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…
Art always keeps one eye on technology, taking the advances of science to make something beautiful, provocative and useless. Artists grabbed cameras almost as soon as they were invented, first for anatomy classes and later to make fine art. They have done the same with film, video, computers and lithography…
Four recent exhibitions at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, all opening on the same night, sent me scurrying to my Roget’s Thesaurus, searching for the right word to describe this melange, this pastiche, this potpourri, this gallimaufry, this hodgepodge–that’s it!–of art. One exhibition showed a single work each by…
In the 1990 Phoenix Triennial at the Phoenix Art Museum, both technique and subject matter drive home the point that life is serious business. Here you can see a large drawing depicting a child beaten to death. Over there, three headlike shapes, covered in velvet, hang from steel-gallows forms, like…
Art decorates the white-collar walls of many Phoenix business high-rises. Most of it is more decor than art. Given the setting and atmosphere of the modern corporation, it almost has to be low-voltage stuff, drawn from the stocks of interior designers and meant to coordinate with dominant color themes. So,…
Art is where you find it in the dog days of summer. You’ve done the Scottsdale art tours until white wine pours out of your ears. You’ve done the local museums and those galleries still braving the heat. Everybody seems to be gearing up for the fall season or lying…
The art critic Lyn Smallwood wrote, “Finally, there’s a selection of large and cheerfully counterfeit dollar bills painted by Robert Dowd and Phillip Hefferton, of which the less seen the better. Dowd’s `Van Gogh Dollar’ of 1965 was indeed prophetic, but it doesn’t prevent it from being stupid. At its…
Visiting the current exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum is like taking a nostalgic stroll through a supermarket. On display are everything from Ritz cracker boxes and Wrigley gum packets to magazines and newspapers, tourist guides and WPA posters. Coca-Cola packages compose one entire installation–even the ring-top can looks outmoded…
Karen Reinhold is sitting in the office she occupies as director of the Sun Cities Art Museum when one of the women working in the gift shop comes in with a pair of earrings. “She says she’ll take them if we can change them to clips,” the woman tells Reinhold…
Image and exposure are the preoccupations of far too many contemporary artists, and fame and wealth their central goals. From the day they leave art school, young artists can network and dress-for-success as well as any hotshot stockbroker on Wall Street. Gone are the heroic poverty and artistic purism of…
“What a trip,” mumbles a student leaving the upper gallery at Arizona State University’s Nelson Fine Arts Center, and for once, the phrase is entirely appropriate. He has just finished looking at a display of work inspired by Lewis Carroll’s nineteenth-century children’s books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the…
Heather Lineberry will be taking over the job of art critic at New Times. She has a master’s degree in twentieth-century art from the University of Texas at Austin, and for the past two years has been involved with a major contemporary gallery in Los Angeles, the Karl Bornstein Gallery…
When four pieces by a single artist can make me question the way I see the entire world, I know I’m seeing terrific art. “Vantage Point,” four installations by Dan Collins at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, is such an exhibition. Part of the show’s pleasure is that it…
Introduction Art lovers were agog last week when thieves made off with twelve works from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The haul included a Manet, a couple of Rembrandts and Vermeer’s “Concert,” well-known to all former Art History 101 students. The event set us to thinking. Is all…
William Wegman is wearing the standard uniform for a male artist of the Sixties generation–jeans, tee shirt and tennis shoes–and by his side is the standard accessory for the successful artist from that time–a pretty young brunette. At 46, Wegman has a mop of curly brown hair and a charming…
“I just think that there are lots and lots of ways to make art, and there just aren’t any rules about how to do it. And that anytime somebody tries to make rules about it, it’s a terrible mistake.” Judging from Laurie Anderson’s reputation as an avant-garde artist, you’d expect…
For years, David Markham has had a devotion to Napoleon that some of his friends think is a bit unnatural, and that would have driven to distraction a wife less understanding than Barbara. He wears, for instance, a tie decorated with bees, the French emperor’s symbol. He has traced Napoleon’s…
Turn your art clock back to the 1920s and 1930s. Yves Tanguy has turned furniture into abstract forms and scattered it over the landscape of time. Max Ernst’s men have sprouted lion heads while Rene Magritte’s tomatoes and apples have grown as big as rooms. Andre Breton has proclaimed “the…
The opening salvo in what ought to develop into quite a lively exchange of gunfire was sounded last week when the first “counter quincentenary celebration” arrived in Phoenix. The quincentenary, as we shall all find out only too well during the next two years, is the celebration of Columbus’ discovery…
