’s Rio Salado project…
Just mentioning last year’s Arizona Juvenile Justice Evaluation Final Report, the latest and maybe the heftiest in a decadelong flurry of state-funded reports about gang and juvenile crime in Arizona, makes state Representative Kathi Foster sputter. “How many more times do we have to sit through and rehash what we’ve…
It hasn’t always been easy to pare Claude Monet’s artistic achievements from his popularity. In the later half of his life (1840 to 1926), his paintings sold so well that the writer Emile Zola suggested that he might be unloading too many unfinished works that were barely dry. More recently,…
The killings are what stick in the minds of teachers and administrators. “I always listen when I hear of shootings on the news,” says Virginia Alcocer, principal of the Garcia School in the Murphy Elementary School District. “And I say, ‘Please don’t let it be our area, please don’t let…
Gene Rushing, a soft-spoken, 27-year veteran of the Phoenix Fire Department, is accustomed to emergencies and sudden changes in stride. But he was stumped the night he showed up to coach a Pop Warner football practice in mid-August. The first practice had gone pretty well. Five teams of helmeted kids…
Robert is in his mid-teens and has been involved in gangs since he was 10. That kind of admission has become almost a cliché in the past decade, as the media, the courts and the political system grapple with the pressing problems of a dysfunctional society and the increasingly violent…
Although the Writer’s Voice is a great option for aspiring writers who are Valley-bound, if writing’s your thing and getting out of town your plan, Prescott’s Hassayampa Institute for Creative Writing will be the place to do both from Monday, July 26, through Saturday, July 31. This is the fifth…
Every so often you overhear someone in an art museum or gallery wishing, “If only the art could talk.” Yet when contemporary art–thanks to electronic media–does pipe up, it often sounds like the cranky woman in Tony Oursler’s installation work Don’t Look at Me. Included in the Scottsdale Museum of…
A gale roaring up the side of Roden Crater, blasting construction grit and sand into the gray-bearded face of artist James Turrell, is making it tough for him to describe the serenity he envisions for this old volcano northeast of Flagstaff. He retreats a few paces down a cindery embankment…
Compared with its recent exhibitions of paintings on copper and works from ancient Egypt, the Phoenix Art Museum’s “Great Design: 100 Masterpieces From the Vitra Design Museum” is a welcomed dive back to the commonplace. Instead of rarities and treasures, it features objects familiar to just about everyone’s backside. It…
Through binoculars at night, the corner of Ninth Avenue and Madison Street is a murky scene of people milling in the dark. Yet the few lights in the area radiate just enough to see that the street’s after-hours crowd of about 100 homeless men and women is beginning to stir…
It’s tempting to say the Heard Museum’s new $18.1 million expansion has transformed the institution. But you don’t have to wander very far through its updated galleries and hallways to hear visitors saying the same old things about the art and artifacts they can’t readily identify. Down one corridor: “Is…
Mimes are usually mute and wave gloved hands in the air. Actors pretend to be someone–anyone–else. Yet you never know what to expect from performance artists. One day they’re masturbating in a gallery. Another, they’re having a friend shoot them in the arm with a gun, or ranting about their…
You see it in American art museums all the time: women towing men from object to object, cooing over things that make the fellers squirm or want to pull out a hammer or a chain saw. But as one official at the West Valley Art Museum/Sun Cities Museum of Art…
The old joke about ceramics–that muddy array of things made of clay–is that the difference between a pot and a vase is about 10,000 bucks. Not long into the tour of Anne and Sam Davis’ El Paso home, it’s apparent that the Davises, who recently donated about $400,000 in pots…
There are rocks. Then, in jewelry lingo, there are rocks–those glittering gems of high fashion and net worth. Yet the rock that jewelry maker Clare Yares has just picked out of a crate at Rockazona, an annual swap meet of rock hounds and geezers in the desert west of Phoenix,…
The Phoenix Art Museum has wasted little time in living up to the cultural promise of its expansion and renovation. Barely two years into its new digs, the museum is drawing record crowds with its exhibition of Egyptian art and artifacts. Since it opened in October, the mummy show, as…
For more than 150 years, photographers have been busily snapping opposing realities and versions of the truth. They’ve wielded cameras as tools of analysis and exploration, to clarify mysteries and bring the distant near. And they’ve used them as tools of expression, to make enigmas of the commonplace. There’s plenty…
Arizonans have been joking about their cultural desert for years now. But recently Dr. Robert Knight, director of the soon-to-open Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMOCA), has been putting a slightly different spin on the phrase. Ticking off the list of new or enlarged museums, theaters, sports halls and public-art…
The 20th anniversary of the Movimiento Artistico del Rio Salado–better known downtown as MARS Artspace–is as much a milestone of resilience as it is one of culture. The organization, now hosting its anniversary show, “20 Years On,” has outlasted the involvement of most of its Chicano founders. It has long…
