Richard Lessner, the Arizona Republic editorial writer who inflamed Hurricane Andrew survivors in Florida when his victim-bashing column was reprinted there, has resigned under fire. Lessner walked out on Tuesday rather than accept a demotion to religion writer, a position he held when he joined the Republic in 1981, Lessner…
Everything that could have gone wrong did. The puppeteer hadn’t shown up. Instead of the five or six friends Lee Breuer was expecting, an audience of 35 adults and children had materialized. He wanted to cancel the performance but was told he couldn’t. So he addressed the audience, warning parents…
When writers write books, they’re published as they’ve written them. Photographers’ photographs are displayed as they’ve printed them. But playwrights and their plays, which require middlemen, are at the mercy of the actors and directors who produce them. The Terry Earp Festival at the 7th Street Theatre complex features five…
Anne Coe is a captivating conversationalist. Her passion for environmental issues is evident in her dialogue and in her artwork, and she can hold forth for hours on aspects of life in the desert you’ve never considered before. Too bad her paintings are so lousy. Coe’s current exhibition, on display…
Artist Linda Mundwiler used to collect pieces of dead birds. Today she gathers lists of stupid questions about her art instead. Among her favorites are: Do you ever paint the tender moments?” Do you do a lot of drugs before you paint?” Don’t you ever paint in earth tones?” (Her…
It’s just before midnight on a Saturday evening, and Rose Johnson is putting the finishing touches on a 25-foot mural outside her downtown Phoenix art studio. Inside, Johnson’s studio-mate, Anne Thompson, is displaying glass etchings and mixed-media paintings. Around the corner, at arty hangout Metropophobobia, a group of volunteers is…
Canadian artist ManWoman is accustomed to giddy questions about his peculiar name. He responds politely when asked how he’s listed in the telephone book (“ManWoman”); whether his friends call him Man (“No, because then strangers would have to call me Mr. Woman”); and what his mother calls him (Nothing: “She…
In the world of academia, where many things are taken quite seriously, Gus Edwards is like a breath of fresh air. He talks about how as a kid in the Caribbean he was inspired to acting by Sidney Poitier. Was it the chance to… prove that blacks were as capable…
Just when we thought the people at Actors Lab Arizona were going to change their name to the Six Women With Brain Death–or Expiring Minds Want to Know Theatre Company, they closed their long-running revival of their biggest hit ever. But they announced–you guessed it–another revival. This time it’s a…
Lee Breuer is pretty sure that if he gathered together 1,700 press agents, gave them each a copy of his bio and asked them to write an ending to his story, not one of them would place him in a Phoenix suburb, teaching interdisciplinary theatre art on a university campus…
Jaime Ituarte visited New York City for the first time last year. Before he went, his friends gave him the standard tourist warnings about crime. In Ituarte’s case, such advice was even more important because he is legally blind. Still, he says, he could recognize dangerous neighborhoods. “They smelled like…
In her 1944 oil painting “Arizona,” Dorothea Tanning stands at the edge of a cliff. She’s surrounded by the spires, buttes and mesas of the red rock country around Sedona. Only here, the rocks are blue and green in the eerie, ambiguous light of early dawn. You can’t see the…
Phoenix gave performance artist Frank Moore and his Chero Company a pleasant surprise on October 5 by showing up in record numbers for his controversial “Passions Play” at Gallery X. Eighty people doesn’t sound like a lot, but Moore is a self-described “spastic,” palsied from the neck down and unable…
Marilyn Butler remembers reading the handwriting on the wall. It was early 1989, and she was putting together an invitational show of landscape paintings at the gallery she owned in Santa Monica. She called a neighboring gallery to borrow one of its pieces. Such intergallery borrowings are common in the…
In Valley art circles, “Lisa Sette, Lisa Sette, Lisa Sette” is a mantra intoned by young artists anxious for a chance at the nirvana of showing at her gallery. Unlike her high-profile Scottsdale neighbors, where art means Southwestern glitz and glamour, Sette consistently shows serious, and, at least for the…
Melvin Killeen is an artist, but Melvin Killeen looks like my dad. Out on the town, Killeen is apt to wear brown polyester trousers with a telltale hint of a flare below the knee and a patterned cream Qiana shirt, open at the neck, exposing a triangular patch of graying…
Square One, at the corner of Washington and Central in downtown Phoenix, is a block of vacant storefronts, boarded up and painted with murals. Although beginning to show their age, the murals are bright; they’re optimistic. When you’re right up against them, walking by, the murals do a great job…
Jon Planas was a fixture on New York City’s club circuit in the late Eighties, a party boy with a flair for fashion and flash. He became known for the painted jackets that draped the famous forms of Madonna, Cher, Cyndi Lauper, and Deborah Harry, to name but a few…
Remember the rash of movies two or three years ago where everybody was switching bodies with everyone else? Fathers with sons? Women with men? Judge Reinhold with Fred Savage? As far as I know, body switching exists only in the minds of desperate screenwriters. Too bad. If it were a…
It sounded like pretty good news when the Phoenix Art Museum announced the opening of a show entitled “Five Centuries of Italian Painting, 1300-1800.” So along with, apparently, most everyone else in town, a friend and I trooped over to the museum on a recent Friday night to get a…
Mary Stokrocki’s contribution to the ASU Faculty Art Show at the Nelson Fine Arts Center neatly summarizes the hollow feeling one is left with after viewing the exhibition. Titled “THE UnBAREable lightness of being,” the piece is a vertical rectangular outline traced in flesh- and blue-colored crayon on the surface…
Everything in the picture was plastic, except Our Lady of Guadalupe and the dirt floor. Plastic flowers, plastic fruit, plastic saints, plastic covering the statue of Jesus, and behind it all, a pale blue plastic backdrop that looked like a used swimming-pool cover. It should have been the tackiest scene…
