The swamp cooler: water + electric fan = cool air. It’s a device as minimal as the desert landscape itself, and it entered American popular culture right here in Arizona. It’s as key to the classic Phoenix tableau as saguaros, ranch houses and retirees. Swampers are about leaving the door…
Like it or not, guns are as American as Happy Meals and maxed-out credit cards, so making them the theme of a group exhibition invites all kinds of timely and biting cultural criticism. The pieces in “The Gun Show: No Background Check Required” at reZurrection Gallery in Tempe are mixed…
Deborah Butterfield makes horse statues, but don’t hold it against her. Her horses are not the ones of civic monuments, rendered in elegant marble and carrying some dead white war hero. Nor are they the romantic bronze beasts of flaring nostrils and lush manes cranked out by mediocre Western artists…
You must, we repeat, must go to the Phoenix Art Museum and see the Impressionist paintings on exhibit for just a few more days. We know what you’re thinking. Impressionist paintings are boring, and those oh-so-pretty depictions of bucolic French landscapes are the sort of art swill your grandma would…
Virgil Ortiz, ceramicist, fashion designer and Cochiti Pueblo Indian, makes visual mash-ups by putting designs inspired by traditional tribal pottery in contemporary places. In “La Renaissance Indigène” at the Heard Museum, Ortiz’s black-and-white swirls, lines and animals show up on purses, corsets and skirts; in a jerky black-and-white video; and…
Marcia Myers grooves on color, texture and ancient Italy. Her abstract diptychs and triptychs — artspeak for paintings made of two or three panels attached to one another — are floating fields of sun-soaked Mediterranean color that will remind you of an ancient Roman villa crossed with a cool, downtown…
She’s been dead for 34 years, but Diane Arbus, the photographer who found her muse among the weird and the seedy, is hot again thanks to a retrospective of her work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. You don’t have to journey to Gotham to see her startling photos…
Some women enjoy being a girl, but Elizabeth Bretharte Lyon isn’t so sure. The Phoenix artist vents her doubts about sugar and spice and everything nice in a powerful exhibition of photographs at the Paulina Miller Gallery. Beware, Lyon’s images say, there’s poison in being pretty. At first glance, Lyon’s…
Designers are maligned as the pragmatists of the art world, the art majors who were employable instead of outrageous, responsible instead of romantic. Unlike artists, designers don’t do glamorous acts of audacity like lop off their ears, marry ex-porn stars or drape Central Park in sheets of plastic. Designers make…
