“Surrealism U.S.A.” at Phoenix Art Museum: This spirited exhibition that includes works by artists such as Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell and Robert Motherwell is the first major survey of American surrealism in 25 years. Some of the works are as melodramatic as a 13-year-old’s art project. But whether…
Technology and inhumanity and greed, oh, my! Those wild beasties have been lurking in the shadows alongside the yellow brick road to progress for generations. Spend some time at the spirited “Surrealism USA” exhibit at Phoenix Art Museum, and you’ll realize we were worried about the dark side of our…
Leandro Soto at Paulina Miller Gallery: There’s no place like home when you’re far, far away. Maybe that’s why the mixed-media assemblages about Cuba, Leandro Soto’s lost home, are so much more powerful than the ones about his adopted hometown, Phoenix. Soto’s landscapes of saguaro and rock are technically accomplished,…
The group exhibition “Fur, Feathers and Family: Our Relationship With Animals” at Arizona State University Art Museum is far better than its name. The show of animal-themed art is aimed at children, which explains the facile title. It’s the centerpiece of the museum’s sixth annual Family Fun Day (July 16,…
Mercifully, the work in “Water, Water Everywhere” stays clear of the obvious themes you would expect to see in an exhibition in the desert about water. There isn’t a single piece in this group exhibition of artists from around the world that settles for the simple “water equals life” concept…
Deborah Butterfield makes horse statues, but don’t hold it against her. Her horses are not the ones of civic monuments, rendered in elegant marble and carrying some dead white war hero. Nor are they the romantic bronze beasts of flaring nostrils and lush manes cranked out by mediocre Western artists…
Like it or not, guns are as American as Happy Meals and maxed-out credit cards, so making them the theme of a group exhibition invites all kinds of timely and biting cultural criticism. The pieces in “The Gun Show: No Background Check Required” at reZurrection Gallery in Tempe are mixed…
Don’t pigeonhole Nissa Kubly . . . she’s an artist, but also an inventor and a scientist. What’s clear is her passion for one place — the brink of discovery. Almost any day, you can find Kubly, 29, tinkering in her Phoenix studio — a converted garage crammed with books,…
Marcia Myers grooves on color, texture and ancient Italy. Her abstract diptychs and triptychs — artspeak for paintings made of two or three panels attached to one another — are floating fields of sun-soaked Mediterranean color that will remind you of an ancient Roman villa crossed with a cool, downtown…
Virgil Ortiz, ceramicist, fashion designer and Cochiti Pueblo Indian, makes visual mash-ups by putting designs inspired by traditional tribal pottery in contemporary places. In “La Renaissance Indigène” at the Heard Museum, Ortiz’s black-and-white swirls, lines and animals show up on purses, corsets and skirts; in a jerky black-and-white video; and…
Some women enjoy being a girl, but Elizabeth Bretharte Lyon isn’t so sure. The Phoenix artist vents her doubts about sugar and spice and everything nice in a powerful exhibition of photographs at the Paulina Miller Gallery. Beware, Lyon’s images say, there’s poison in being pretty. At first glance, Lyon’s…
She’s been dead for 34 years, but Diane Arbus, the photographer who found her muse among the weird and the seedy, is hot again thanks to a retrospective of her work at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. You don’t have to journey to Gotham to see her startling photos…
Designers are maligned as the pragmatists of the art world, the art majors who were employable instead of outrageous, responsible instead of romantic. Unlike artists, designers don’t do glamorous acts of audacity like lop off their ears, marry ex-porn stars or drape Central Park in sheets of plastic. Designers make…
We are under attack. The enemy, invisible and silent, has annexed every living room, classroom and workplace — and gallery. At monOrchid Gallery in downtown Phoenix, a show titled “A WarLike People: Victims or Perpetrators?” exposes the adversary, sounding the alarm on government control through fear, subsequent elimination of civil…
Robrt Pela interviews Emma Stone (then known as Emily) over Partridge Family records.
Camille Messina, 24, fashion designer, filmmaker, singer and hairdresser, lives with three roommates, four pets and one creepy mannequin in a quaint Tempe condo. Favorite art form: I don’t know. Fashion comes the easiest. If I haven’t done that in a long time, it makes me feel better. Music is…
His brand of art: I’m primarily a painter, but I also like dabbling in different mediums and styles. Like, next month I might do a film, or photography, or sculpture. I enjoy all art, and I don’t like to be pigeonholed into one thing. Themes: I try to find beauty…
Linda King is digging past a mound of dirty clothes and clutter, into a corner of her bedroom, where the air is stagnant and stale, to find her inspiration. “This is my muse,” King declares, followed by a nervous giggle, as she lifts the clay bust she molded of Charles…
At 5:30 on a Thursday afternoon, photographer Kristen Wright’s Tempe home looks like it could belong to any college student. Clothes pile up on a pool table in one room, the TV blares in another, and a tiny pug with a black, spiked collar just took a dump on someone’s…
Ryan Singer is a Native American painter, but don’t confuse him with R.C. Gorman or some other traditionalist you see hanging in downtown Scottsdale galleries. Toss a hit or two of acid at Gorman, and you’re getting close. Singer grew up on the Navajo reservation. Today he paints in a…
With some notable exceptions, you won’t find the folk art now appearing in “Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art” at Phoenix Art Museum popping up in your average Mexican mercado. Having beaten the bushes in backwaters all over Mexico for various forms of folk art for 25 years, I feel…
It’s too easy to label Rachel Bess dark. After all, the 24-year-old artist harbors an obvious obsession with mortality. Her artwork is more still-dead than still-life, often incorporating fragments of animal skeletons or human skulls, and the bleak landscapes she paints, with titles like The Nightmare, have earned the moniker…
