Names like “A Puncher’s Paradise,” “Reluctant Mount,” “Last Drop” and “Lickin’ Clean” leave little doubt that you’re in the company of men who wear chaps. No, this isn’t theme night at the local gay bar. This is the Cowboy Artists of America annual bunkhouse of fun at the Phoenix Art…

Great art from past civilizations always seems to contain more future than past. Some of that might be because of the money and grandiose faith we cast in the direction of old treasures and the cliche of “art for the ages.” Yet you can trace much of the verve in…

It’s fairly easy to fall into the trap of looking to a nation’s art for state department insights about its culture–one nation one art. But even before you’re through the first gallery of the ASU Art Museum’s “Contemporary Art From Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island” it’s clear…

The primary theme of Galeria Mesa’s current exhibition, “Light Sensitive,” is photography and the photographic processes that artists are using to make their images. Yet the show’s quieter point is the difficulty this kind of exhibition has in attracting first-rate work. Like many exhibitions developed by small art centers around…

You don’t often notice the effect that a museum’s architecture has on exhibitions–the way the surroundings bolster some shows and diminish others. But it’s difficult to miss the boost that the Phoenix Art Museum’s 1998 Triennial gets from the museum’s hangarlike Steele Gallery. From the moment Carlos Mollura’s giant, black…

Joanne Rapp has always been something of a “low talker”–that Seinfeldian girlfriend of Kramer’s whose inaudible delivery got the politely nodding Jerry to agree inadvertently to wear a “puffy shirt” on national television. But the wares and wearables Rapp promoted in near whispers for 26 years at her Marshall Way…

The Internet has reduced most of us to chimpanzees in the cockpit of a jumbo jet: clicking this, clicking that, listening, waiting, waiting some more, then reloading and trying it all over again. Gamblers, pornographers and the military seem to have figured out its purpose. But artists are among those…

We may never know why sports elevated the ancient Grecian imagination to Praxiteles, and has lowered the current Phoenician one to the art at Bank One Ballpark. But the modern impulse to turn every little sports-related thing into a marketing scheme may have something to do with it. Diamondbacks spokesmen…

Some 30 years after “Mrs. Robinson,” no one wonders, in cheery Simon-and-Garfunkel tones, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” Everyone knows that, when his time came, the Yankee Clipper quietly limped down from the pinstriped Olympus of his day, married and divorced a tragic beauty and slipped into a life…

Nature has been the subject in search of a form in Mayme Kratz’s art for some time now–especially fragments of nature. Since 1991, when she began embedding all sorts of found natural objects in her resin sculptures, the artist has been preoccupied with drawing attention to the smallest of small…

It’s no secret that the identity of “Arizona” or “Southwest” art has been changing for some time now. As the urban forces that molded the cultures of other international cities have begun to affect our own, the art being made here has become as varied and complex as the works…

It’s tough to miss the new mural wrapping the Mercer Mortuary building, on the southwest corner of 16th Street and Thomas Road. Its big, stylized figures and scenes in bold colors radiate just the sort of up-with-people exuberance you’d hope to find in a neighborhood that has been fighting crime…

The railroad didn’t do many favors for Southwestern American Indians. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it did bring them a vital new market for their arts and crafts. Just when traditional tribal wares were losing their place to manufactured ones (also brought by train), the iron…

Given the long partnership that words and pictures have had in the evolution of alphabets and books, it isn’t surprising to find contemporary artists dedicating prints and drawings to a favorite author, or joining writers in the production of limited-edition books and folios. But you rarely see them going to…

“Domestic Pottery,” the title of the current show at the Joanne Rapp Gallery, seems less a holiday sales pitch than a lesson in how far the reputation of useful, handmade pottery has sunk in the past 50 years. Praised through mid-century as the art of the people, it was gradually…

You ordinarily wouldn’t consider a cheese-loving Yorkshire inventor named Wallace and his mute dog, Gromit, the stuff of cinematic stardom. But in Toonland, where cults and corporations rise from the zany fiction of talking crickets, mice, ducks, moose, flying squirrels, the Simpsons and their heavy-metal cousins Beavis and Butt-head, just…

From his office in Los Angeles, Michael Greene, head of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS)–the Grammy people–is waxing passionate about the similarities between playing musical instruments and playing baseball. “The concentration, the focus, the losing of oneself in what you’re doing,” he says quickly in a…