Recently, the Tucson Police Department’s child-abuse detail confiscated artwork by local artist-photographer Robyn Stoutenburg from the city’s downtown Gallery Six & 13–without a validly executed search warrant. Twelve of the artist’s photographs were seized after the principal of an adjacent middle school complained of the propriety and accessibility of the…
I’ll be honest. “Too Late for Goya,” the multimedia exhibition of Spain-born artist Francesc Torres currently showing at ASU Art Museum, is not for the politically or philosophically impaired. If the only thing you know about Hegel is that it rhymes with “bagel,” if the only Marx you’re familiar with…
If artist Frances Whitehead had lived in 16th-century Europe, she probably would have been burned at the stake for being a witch. Whitehead’s sculptural installations, which can be seen at Scottsdale’s Lisa Sette Gallery in an exhibition titled “The Dream,” use unorthodox botanical materials classically associated with ancient divination and…
You can’t miss the funky, Thirties motor court next to Shep’s Liquor on Main Street in downtown Cottonwood. Hallucinogenic folk art on its front porch makes your head swirl and throb, like a recurrent acid flashback. Someone has turned the first four units into an artist’s studio, but often, there’s…
Always borrowing, American artists are the greatest cultural debtors on Earth. And few among them owe the world more than potters do. Over the years, potters have rummaged the cupboards of virtually every mud-baking civilization–often extending their slippery reaches overseas and into the grave–to come up with what we like…
Anne Coe is a captivating conversationalist. Her passion for environmental issues is evident in her dialogue and in her artwork, and she can hold forth for hours on aspects of life in the desert you’ve never considered before. Too bad her paintings are so lousy. Coe’s current exhibition, on display…
Artist Linda Mundwiler used to collect pieces of dead birds. Today she gathers lists of stupid questions about her art instead. Among her favorites are: Do you ever paint the tender moments?” Do you do a lot of drugs before you paint?” Don’t you ever paint in earth tones?” (Her…
It’s just before midnight on a Saturday evening, and Rose Johnson is putting the finishing touches on a 25-foot mural outside her downtown Phoenix art studio. Inside, Johnson’s studio-mate, Anne Thompson, is displaying glass etchings and mixed-media paintings. Around the corner, at arty hangout Metropophobobia, a group of volunteers is…
Canadian artist ManWoman is accustomed to giddy questions about his peculiar name. He responds politely when asked how he’s listed in the telephone book (“ManWoman”); whether his friends call him Man (“No, because then strangers would have to call me Mr. Woman”); and what his mother calls him (Nothing: “She…
In her 1944 oil painting “Arizona,” Dorothea Tanning stands at the edge of a cliff. She’s surrounded by the spires, buttes and mesas of the red rock country around Sedona. Only here, the rocks are blue and green in the eerie, ambiguous light of early dawn. You can’t see the…
Phoenix gave performance artist Frank Moore and his Chero Company a pleasant surprise on October 5 by showing up in record numbers for his controversial “Passions Play” at Gallery X. Eighty people doesn’t sound like a lot, but Moore is a self-described “spastic,” palsied from the neck down and unable…
Marilyn Butler remembers reading the handwriting on the wall. It was early 1989, and she was putting together an invitational show of landscape paintings at the gallery she owned in Santa Monica. She called a neighboring gallery to borrow one of its pieces. Such intergallery borrowings are common in the…
In Valley art circles, “Lisa Sette, Lisa Sette, Lisa Sette” is a mantra intoned by young artists anxious for a chance at the nirvana of showing at her gallery. Unlike her high-profile Scottsdale neighbors, where art means Southwestern glitz and glamour, Sette consistently shows serious, and, at least for the…
Melvin Killeen is an artist, but Melvin Killeen looks like my dad. Out on the town, Killeen is apt to wear brown polyester trousers with a telltale hint of a flare below the knee and a patterned cream Qiana shirt, open at the neck, exposing a triangular patch of graying…
Square One, at the corner of Washington and Central in downtown Phoenix, is a block of vacant storefronts, boarded up and painted with murals. Although beginning to show their age, the murals are bright; they’re optimistic. When you’re right up against them, walking by, the murals do a great job…
Jon Planas was a fixture on New York City’s club circuit in the late Eighties, a party boy with a flair for fashion and flash. He became known for the painted jackets that draped the famous forms of Madonna, Cher, Cyndi Lauper, and Deborah Harry, to name but a few…
Remember the rash of movies two or three years ago where everybody was switching bodies with everyone else? Fathers with sons? Women with men? Judge Reinhold with Fred Savage? As far as I know, body switching exists only in the minds of desperate screenwriters. Too bad. If it were a…
It sounded like pretty good news when the Phoenix Art Museum announced the opening of a show entitled “Five Centuries of Italian Painting, 1300-1800.” So along with, apparently, most everyone else in town, a friend and I trooped over to the museum on a recent Friday night to get a…
Mary Stokrocki’s contribution to the ASU Faculty Art Show at the Nelson Fine Arts Center neatly summarizes the hollow feeling one is left with after viewing the exhibition. Titled “THE UnBAREable lightness of being,” the piece is a vertical rectangular outline traced in flesh- and blue-colored crayon on the surface…
Everything in the picture was plastic, except Our Lady of Guadalupe and the dirt floor. Plastic flowers, plastic fruit, plastic saints, plastic covering the statue of Jesus, and behind it all, a pale blue plastic backdrop that looked like a used swimming-pool cover. It should have been the tackiest scene…
I was standing in front of Bud Helbig’s painting, “Almost Smell the Coffee,” wondering why I felt so betrayed. It’s an innocuous painting, a winter scene with one cowboy opening the gate while his mounted companion waits nearby. The bunkhouse in the distance beckons with its promise of warmth. They…
It’s 6 p.m Friday, October 19. You’ve paid your $125 admission fee to the 25th Annual Cowboy Artists of America Exhibition and Sale. A sea of Stetsons crowds the exhibition area. Beside each painting and sculpture stands a man and a little box with a slot on top. The man…
