Most of the people who showed up at a recent sake tasting hosted by the Japan America Society of Phoenix knew what many Americans apparently don’t: Good sake should never be served hot.”The only place in the world you’ll get hot sake is here in the U.S.,” American sake maker…
Move over, Awesome Blossom. There’s a new vegetable on the marketing block that’s threatening to steal diehard fans of French-fried onion and potato snacks.For the past 21 years, Phoenix-based Seaphire International, a spin-off of Planetary Design Corporation, has been researching and developing sea asparagus, as this exceptionally salty cultivar is…
I’m still at a loss as to why Mexico’s Cinco de Mayo is such a big deal in the U.S. when it’s not a big deal in Mexico. Most people I’ve polled labor under the illusion that the fifth of May is Mexican Independence Day. If you think that, you…
“We want to be the Harry and David of certified organic produce. That’s our aspiration,” says Gina Verdugo, co-owner with Dan Wygocki of Boxed Greens Inc. Verdugo is referring to the much-copied originator of the now legendary Fruit-of-the-Month Club, a multimillion-dollar mail-order company founded in Medford, Oregon, during the Great…
As I swing open the heavy, carved wooden door to the West Valley Art Museum in Surprise, the odd juxtaposition of the serene paintings of Phoenix’s own 92-year-old Philip Curtis with the in-your-face artwork of 78-year-old Leonard Baskin throws me completely off guard. I’ve come to see “Leonard Baskin: The…
The Mad Hatter must have organized the menu and set the table for the First International Edible Book High Tea. The “tea” — and I use the term quite loosely — was held during one of Tempe’s patience-trying street fairs on Changing Hands Bookstore’s back patio during intermittent rain showers…
Phoenix video artist Sloane McFarland is the first to admit that he’s not quite sure exactly what “PHACAEANS,” his laptop video installation at ASU Art Museum’s Experimental Gallery at Matthews Center, is about. A part of the extensive citywide programming for “Sites Around the City,” the museum’s current art exhibition…
Back in 1958, when most high school guys were dreaming about cruising Camelback in a cool, two-tone Chevy, Gary Schiller was probably thinking about sausages. That’s because at age 13, he began working after school as a Boy Friday at Schreiner’s Fine Sausages, a Phoenix landmark on Seventh Street. Established…
Never has one cocktail inspired so many people to produce so many memorably bad quotes (not to mention urban myths). I’m talking about the martini, of course. You know, quotes like those slung around by Barnaby Conrad III, author of The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic. In…
Pulsating salsa tunes blare from a boom box as you walk into K-Rico Cafe & Bakery. The small eatery is plopped at the end of a funky strip mall at Glendale and 12th Street, two doors down from The Empire of Toys Collectibles and Comics. Filled with sweet and garlicky…
Artist Roger Shimomura’s earliest childhood memories are etched into his psyche. He is 3 years old and living in a U.S. government internment camp in a forlorn corner of Idaho — a camp set up to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II. Shimomura has drawn on those vivid, often poignant…
“Any time you introduce a large body of water into an art museum, it’s a little hair-raising,” Heather Lineberry, senior curator at ASU Art Museum, confides with a nervous laugh. Lineberry is making uneasy reference to an expansive, 19-by-22-foot reflecting pool brimming with several inches of water, which was recently…
When fine woodworker Steve Makin became sufficiently frustrated by the lack of gallery and museum exhibition opportunities available to Arizona woodworkers, he decided to do something about it. The most recent fruits of Makin’s persistence can be seen in “Makin Furniture,” an exhibition of fine wood furniture and functional objects…
It is not your typical art opening. There are no paintings on the wall, no spotlighted sculptures on pedestals. The usual clusters of murmuring, wineglass-wielding museumgoers, clad in black and ignoring the artwork, are nowhere in sight at the kick-off of “Club Extra,” the ongoing performance/installation created by artist Angela…
One quick look at the huge mixed-media paintings of artist William T. Wiley — now on display in “Recent and Relevant” at Scottsdale’s Riva Yares Gallery — and it becomes crystal clear that Wiley is a man who must never sleep. That’s probably because, for 40 years, this consummate artist…
Little Black Sambo, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben — all that’s missing from this classic cast of racist stereotypes is a lawn jockey at the front door of Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. No, SMOCA is not hosting a Ku Klux Klan convention or a twisted Antiques Roadshow episode. It’s just…
If the latest show in the back room of Lisa Sette Gallery reminds you of being hustled by souvenir vendors wielding lacy glass galleons and spray-painted plaster statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Mickey Mouse at the Tijuana-San Diego border, you’ve actually gotten the real drift of “Nouveau…
Tempe photographer Bob Carey will do almost anything for art. He willingly shaves his entire body, slathers it with silver paint, tightly wraps his torso, thighs and head in fishing line, garrots his genitalia and pastes clear plastic dots over his skull (ears and lips included). He’s also photographed himself…
Jose Benavides spent almost a year begging or buying the 500 license plates that he has since pounded into a gigantic depiction of the Virgin Mary attached to the chassis of a 1979 Datsun pickup truck. Benavides’ “Madonna” is a 17-foot-tall, fully drivable shrine to Our Lady of Grace–a sort…
‘The sign posted on the door of Tempe Arts Center warns that the center’s current ceramics exhibit, “Master’s Touch: Akio Takamori,” contains images of adult themes. What it doesn’t tell you, however, is that the work within is a poetic paean to the myth and magic that have always surrounded…
According to artist Hans Haacke, all art becomes purely nostalgic after a period of ten years. Haacke’s own 1991 mixed-media sculpture “Collateral,” included in Phoenix Art Museum’s “Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art,” falls premature victim to this gloomy, but fairly accurate, pronouncement about the staying power of…
Deposit all linear thinking at the shadowy portals of “Buried Secrets,” Bill Viola’s five-part, multimedia installation at ASU Art Museum at Nelson Fine Arts Center. That’s because this potent visual and auditory experience is consciously designed to be understood on a purely intuitive plane, a level on which just about…
