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…
If you are un patron des arts, hip to the street-artist-cum-gallery-phenom tip, you’ve probably seen Basquiat five times and even own a Keith Haring tie you picked up at the Museum Store at Scottsdale Fashion Square. You may have even heard of “Lalo Land,” the installation at Thought Crime Gallery…
Linda Lewis apparently has a little trouble with authority.In her solo show at the Burton Barr Central Library and group show at Mesa Contemporary Arts, she uses old historical texts and documents to wage an arty war against history’s multitude of oppressive forces. Her weapon isn’t the heady philosophical discourse…
This is a city of ghosts. Like an ancient necropolis unearthed from beneath the desert, Phoenix is a place of the dead. You see them caught in mid-scream in front of the bronze dome of the State Capitol, wandering eyeless across the dirt mounds of Pueblo Grande on Washington Street…
Philip Curtis, the Scottsdale painter who died November 12 at age 93, would have loved the Phoenix Art Museum’s farewell to him last week. He always liked a good party. And this one included some of his favorite things: a few hundred of his closest friends praising him and his…
In our daily physical world, “Sustained,” the new installation by Gene Cooper, is located at the Lisa Sette Gallery in downtown Scottsdale. The installation also exists in the cyberworld of technology and virtual reality, over a tangled web of fiber-optic cables. And on yet another level, the work exists literally…
Gardens have been a source of contemplation and inspiration ever since we were booted out of the first one for bad behavior. These havens give us order and perfection within the otherwise untamed chaos of the natural world. In the solace they provide, some religious scholars have argued, we are…
If “No Absolutes” — ASU Art Museum’s group exhibition showcasing artists working today in the Southwest — is any indication of what is truly being produced in the region, maybe it’s time to pack it up and move to Minnesota. Jointly curated by the museum’s director, Marilyn Zeitlin, senior curator…
We’ve come to know an Annie Leibovitz photograph not by any particular style or photographic technique but by the combination of two relatively simple characteristics — if the photo is of a celebrity and said celebrity is doing something unusual or rather un-celebrity-like, then it must have come from the…
Besides the obvious mind alteration and outright brainwash inflicted upon all the video game-obsessed minions who populate the elementary schools and high schools across our country, a less virulent but sad phenomenon awaits them in adulthood. It has nothing to do with the usual criticisms of overhyped sex and violence…
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea. — Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”Dylan Thomas knew the harsh truth that childhood is nothing but a myth. No matter how much we…
Rotting bodies, leering skulls, flickering candles, droopy roses — not one of these creaky, well-worn symbols for death and the passage of time makes an appearance in “Memento Mori,” the latest national juried exhibition organized by Mesa Contemporary Arts. Formerly operating under the name of Galeria Mesa, Mesa Contemporary Arts…
Liliana Porter’s exhibition, “Secret Lives of Toys,” slipped into the Phoenix Art Museum in early September when most of the bright lights were still shining on Annie Leibovitz’s portraits of women. It overlapped the Leibovitz extravaganza for only a few weeks. But that was long enough for Porter’s quiet images…
Western tradition, in all its romanticized glory, has always appealed most intensely to the urban dwellers of the East Coast. From their cries of gold on the leftmost shore, through pulp magazines, to serialized television shows and onto New York fashion runways, the West has always been about the ideal…
If I am ever forced at samurai swordpoint to come up with solid truisms about art at the beginning of the second millennium, I would have to say there are but two I could bet on to save my life. The first is that the genuinely beautiful will never go…
Western tradition, in all its romanticized glory, has always appealed most intensely to the urban dwellers of the East Coast. From their cries of gold on the leftmost shore, through pulp magazines, to serialized television shows and onto New York fashion runways, the West has always been about the ideal…
Going to the airport for reasons other than the usual provides an entirely new perspective on the place: Suited beings traverse the empty corridors looking nowhere but ahead; strange desert-themed gift shops offer the best in plastic souvenir ware such as rattlesnake heads encased in glass, while other “high end”…
In astrophysics parlance, the term “chaos theory” refers to the hypothesis that even a simple system can manifest unpredictable and highly complicated behavior. In other words, even the tiniest uncertainty in initial conditions within a system can have far-ranging, sometimes unforeseeable effects down the line. The flap of a butterfly’s…
