Forty years ago, a sculptor could stop almost any American museum crowd in its tracks by erecting an abstract tower of metal. But as times have changed, sculptural works in fabricated steel have steadily lost that allure. They haven’t suffered the infamy of collapsing on and killing college students for…
If the latest show in the back room of Lisa Sette Gallery reminds you of being hustled by souvenir vendors wielding lacy glass galleons and spray-painted plaster statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Mickey Mouse at the Tijuana-San Diego border, you’ve actually gotten the real drift of “Nouveau…
Warren McArthur knows something about the tenacity of fiction. For the past quarter century, he has been trying to undo the popular one that presents America’s über-architect Frank Lloyd Wright as the designer of the Arizona Biltmore. “My uncle Albert [Chase McArthur] was the real architect, but I guess some…
Phoenix wouldn’t be Phoenix without its illusions about water. All its boats and pools and golf greens, all its fountains, irrigated farm fields and backyards have helped to turn some fairly extravagant wet dreams into everyday occurrences. That may be why last week’s formal opening of Tempe’s Rio Salado project…
It hasn’t always been easy to pare Claude Monet’s artistic achievements from his popularity. In the later half of his life (1840 to 1926), his paintings sold so well that the writer Emile Zola suggested that he might be unloading too many unfinished works that were barely dry. More recently,…
In a decade that has seen the mass market of the cellular phone and the emergence of the Internet, it’s hardly surprising that more artists than ever are turning to technology for expression. This new breed of artists comprises computer geeks, electrical engineers and quantum physicists. Two of these science…
Tempe photographer Bob Carey will do almost anything for art. He willingly shaves his entire body, slathers it with silver paint, tightly wraps his torso, thighs and head in fishing line, garrots his genitalia and pastes clear plastic dots over his skull (ears and lips included). He’s also photographed himself…
Every so often you overhear someone in an art museum or gallery wishing, “If only the art could talk.” Yet when contemporary art–thanks to electronic media–does pipe up, it often sounds like the cranky woman in Tony Oursler’s installation work Don’t Look at Me. Included in the Scottsdale Museum of…
Compared with its recent exhibitions of paintings on copper and works from ancient Egypt, the Phoenix Art Museum’s “Great Design: 100 Masterpieces From the Vitra Design Museum” is a welcomed dive back to the commonplace. Instead of rarities and treasures, it features objects familiar to just about everyone’s backside. It…
It’s tempting to say the Heard Museum’s new $18.1 million expansion has transformed the institution. But you don’t have to wander very far through its updated galleries and hallways to hear visitors saying the same old things about the art and artifacts they can’t readily identify. Down one corridor: “Is…
Mimes are usually mute and wave gloved hands in the air. Actors pretend to be someone–anyone–else. Yet you never know what to expect from performance artists. One day they’re masturbating in a gallery. Another, they’re having a friend shoot them in the arm with a gun, or ranting about their…
You see it in American art museums all the time: women towing men from object to object, cooing over things that make the fellers squirm or want to pull out a hammer or a chain saw. But as one official at the West Valley Art Museum/Sun Cities Museum of Art…
You knew Olympia Dukakis was an Oscar- and Obie-winning actor. You saw her in Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias and in many other films. So what’s she doing acting as creative consultant to a San Francisco dance troupe that’s making a new work here in Phoenix? No scripts in the offing?…
In the opening image of a documentary video, Meryl Tankard dances sinuously, sweatily, whipping her hair in front of the camera. “Dance really should be the ultimate form of expression,” she says when she finally catches her breath. “I wanted to act, to paint, to design. But then I thought,…
The Phoenix Art Museum has wasted little time in living up to the cultural promise of its expansion and renovation. Barely two years into its new digs, the museum is drawing record crowds with its exhibition of Egyptian art and artifacts. Since it opened in October, the mummy show, as…
For more than 150 years, photographers have been busily snapping opposing realities and versions of the truth. They’ve wielded cameras as tools of analysis and exploration, to clarify mysteries and bring the distant near. And they’ve used them as tools of expression, to make enigmas of the commonplace. There’s plenty…
The 20th anniversary of the Movimiento Artistico del Rio Salado–better known downtown as MARS Artspace–is as much a milestone of resilience as it is one of culture. The organization, now hosting its anniversary show, “20 Years On,” has outlasted the involvement of most of its Chicano founders. It has long…
For nine years Michael Cole starred as one of Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s dancers. Now he’s starring on stage and screen. Computer screen that is. The tall, gorgeous, dreadlocked dancer/choreographer could easily star on the silver screen too. Cole dances his work Command X/V, Versions 1, 2, and 3 during…
Names like “A Puncher’s Paradise,” “Reluctant Mount,” “Last Drop” and “Lickin’ Clean” leave little doubt that you’re in the company of men who wear chaps. No, this isn’t theme night at the local gay bar. This is the Cowboy Artists of America annual bunkhouse of fun at the Phoenix Art…
Great art from past civilizations always seems to contain more future than past. Some of that might be because of the money and grandiose faith we cast in the direction of old treasures and the cliche of “art for the ages.” Yet you can trace much of the verve in…
It’s fairly easy to fall into the trap of looking to a nation’s art for state department insights about its culture–one nation one art. But even before you’re through the first gallery of the ASU Art Museum’s “Contemporary Art From Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island” it’s clear…
The primary theme of Galeria Mesa’s current exhibition, “Light Sensitive,” is photography and the photographic processes that artists are using to make their images. Yet the show’s quieter point is the difficulty this kind of exhibition has in attracting first-rate work. Like many exhibitions developed by small art centers around…
