They call it “Phantasmagoria: De Trop Capsule Episode #2,” but the scene looks like Trading Spaces meets Alice in Wonderland. Mark Freedman and Grant Wiggins wrestle with the sand-colored carpet as Oliver Hibert looks on, dark circles rimming dazed eyes. It’s one day before the innovative exhibition is set to…
Picture a painting, suffused with a golden glow, in which naked men and women writhe in what appears to be a bed of gleaming black lava, like tortured souls in purgatory waiting to be released into heaven. In the foreground, a man with an amputated leg is helped to the…
Several years ago, I was soundly excoriated in the pages of this newspaper by a seriously disaffected letter writer from the arts community. She was incensed about a review I wrote concerning a downtown art gallery event that I found less than, shall we say, aesthetically enriching. In fact, she…
If appearance counts for anything, the art scene in Phoenix is thriving. Literally thousands of people make their way from gallery to gallery the first Friday of each month, flooding Roosevelt Street and Grand Avenue. The interest of locals has been echoed nationally, even drawing notice in Art in America…
Aderelict-looking Toucan Sam clutches a wad of money in one wing, a paper-bag-wrapped liquor bottle in the other. Behind him Cap’n Crunch and Lucky the Leprechaun (of Lucky Charms fame) are in a purple convertible lowrider; Crunch is riding shotgun, firing a semi-automatic handgun at a Keebler elf and that…
The middle of a scorching summer seems like the worst possible time to open a coffee shop and art space. Especially since, restricted by anal Tempe business ordinances about announcing your “grand opening,” you don’t dare advertise the place until students come back to Arizona State University. But Three Roots…
A fire last September forced Amsterdam co-owner Todd Colin to consider a major restoration to the nightclub. On Central just north of the downtown core, the gay bar has been known for its swank interior, so Colin naturally set about making the place as cushy as it had been before…
Of its many owners, surely the strangest person to purchase Phoenix’s first skyscraper, the Westward Ho hotel, was Roger Rudin, a fundamentalist preacher who briefly took over the building with a business partner in the late 1970s. Only after his death in 1998 was it revealed in New Times that…
On a recent Sunday evening, a good while after dusk, the artist known simply as Rodgell led a caravan of cyclists to his downtown Tempe studio to unveil his latest work, a mounted sculpture of a steam locomotive coming out of a wall, its headlight lit, and behind it a…
The last show I remember at the old space that once housed Art Lab 16 was so haunting, it’s never left my mind. The storefront on East Roosevelt Street was nothing to look at; even today, the thing you notice first is the weatherworn corrugated aluminum covering the front window…
You could belt out Blondie’s “Call Me,” or ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” Maybe “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles. Fitting snugly in the cushiony pod, you select a song — David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” seems the most appropriate — and sing into a microphone, your voice echoing against a chorus of…
How exactly to characterize Perihelion Arts? As a little shop of horrors, delights and complexities? That seems just about right. Not that this art gallery/bookstore and occasional music venue is teeny. The good-sized space with its pocked concrete floors and white-and-black interior adds heft to the oasis of art life…
I couldn’t help but scoff. A friend had forwarded me a notice about “Art & Society,” a new lecture series taking place at Arizona State University, and the kickoff event sounded too precious by half. For one thing, there was the setting: brunch at a posh resort, the Grayhawk Golf…
Edward Dominguez’s studio door was wide open. He was waiting for Chinese food, and had only just begun to survey his previous night’s work, large oil paints of his visions of Phoenix’s fifth tallest building, the Viad Tower. I called the former architect turned painter from the curb in front…
My father disliked comic books, even smart, deep ones, like Art Spiegelman’s Maus. He just couldn’t get past the words-and-pictures-in-boxes thing. To him, the comic book was a crude, impoverished vehicle, and its content became less significant by virtue of its form. This frustrated me. After all, he liked art,…
I can’t help thinking about empire lately, as in the end of. Only that’s not Nero fiddling. It sounds more like the Charlie Daniels Band. In July, I went to see “The Surrealist Revolution” at the Pompidou Center in Paris, and I thought about how Surrealism often has been written…
If you read last month’s Art in America, you know that Studio LoDo (along with a lot of other deserving art spaces in the Scottsdale/Phoenix/Tempe megalopolitan area) is now officially “on the map.” Those of you who’ve been to this warehouse space with a loading-dock entrance don’t need to wonder…
On the first Friday night of every month, the art galleries in downtown Phoenix, big and small, as well as many artists’ studios and temporary art spaces, open their doors to the now thousands of people who come through on self-guided tours. Since the mid-’90s, nonprofit volunteer organization Artlink has…
If you were going to categorize the work of Adam Chodzko, whose first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. is now on view at Arizona State University, you’d have to resort to something like “participatory conceptual performance art,” a clumsy mouthful that doesn’t begin to convey the magic and humor…
One indication of the Valley art scene’s healthy pulse is the proliferation of small, worthwhile shows in unexpected places. Recently, the lower level of the Tempe Public Library has housed several such treats, the most recent of which features works by six artists participating in the city’s Studio Artist Program…
If you’d like to see some extraordinary art by someone whose name has all but vanished from the art world, go to Vanier Gallery and look into the paintings and drawings of Jochen Seidel. Seidel has been called “the German Jackson Pollock” and “a unique link between German and American…
This is a season of big ideas at the ASU Art Museum. Sex, self, gender, time — take your pick. If you don’t walk out of these shows thinking, you might need a box of mental floss. Begin with Janis Lewin’s “The Aftermath (9/11).” You may feel as if you’ve…
