You don’t notice the powder-blue hat at first. Its hue is too cool to steal your eye from the surrounding candy-wrapper yellows, oranges and reds. Yet once you see it, rising almost headless above a candy aisle in Andreas Gursky’s large photographic mural 99 Cent, the hat becomes one of…
New York painter Donald Sultan long ago abandoned the tried-and-true tools and materials customarily associated with an artist. Eschewing canvas, Sultan instead opts for heavy-duty Masonite topped with cheap, run-of-the-mill linoleum tiles — the kind seen on the floors of old cafeterias and kitchens — as a base for his…
I’m being far from hyperbolic when I say that the most searingly memorable art event in the Valley this summer is Iranian-born Shirin Neshat’s critically acclaimed 1998 video installation, Rapture.And, after seeing this 13-minute piece, on loan from Santa Monica’s Broad Art Foundation and staged locally in a stripped-down, shadowy,…
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Apparently, it’s high-profile art collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman, judging from all the glitzy portraits commissioned from famous Mexican artists that now grace the walls of the Phoenix Art Museum as part of “Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Twentieth-Century…
No birthday party in this town seems to be complete without the tradition of breaking a piñata. And why should it? After all, nothing says “Happy Birthday” better than taking a giant wooden stick and beating the complete crap out of, say, a life-size Barbie or a smiling yellow Picachu…
Too much digital or ‘Net.art’ suffers from an anemia that comes from a steady diet of neo-Conceptualism and raw, uncut theory,” sputters Mark Dery, author of Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, during an e-mail-generated discussion with several prominent museum curators in March’s Artforum magazine. “Let’s face…
Walk around on Mill Avenue, or any other disaffected-youth-magnet sort of locale, and you’re bound to see a proliferation of bad tattoos. It’s symptomatic of a generation of 20- to 30-year-olds who years ago grew an affection for tattoos as a mark of rebellion and not artistry; scratchwork is omnipresent…
It’s difficult to make a convincing case for the comforts of things you can’t touch. Yet there’s clearly a physical ease about the fashions and furnishings in Phoenix Art Museum’s exhibition “Sophisticated Moderns: Claire McCardell and Edward Wormley.”Both were masters of the kinds of material subtleties that are often better…
For years, I’ve harbored two secret but obsessive desires. The first is to furnish an entire house solely with swap meet treasures in truly terrible taste — you know, resin-on-wood wall clocks decorated with praying hands, garish orange floral crushed velvet couches, faded plastic flower arrangements, glitter-splashed plaster of Paris…
It’s tough to name the feeling you get being rolled, head first, into James Turrell’s Gasworks — maybe a little anxious, maybe a little silly. Yet when the friendly attendant in a white lab coat reminds you not to sit up once the light show begins inside the spherical chamber,…
Artist Joy Episalla is a student of the past. The history that she documents through the lens of her trusty 35mm camera isn’t one of political turmoil, international conflict or even the lives of great figures. In fact, people don’t show up in her work at all. Rather, the history…
If you need an antidote for the diabetic coma you may have fallen into after seeing Phoenix Art Museum’s syrupy “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People” exhibition, we suggest hightailing it — stat — to Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale. The gallery’s current group exhibition, which includes recent work by…
Considering what’s now on display in “Swans and Portraits” — an exhibition of screen prints and two large paintings by Julian Schnabel at AZ/NY Gallery in Scottsdale — the New York artist better not be giving up his film directing day job anytime soon. AZ/NY Gallery, new to the Scottsdale…
Pornography. Say the word out loud — do you spit it out with disgust or roll the syllables off your tongue gently, dreamily? Does the mere thought of pornography revolt you, make you muse about the decline of Western civilization in the 21st century? Does it weigh you down with…
To look at her, Phoenix painter Sue Chenoweth — an indefatigably cheerful 47-year-old married mother of two teenagers — doesn’t strike you as a stereotypically introspective, visionary artist type. But the frenzied mixed-media paintings of this Valley artist, now on exhibit through February 27 at Modified in central Phoenix, underscore…
“Craft” has proven to be a remarkably elastic term. Once a relatively taut label for useful objects made by hand, it has been stretched by artists in the past half-century to cover an ever-widening array of things made mostly to be seen. Just how wide an array is apparent in…
A heart. A bathrobe. A Greek statue.Pretty simple objects for the large job of redefining the notion of art in the latter half of the 20th century. But Jim Dine is hardly a student of conventional wisdom: The artist once performed in the basement of a New York church by…
It took artist Merrill Mahaffey 20 years to realize that the art he thought he liked painting was actually just the art he thought he was supposed to be painting.”When I was in college and graduate school, the common teaching was that a painter was supposed to end up as…
No modern artist made more of normality than Norman Rockwell did. “I do ordinary people in everyday situations, and that’s about all I can do,” he once wrote. Yet Rockwell had a highly theatrical and romanticized sense of the ho-hum. The more than 70 paintings and several hundred magazine illustrations…
The general trend in contemporary art galleries these days is that a certain exclusivity can be achieved through sparse offerings. You won’t find that at the Udinotti Gallery — it’s done little to change its look and feel in 20 years in downtown Scottsdale. At this gallery, the art is…
The irony of most travel is that no matter how far you go, you end up in a place that’s not so different from home at its core. For Bronx-born artist Elias Rivera, it took trips to Mexico, Guatemala and even Peru for him to realize that any global search…
Even before the lights dimmed, it was apparent that this was no ordinary movie première. Held in the recreation center — down the path toward the boccie and shuffleboard courts — of the La Posada retirement community in Green Valley, the screening of a documentary about two of La Posada’s…
