Touring the artworks at the three terminals at Sky Harbor International Airport provides a lesson in Phoenix’s progressive sophistication in relation to public art. The big bird mosaic at Terminal Two looks as dated as a Depression-era mural. The big metal turds and huge woven wall hangings at Terminal Three…
If I can only have a dress made from Junichi Arai’s fluid stainless steel fabric in time for Halloween, I can go to the big party as Queen of the Martians. The arresting fabric, which moves like mercury in the hand and could have come straight out of some secret…
Get out your Raybans and suntan lotion because the Valley’s art season opens with a nuclear blast this year. Ground Zero is Scottsdale Center for the Arts, currently housing “Critical Mass” and “The P2 Project,” two exhibitions which examine the relationship between human beings and their seemingly genetic propensity for…
When I first moved to the Valley two years ago, I did the expected thing–I made a visit to Sedona. I was interested in the town for many reasons: the allure of the name, which comes from Sedona Schnebly, who founded the town with husband Carl in 1902; the spot’s…
I fell for it. I believed, after glancing through the book Why Cats Paint, that the authors had really managed to document the unleashing of feline artistic finesse. And, indeed, at first blush, this slim volume, which outsold nearly everything last holiday season, seems to explain the little-known phenomenon of…
I remember one night in college, my classmate Carol and I were cramming for Dr. Deleuze’s art history exam, smoking up a storm and bitching about the absence of women in our art history texts. One of the books was H.W. Janson’s History of Art. I remembered that night because…
If you want to see the state of contemporary art in Arizona, you’ll have to go down to Tucson–and down the stairs at the Tucson Museum of Art. The Arizona Biennial, the only statewide juried exhibition open to all artists and craftspeople from or living in Arizona, and a show…
“When you photograph me, I feel everything leave me. The blood drains from my face, my eyelids droop, my thoughts disappear. I can feel my facial muscles go limp. All you have to do is to give me that one cue, ‘Don’t smile,’ and zap. Nothing. That’s what you get…
Long before Spike Lee and John Singleton made their first films, African-American cinema had had a 50-year history as an alternative genre that few people, even film buffs, knew about. Made independently by African-American directors for African-American audiences, “race films” flourished from after World War I until the late 1940s,…
If Marcel Duchamp, Pieter Brueghel and Franz Kafka had somehow been commissioned to build a playroom for disenchanted philosophers, it may have looked a lot like deCompression Satellite Gallery does right now. The Arizona Center gallery is presenting the work of Bay Area sculptor Bella Feldman in an exhibition titled…
Art Detour, the yearly open house of downtown Phoenix art studios and galleries, came and went this year without much fanfare. No trolleys to shuttle folks along the circuit of art spaces, no “mystery” galleries (empty downtown storefronts turned into art spaces for the event), no juried exhibition. In other…
Robert Anderson had just finished his first year of art school at St. Francis College in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “I had won just about everything I entered in the Midwest,” he recalls. “My teachers were entering the same art contests, and I was winning. I expected them to congratulate me,…
The term “neo-Dada” was used in a very negative sense by art critics, and only for a short time at that. Hence, it’s somewhat surprising that Susan Hapgood has pressed it into service as the title of the exhibition she has curated at Scottsdale Center for the Arts. “Neo-Dada: Redefining…
Putting features on the faceless hordes of homeless that roam the streets and back alleys of urban America is the goal of Galeria Mesa’s juried exhibition “Going Home-less.” The show successfully dredges up some real humanity, with some very real emotions, from the bottom of those overflowing grocery carts typically…
The October 10 cover of Time magazine boldly proclaims the advent of a black renaissance here in America. The cover declares that “African-American artists are truly free at last”–at least in an aesthetic sense. But photographer Rene Cox, an African-American artist from New York, would probably take great issue with…
When audiences went to Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, expecting to see a sexy comedy in a restaurant, they were perhaps among the most unprepared audiences in film history. Rather than a knockabout farce, Greenaway served up a baroquely ferocious black comedy…
Neither rain nor smog nor threat of armed insurrection can keep any really hard-core Mexican folk art aficionado, including me (and, at one time, Nelson Rockefeller), from tracking down the objects of this insane aesthetic obsession. Recently, as Mexico was in the throes of electing a new president amid highly…
In 1992, the world celebrated–or at least acknowledged–the quincentennial of America’s discovery by Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. During that glorious year, open season was declared on good ol’ Chris and on those who followed in his wake. European conquerors were enthusiastically pressed into service for target practice by artists who…
“Fish Out Of Water,” Mesa Southwest Museum’s summer art show, is about the closest I’ve gotten to baiting a hook in 30 years. That’s when my father gave up trying to convert me to the church of fishing–and also gave up dragging me, kicking and screaming, on family fishing expeditions…
After seeing the works on paper in the latest group show being hosted by MARS Gallery, a snide adage pops to mind: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Imported from Richmond, Virginia’s 1708 Gallery, a well-established artists’ cooperative, the current show at MARS (Phoenix’s own 15-year-old co-op) boasts…
The title of Widows’ Peak, a comic mystery set in Ireland in the 1920s, refers to a sort of colony of happy widows. It’s a high hill which overlooks the town of Kilshannon, and upon which, by some vaguely explained decree of antiquity, only widows are permitted to live. Presiding…
Valley Art Theatre in Tempe opens the Second Annual Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on Friday. The festival consists of four features and a collection of shorts, all of which are more intriguing than anything new you’re likely to see at the multiplexes this summer. Here, briefly reviewed, are this…
