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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
“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,…
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…
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,…
Ruben Maqueda at Museo Chicano: Ruben Maqueda brings contemporary kick to some of the work in this show of photography and folk art. His glitter-bedecked, candy-colored photos of descansos are digital age-meets-dollar store, a knowing wink at the anti-intellectualism that runs beneath much folk art. And his Day of the…
Live in the Southwest long enough, mi’ja, and you would rather eat live fire ants than look at one more gallery full of quaint, decorator-friendly Latino folk art. Ruben Maqueda makes art in this tradition, but mercifully, Maqueda manages to bring some contemporary kick to “Tradiciones de Mi Gente (Traditions…
Some superstars of photography come together in a fascinating exhibition of photographs at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. “Private Pictures: Photography From Arizona Collections” features work by classic shooters like Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Cindy Sherman, Henri Cartier Bresson and Tina Modetti. It’s a greatest-hits show, the art world…
Colin Chillag’s paintings at Modified Arts make you feel like you’ve seen them before, in an earlier life. The one of a grandmotherly woman holding a baby is eerily familiar, as is the one of the middle-aged couple standing in front of an elaborately decorated cake. We’ve all lived these…
Stella Lai at ASU Art Museum: Lai’s deceptively pretty paintings are about how ugly it is to be a woman or an animal in her native Hong Kong. Sad yellow chicken carcasses and plump pink pork chops morph into faceless silhouettes of swimsuit-clad women, and a roasted pig, cherry tomato…
Michael Eastman’s “America” at Bentley Projects: The ambient desolation of Michael Eastman’s photographs of empty streetscapes and seedy interiors seems prophetic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s leveling of New Orleans. At least two of the photos in this exhibition were made in the city, pre-storm. His portrait of a…
