Despite the bad juju ordinarily associated with the number 13, the 13th time truly turned out to be a charm for downtown Phoenix’s annual Chaos Theory exhibition. The one-weekend-only annual invitational show — started by an art consortium then known as 3CarPileUp, consisting of artists Randy Slack, James Angel, and…
Better chug a Red Bull before you walk into “Frank Lloyd Wright: Organic Architecture for the 21st Century,” currently taking up Steele Gallery at Phoenix Art Museum. You’ll need it. Yes, Phoenix Art Museum has done it yet again, only this time it had help from the Milwaukee Art Museum…
As we bid farewell to the year and look ahead to 2012, Jackalope Ranch contributors will bring you some greatest hits from 2011. Today we’re taking a look back at a few local art happenings that caused a stir in the scene … 10. “Seeing is Believing: Rebecca Campbell and…
Gunshots shatter the quiet of ASU Art Museum. Thankfully, the shots are coming from an edgy video installation created as part of “Securing a Free State: The Second Amendment Project,” by artist Jennifer Nelson, on display in one of the museum’s main galleries through December 31. Until last year, when…
Whatever possessed artist Karolina Sussland to create photographic take-offs on ridiculous stock photo images used to represent the average Joe by graphic designers, art directors, and clueless advertisers? Sussland’s satiric send ups sit side by side with the Shuttterstock commercial images that inspired them in an exhibition that just opened…
A little warm drizzle in no way dampened the spirits of thousands of people who showed up at the Discover India Festival at Heritage Square and Science Park on Sunday in downtown Phoenix. In fact, you’d swear the India Association of Phoenix, in collaboration with its other sister and non-profit organizations…
Way back in the mists of time — September 2000, to be exact — I reviewed one of the very first “Chaos Theory” shows, which have become an arts institution in this town. At that time, the show was installed at 3CarPileUp, a gallery/studio started by now well-known Phoenix artists…
Imagine whirring together Circus Vargas, a downtown Phoenix botanica, Lagunilla and/or Plaza del Ángel flea market in Mexico City, and a walk down Tijuana’s Avenida Revolución during which you are beset with insistent barkers pushing stuffed frogs dressed as mariachis for “almost free.” Got it? If you can, maybe, just…
I’m always somewhat leery of museum exhibitions based on work collected by one person. Many times, these shows are less than stellar, with an unsuspecting viewing audience ending up a prisoner of the collector’s particular aesthetic and vision, which can, on occasion, be brutally banal and screamingly self-absorbed. I’m glad…
The home of 81-year-old artist Dick Seeger doesn’t have a lot of curb appeal. Located in a quiet, upscale neighborhood of North Scottsdale, it certainly doesn’t look like it’s the location of anything particularly remarkable. Half-hidden by scraggly creosote bushes, its unpaved circular driveway is littered with fallout from trees…
Sometimes there’s just not enough space in my regular art reviews to devote to all the facets of individual work in an exhibition. This was especially true in the case of Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s “A Day Like Any Other,” which is a ten-year retrospective of Brazilian conceptual artist…
Keep your head up or you’ll completely miss the almost-hidden turn from Indian School Road into the parking lot of Sekong by Night, Phoenix’s first Cambodian restaurant (and probably the only one in the state of Arizona). And don’t be confused by that wall mural of a flamenco-dancing couple you’ll…
On any given day, you’ll find Brazilian multi-media artist Rivane Neuenschwander digging through the utterly humdrum details and detritus of daily life in search of ideas for her unusual art, as she has for the past 10 years. Finding the extraordinary in the everyday is a specialty of this internationally…
It was rarer than a combined sighting of Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster: four Valley museum directors all in the same spot at the same exact time. The brain trust for Phoenix-area art institutions appeared at Phoenix Art Museum Tuesday night to discuss — what else — the future…
One good thing I can say right off the bat about The Arrogant Butcher, the latest “concept” eatery from restaurant guru Sam Fox, located in CitySpace, kitty-corner to US Airways Center in downtown Phoenix: It’s convenient. And though it’s always great to see another downtown restaurant open its doors to…
Got some Girl Scout cookies sitting around? So did we. Hence, the Trefoil Cookie Showdown. There’s something perverse, or at least ironic, in combining Girl Scout cookies and liquor. So I did it. Instead of using lemon pound cake in layers for my usual trifle, I substituted Girl Scout Trefoils,…
You snooze, you lose, Phoenix. Glendale’s one-of-a-kind Bead Museum closed permanently on Saturday. It is considered the most comprehensive public bead collection in existence, containing 11,650 beads and beaded items made from a wide variety of materials. It embraces antique, ethnic, and contemporary beads and beaded objects from cultures around…
If you still believe in the trite Hollywood myth of the anguished artist — alone in a cold-water, walk-up garret, frenziedly cranking out masterpieces in a couple of sustained sessions of inspired madness — you may want to see “What Goes On and What Takes Places,” an exhibition at Modified…
Okay, I’m officially bummed. On March 12, in less than two weeks, The Bead Museum in Glendale will close. Being a lover of culture, as well as beads and jewelry for art’s sake, I am devastated by the loss of this historic collection and its research library to Valley residents,…
California artist and fabled ’70s underground cartoonist Joyce Farmer was using raw meat to make a statement decades before Lady Gaga ever dreamed of showing up at a music awards show in a designer gown made of the smelly stuff. More than 40 years ago, the artist got tired of…
Maybe I shouldn’t admit that I’ve watched every single rerun of Charmed at least three times. Sneer if you must, but my devotion to the early-21st-century TV show featuring three young witches with enviable powers has given me invaluable insight into the subject matter of “Shapeshifters,” the exhibition running at…
In 18th- and 19th-century Europe, during the alleged Age of Enlightenment, telling someone that he needed to have his head examined in no way carried the contemporary connotation of “be a good boy and take your Thorazine.” Back in pre-photography times, having your head examined was the height of scientific…
