Nearly 35 years ago, Ernesto “Che” Guevara — radical Marxist revolutionary, trained medical doctor and severe asthmatic — was captured and killed in Bolivia by Bolivian military forces. Guevara had gone there to spread the political revolution he had successfully fomented in Cuba during the 1950s side by side with…

Long before the economy took its most recent nosedive, the state of the contemporary art scene in the Valley of the Sun could be labeled as pretty abysmal. Only a handful of decent contemporary galleries still open their doors, especially ones willing or financially able to show the work of…

“Stories and Souvenirs,” an exhibition of documentary and portrait photography now lining the walls of ASU’s Northlight Gallery, inspires confidence that classic film-based photography, as practiced by camera masters in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, still survives and thrives, despite the world’s present predisposition to All Things Deeply Digital.Located in…

Having been born and raised 15 minutes from the Mexican border, it’s no surprise that I have a deep and abiding love for Mexican folk arts, crafts and culture. I’ve spent years traveling through Mexico’s interior, boarding buses, hiring drivers, renting cars, all in the ongoing quest to root out…

What a difference almost a decade makes in the ever-morphing world of contemporary art. I can really appreciate this fact when I think about the very first article I wrote for New Times. It was a review of “Alternative Identities,” the 1993 Triennial at Phoenix Art Museum curated by Bruce…

New York painter Donald Sultan long ago abandoned the tried-and-true tools and materials customarily associated with an artist. Eschewing canvas, Sultan instead opts for heavy-duty Masonite topped with cheap, run-of-the-mill linoleum tiles — the kind seen on the floors of old cafeterias and kitchens — as a base for his…

I’m being far from hyperbolic when I say that the most searingly memorable art event in the Valley this summer is Iranian-born Shirin Neshat’s critically acclaimed 1998 video installation, Rapture.And, after seeing this 13-minute piece, on loan from Santa Monica’s Broad Art Foundation and staged locally in a stripped-down, shadowy,…

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Apparently, it’s high-profile art collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman, judging from all the glitzy portraits commissioned from famous Mexican artists that now grace the walls of the Phoenix Art Museum as part of “Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Twentieth-Century…

Too much digital or ‘Net.art’ suffers from an anemia that comes from a steady diet of neo-Conceptualism and raw, uncut theory,” sputters Mark Dery, author of Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, during an e-mail-generated discussion with several prominent museum curators in March’s Artforum magazine. “Let’s face…

For years, I’ve harbored two secret but obsessive desires. The first is to furnish an entire house solely with swap meet treasures in truly terrible taste — you know, resin-on-wood wall clocks decorated with praying hands, garish orange floral crushed velvet couches, faded plastic flower arrangements, glitter-splashed plaster of Paris…

If you need an antidote for the diabetic coma you may have fallen into after seeing Phoenix Art Museum’s syrupy “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People” exhibition, we suggest hightailing it — stat — to Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale. The gallery’s current group exhibition, which includes recent work by…

Considering what’s now on display in “Swans and Portraits” — an exhibition of screen prints and two large paintings by Julian Schnabel at AZ/NY Gallery in Scottsdale — the New York artist better not be giving up his film directing day job anytime soon. AZ/NY Gallery, new to the Scottsdale…

To look at her, Phoenix painter Sue Chenoweth — an indefatigably cheerful 47-year-old married mother of two teenagers — doesn’t strike you as a stereotypically introspective, visionary artist type. But the frenzied mixed-media paintings of this Valley artist, now on exhibit through February 27 at Modified in central Phoenix, underscore…

If “No Absolutes” — ASU Art Museum’s group exhibition showcasing artists working today in the Southwest — is any indication of what is truly being produced in the region, maybe it’s time to pack it up and move to Minnesota. Jointly curated by the museum’s director, Marilyn Zeitlin, senior curator…

Rotting bodies, leering skulls, flickering candles, droopy roses — not one of these creaky, well-worn symbols for death and the passage of time makes an appearance in “Memento Mori,” the latest national juried exhibition organized by Mesa Contemporary Arts. Formerly operating under the name of Galeria Mesa, Mesa Contemporary Arts…

If I am ever forced at samurai swordpoint to come up with solid truisms about art at the beginning of the second millennium, I would have to say there are but two I could bet on to save my life. The first is that the genuinely beautiful will never go…

In astrophysics parlance, the term “chaos theory” refers to the hypothesis that even a simple system can manifest unpredictable and highly complicated behavior. In other words, even the tiniest uncertainty in initial conditions within a system can have far-ranging, sometimes unforeseeable effects down the line. The flap of a butterfly’s…

How did a nice, quiet girl from a small town in upstate New York find herself learning to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese, traipsing all over China and other parts of Asia like Indiana Jones and eventually landing in Phoenix, Arizona?Janet Baker, new curator of Asian art at Phoenix Art Museum,…

The exhibition catalogue accompanying Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest offering, “do it,” makes no bones about it. The show’s title, notes catalogue essayist Bruce Altshuler, is designed to bring to mind the nostalgic rallying cry of radical Vietnam War protestor and Yippie co-founder Jerry Rubin, as well as the…

Ever send out an invitation to a big wingding and no one RSVP’d? That’s basically what happened to Mesa Arts Center’s Galeria Mesa when it sent out a submission call for its third juried exhibition of work by art educators who teach in Arizona’s public schools, colleges and universities –…

Don’t expect to see the luminous resin shrines and mysterious opalescent spheres for which Valley artist Mayme Kratz previously has been known when you go to see “Waking in the Dark,” an exhibition of Kratz’s most current work at Scottsdale’s Lisa Sette Gallery.The only stylistic remnant of her older artwork…