Art Scene

“Father and Son Exhibition” at Figarelli Fine Art: The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree when it comes to sculptor Allan Houser Haozous and his son, Phillip. Father’s influence can be seen in the familial depictions dominating Phillip’s work — brothers embracing, mothers clinging to infants. But the younger…

D.I.Y. Downtown

Go to a city like New York, Denver or Chicago, and a glimmering Oz awaits you. The city core is thriving, the mass transit is running, the scene is a done deal and you just have to hop on board. In Phoenix the downtown is still more down than town,…

Art Scene

“Sensual Pleasures” at the Herberger Gallery: Phoenix artist Jeanne Collins’ installation Biopsy Banquet is the standout in this group show of predictable erotic-themed pieces. Her gleefully grotesque feast fit for Hannibal Lecter consists of ceramic entrees made from human organs. There’s Stomach l’orange with Sliced Beets and Green Beans, Lungs…

Art Scene

“Sensual Pleasures” at the Herberger Gallery: Phoenix artist Jeanne Collins’ installation Biopsy Banquet is the standout in this group show of predictable erotic-themed pieces. Her gleefully grotesque feast fit for Hannibal Lecter consists of ceramic entrees made from human organs. There’s Stomach l’orange with Sliced Beets and Green Beans, Lungs…

Paint It Black

You would think a show full of candy-colored Andy Warhol pictures of Mick Jagger, Marilyn Monroe and designer shoes would be all froth and fun. Think again. The 97 Warhol prints in “Andy Warhol’s Dream America,” a traveling exhibition at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, carry a larger, darker…

Art Scene

“Sensual Pleasures” at the Herberger Gallery: Phoenix artist Jeanne Collins’ installation Biopsy Banquet is the standout in this group show of predictable erotic-themed pieces. Her gleefully grotesque feast fit for Hannibal Lecter consists of ceramic entrees made from human organs. There’s Stomach l’orange with Sliced Beets and Green Beans, Lungs…

Doesn’t Compute

If you’re not the sort of person who understands very deeply how your iPod downloads and manages all those songs, the work in “southwestNET: techno,” a show of technological devices as art at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, will leave you baffled. To use a techno term, this exhibition…

Red Meat

The theme of the group show at Herberger Theater Center Gallery is “Sensual Pleasures,” so there’s lots of red in the pottery, paintings and sculptures on exhibit. Because as we all know, red equals sexy. There are also the requisite nude female forms cropped tightly so the curve of a…

Art Scene

“Lingerie: Secrets of Elegance” at Phoenix Art Museum: Yep, you read that right. Bras, baby doll nighties, and a sunburst display of girdles are just a gallery over from the paintings of dead white guys in powdered wigs. This fascinating fashion exhibition traces lingerie’s evolution (or maybe devolution) from corsets…

The Layered Look

One of the hottest trends going in the art world is for artists or groups of artists to work under a pseudonym. The phony name is a protest against commercialism in art, and it’s also a heck of a good gimmick. Enter COAX, the nom de brush of a Phoenix…

Art Scene

Susan Copeland at Burton Barr Central Library: Hey, America, wake up and smell the discrimination. That’s the theme of Susan Copeland’s exhibition “Refuse,” a name that refers to the materials Copeland uses in her mixed-media creations and to treatment she believes African-Americans get in this country. The strongest pieces in…

Life’s Work

One of the perks of being an artist is that you usually end up with a fabulous art collection, compensation for all those years of living in an unheated studio and subsisting on beans and ramen noodles. An artist’s private stash is generally the product of a good eye, good…

Life’s Lumps

British sculptor Anthony Caro is most famous for the lean, linear metal abstractions he made in the 1960s, playful pieces that seemed to float in the air. So it’s surprising to see the lumpy, earthbound assemblages of clay and steel in “A Life in Sculpture: The Kenwood Series,” an exhibition…

Art Scene

Eric Finzi at Perihelion Arts: It’s a pop culture tenet that Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a perv whose fascination with little girls appears, to contemporary eyes, to be very Michael Jackson. Maryland painter Eric Finzi explores Carroll’s oddness in a series of epoxy resin paintings based…

Shadow Dancing

“Keeping Shadows: Photography From the Worcester Museum of Art” Photos lie. You knew that. What you probably didn’t know is that photos were lying more than a century before Photoshop became a verb. Photographers were mucking with their images way back in the 19th century when the medium was still…

Malice in Wonderland

It’s a pop culture tenet that Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a perv. Carroll, who wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, was a shy, stuttering deacon and lifelong bachelor with an interest in little girls that, to contemporary eyes, appears very Michael…

Art Scene

Jennifer Bartlett at Bentley Projects: If you want to see how a painter’s brain differs from the gray matter of people who don’t know which end of a paintbrush to hold, go see this retrospective of work by the famed California-born artist. In a piece titled Boats, Bartlett places a…

Happy Trees

If you want to see how a painter’s brain is different from the gray matter of people who don’t know which end of a paintbrush to hold, go look at Jennifer Bartlett’s retrospective at Bentley Projects. The show, composed of 30 paintings, sculptures and constructions chosen by the artist herself,…

Made in China

Most Americans don’t think much about China. The nation that’s home to 20 percent of the people on the planet is a murky place that hovers behind low price tags and bird flu. Few of us think of China as a producer of first-rate contemporary art that gazes out at…

Art Scene

“Big City” at Phoenix Art Museum: There isn’t a single image of the PHX among the cityscapes and urban life scenes drawn from PAM’s permanent collection. That’s odd, seeing as how we’re the nation’s fifth or sixth largest metropolis. The omission is partly because of the age of the work,…

Spin City

There isn’t a single image of Phoenix in the “Big City: Cityscapes and Urban Life” exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum. Which is odd, seeing as how there are only a handful of cities in the country bigger than this one. Don’t we rate at least one tiny watercolor in a…

Star Struck

Hector Ruiz is one of the most talented artists in the city. His visceral woodblock prints, woodcarvings and papier-mâch&ecute; installations show what life in America in 2005 is like for anyone who isn’t a white male. He also runs a gallery in an old auto repair shop on Grand Avenue,…