Perched on a swivel chair in the small living room of the Scottsdale home where he has lived since 1949, Philip Curtis is testing his vision. He opens one eye, then the other. He raises his hands in front of his face as if to read his palms. Then he…
Aaah, the unspoiled West: Big space. Big light. Big view. Big lure for the millions who yearly go searching for the serenity and wilderness behind this popular yet fading image. For the most part, it is the image featured in Phoenix Art Museum’s “Canyonland Visions,” a show highlighting artists’ portrayals…
When Scottsdale began talking about developing a new downtown transit center several years ago, urban-design junkies had plenty of cause to roll their eyes and mutter, “Here comes more Frontiertown.” The doodads the city had added to its downtown streets in the early 1990s had only bolstered its reputation for…
Not long into a tour of Sky Harbor International Airport’s Terminal Four (T-4), Lennee Eller changes from the curator of the airport’s art program into a disconsolate housekeeper. She can’t believe the dust accumulating in the display cases; the chocolate, chewing gum and worse ground into the carpet nearby; the…
There was an angry one in Boston harbor, a Mad one in Alice’s wonderland. Now comes the Tempe Tea Party–a diverse assembly of artworks related to tea. It is the third such bash hosted by the Tempe Arts Center in the past six years. Its cups, saucers, jewelry, books, sculpture…
Carol Zraket welcomes visitors to her Scottsdale home with a broad smile and the weary words, “He’s in the war room.” But before she can turn to call him, her husband, George, appears carrying copies of the faxes, memos, letters, lawsuits and petitions that have been his chief arsenal in…
By almost any measure, “An Excess of Fact,” Lee Friedlander’s photographs of the Sonoran Desert at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, is an extraordinary event. It pairs one of the nation’s most distinctive photographers with a subject that’s relatively new to him and consistently elusive to most…
Impressionism has become so lovable and precious ($78.1 million for a Renoir painting in 1990) that we tend to forget what a poke in the eye the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Cezanne, Sisley and friends once seemed to be. Or that the movement’s name was coined by a…
Beyond sex, drugs, Top 10 marketing and the self-indulgences of youth, it’s hard to name many lasting cultural associations with rock ‘n’ roll. Politics, maybe, but only from time to time. Satan, I suppose, if embarrassment doesn’t keep you from saying so. Yet one rarely thinks of fine art. With…
For the past 16 years, the Arizona Museum for Youth in Mesa has thrived on the fact that children would rather “just do it” than listen to or watch grown-ups tell or show them how to do it. The museum averages about three major exhibits a year, and its hands-on…
As luck would have it, my epiphany about “Art on the Edge of Fashion,” a show of some 30 works by eight artists at ASU’s Nelson Fine Arts Center, came last Saturday night in the museum’s men’s room. I was taking care of some personal business when a woman’s voice…
When the King of Spain sent Christianity to the New World in the 1500s, he hardly counted on finding heathens living as well as the ones Hernan Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, first met in 1519. Cortes reported the ancient Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan–now Mexico City–to be filled with “large and beautiful…
The case of Andres Serrano, whose photographs are on view at the Bentley Gallery, suggests that your household variety of aversion doesn’t get artists anywhere anymore; that it takes a downright revulsion to make their careers. Up until 1989, when his photograph “Piss Christ,” depicting a crucifix immersed in two…
Not many people are familiar with the sculptor Lawrence Tenney Stevens, who lived and worked in Tempe from the 1950s until his death at age 76 in 1972, but those who are all take the same sobering gulp of air before exhaling, “Ohhhhh, he was a character, all right.” Irascible,…
In the bumpy 1960s, a number of irascible artists reached the neo-Dada conclusion that an “installation” could be something other than a military depot with radar, missiles and rusting weapons from earlier wars. It could be a room filled with unlikely materials and even more unlikely experiences in the arts…
When the Phoenix Art Museum’s sprawling new $25 million expansion/renovation hatches next month, it is expected to be one of the premier museum spaces in the Southwest. Two new wings, designed by New Yorkers Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, will double PAM’s exhibition area, to 65,000 square feet. The new…
In the 20 years that Mark Klett has been making pictures of the American West, his photographs have come to symbolize its ongoing revision in the American mind. No longer an eternal paradise of opportunity and natural splendor, it has become a lesson in the rub between the two. Take…
Diane Upchurch sees considerably more in shopping bags than “paper or plastic.” Just how much more is apparent in the 80 or so examples dating from 1985 that she has assembled into “Portable Design: A Selection of Shopping Bags,” an ASU College of Architecture show highlighting the ingenuity and marketing…
When Del Webb Corporation brought plans for its huge New River development to Maricopa County for approval early last year, the ensuing donnybrook was about as lively and entertaining as land planning gets. On one side was Del Webb, assuring the county that its 5,661-acre community–the Villages at Desert Hills–would…
Always borrowing, American artists are the greatest cultural debtors on Earth. And few among them owe the world more than potters do. Over the years, potters have rummaged the cupboards of virtually every mud-baking civilization–often extending their slippery reaches overseas and into the grave–to come up with what we like…
