If your home looks like the set of Mad Men (or you wish it did), then drop that double Old Fashioned and set your WABAC time machine for Modern Phoenix Expo, a showcase of modern and contemporary architecture, interior design, landscaping, furniture, literature and home renovation. This year’s event is…

For most of us, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is a coffee table book — something we wanted to read (or wanted others to think we read) but never did. That’s a shame, because Dr. Stephen Hawking is more than a contemporary bright light of theoretical physics and…

Tie on your couture bib — it’s time for the 33rd Annual Scottsdale Culinary Festival, where the elite and effete meet to eat. Bring a hearty appetite and gorge yourself on over a dozen events featuring grub from local restaurants including Petite Maison and Ocean Prime, celebrity chef seminars by…

At first glance, Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers looks like another semi-autobiographical intergenerational family comedy meets coming-of-age story. Peer a little closer and you’ll find a play that’s less autobiographical—and less overtly sentimental—than most of Simon’s other plays. This is Simon at the top of his game, the play that…

Remember when galley slaves rowed boats to cadences beaten on drums by huge, sweaty guys, instead of instructions barked by a Yale Bulldog with a bullhorn? Neither do we. Still, there’s nothing quite like a boat with a drummer, as you’ll see and hear at the eighth annual AZ Dragon…

To act in a telenovela, Erik Estrada once said you only need to know the story; the lines are fed to you. In our mediated reality, images of Mexico follow similar lines: talking heads repeating emotionally charged and clumsy narratives, tweaking the script to suit their interests. Four photographers challenge,…

If you feel like First Fridays have become more party than arty, or if you just hanker to poke your head into galleries and hot spots that usually bar their doors against the art walk rabble, then turn your toes toward the 23rd annual Art Detour, one of the longest-running…

Although the internet is useful in helping new artists generate buzz and connecting art aficionados with their favorite artists, Lisa Sette doubts that brick-and-mortar galleries are going away anytime soon. “I believe strongly that art remains experiential; that you need to see it in the flesh to fully appreciate it,”…

One magical night in 1995, Stella Pope Duarte had a dream in which her dead father told her that it was her destiny to be a writer, and that every element she needed to pen her stories could be found in her own life and experiences growing up in the…

If you dig Japanese culture but can’t swing the ticket to Tokyo, then spare yourself the typhoons, earthquakes, and Godzilla attacks and drop by the 27th annual Matsuri Festival. Follow the thunder of taiko drums to the delicious yakisoba, grab a snow cone (with ice cream in the bottom), and…

Thesis presentations are nerve-wracking enough without a bunch of rubberneckers showing up, but don’t let that stop you from going to see “Reflections,” a thesis exhibition by Arizona State University Master of Fine Art candidate Jason Ripper. The artist, who specializes in intermedia, slips from representational art to abstraction, at…

Memory troubled Emily Dickinson throughout her life, bubbling up from limbic depths to agitate her surface world. She must have felt its disturbance keenly soon after her mother died, when she wrote, “Memory is a strange Bell – Jubilee, and Knell,” reminding us that, like a mosquito in amber, a…

In high school, we always suspected our art teachers were unsuccessful journeymen and women who had resorted to teaching to pay the rent. Maybe university art teachers are in it for the bennies, too, but there is one key difference: Art faculty must have real artistic chops. Those talents are…

Back in her vampire days, Anne Rice would show up to book signings in a coffin. Rather makes you wonder what they’ll carry her in on now that she’s on the side of the angels. Not that Rice has strayed far from the supernatural; she’s just traded caskets and chronicles…

It’s never been easy – or cheap – to get noticed in photography, an industry where self-publishing a book of your work roughly equates to printing a business card. The internet offers ready access to self-publication tools, promising to help you capture a wider audience, but too many sites vie…

After millennia of tomb scratchings, decades of gallery shows, and the serial ubiquity of Keith Haring and Banksy, it’s a wonder we’re still debating the art value of graffiti. The best street art marries clarity and sincerity with provocative, often uncompromising, statements — provoking the very reactions that we expect…

No particular place to go? Ride along in your automobile to Motoring Thru Time at Heritage Square. Even if you don’t know a jalopy from a hatchback, you’re bound to find something to rev your engine among the 100-plus righteous rides at this classic vehicle show. It’s not all ’55…

Surrealism was always a muddled movement; nevertheless, it succeeded in imprinting its aesthetic and stylistic qualities in the collective unconscious. Witness that museum of co-opted rebellions, the dorm room, where Dalis and Magrittes nestle between posters of Che Guevara and decades-defunct punk bands. That’s more an indictment of poseurs than…

Shakespeare called art a mirror; 300 years later, Brecht replied that it was a hammer. Perhaps, though, truth is just as effectively framed in an embroiderer’s hoop or scried in a peyote stitch. After all, deft hands and an inspired mind can transform even the meanest material into something meaningful…

Shakespeare called art a mirror; 300 years later, Brecht replied that it was a hammer. Perhaps, though, truth is just as effectively framed in an embroiderer’s hoop or scried in a peyote stitch. After all, deft hands and an inspired mind can transform even the meanest material into something meaningful…

p>Shakespeare called art a mirror; 300 years later, Brecht replied that it was a hammer. Perhaps, though, truth is just as effectively framed in an embroiderer’s hoop or scried in a peyote stitch. After all, deft hands and an inspired mind can transform even the meanest material into something meaningful…

A longstanding Japanese metaphor describes human beings as ukigusa: duckweed floating down the river of life, buoyed and propelled through no effort of their own, swirled, pulled, and deflected by currents beyond their ken or control. It’s an allegory that might apply to any of us, but it captures particularly…