Used to be Art Detour was a depressing event — a benchmark of just how far the downtown Phoenix arts scene hadn’t come. The three-day tour of Phoenix art venues was held at the end of March, always landing, it seemed, on the first uncomfortably warm day of the year…
The artistic offerings vary from metal giraffes to New York-sophisticated paintings. Before First Friday, there was First Thursday. For many years, snowbirds and equally gentle folk have flocked to Scottsdale on cool Thursday evenings, to sip wine and stroll through the galleries that line the city’s downtown streets. The artistic…
Better double-time it to Shemer Art Center on Camelback if you want to see “Land: Unconventional Approaches to Landscape” — billed as an exhibition that’s “pushing the boundaries” of the Phoenix municipal gallery — since it’s only going to be up for a mere two weeks. Considering the safe, watered-down…
Photographs of murdered men and women in grocery store parking lots. A picture of an enormous man made of cell phones and DVDs. And a guy in a karaoke bar. Not images you’d expect to see at the Heard Museum. But the Heard, like the Native cultures it showcases, is…
Putting a face to the name is the name of the game in “Bill Jay: Photographers Photographed.” The exhibition, now on display at Segura Art in downtown Mesa, pairs black-and-white images of internationally renowned artist-photographers taken by Jay over a 35-year period with a characteristic photographic image made by each…
Though white-bread Scottsdale may seem like an improbable venue for an exhibition about African-American hair and its vast implications, it’s actually the perfect place for “HairStories,” one of the current offerings at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. This hit me as I was following several SMoCA docents who were…
The room is dark and loud, and a projector plays the image of a guy in a suit slamming his body against a wall, again and again, as strobe lights flare. No, it’s not a Sid Vicious video and this is not a bad flashback. It’s art. And it’s what…
They call it “Phantasmagoria: De Trop Capsule Episode #2,” but the scene looks like Trading Spaces meets Alice in Wonderland. Mark Freedman and Grant Wiggins wrestle with the sand-colored carpet as Oliver Hibert looks on, dark circles rimming dazed eyes. It’s one day before the innovative exhibition is set to…
Picture a painting, suffused with a golden glow, in which naked men and women writhe in what appears to be a bed of gleaming black lava, like tortured souls in purgatory waiting to be released into heaven. In the foreground, a man with an amputated leg is helped to the…
Several years ago, I was soundly excoriated in the pages of this newspaper by a seriously disaffected letter writer from the arts community. She was incensed about a review I wrote concerning a downtown art gallery event that I found less than, shall we say, aesthetically enriching. In fact, she…
If appearance counts for anything, the art scene in Phoenix is thriving. Literally thousands of people make their way from gallery to gallery the first Friday of each month, flooding Roosevelt Street and Grand Avenue. The interest of locals has been echoed nationally, even drawing notice in Art in America…
Aderelict-looking Toucan Sam clutches a wad of money in one wing, a paper-bag-wrapped liquor bottle in the other. Behind him Cap’n Crunch and Lucky the Leprechaun (of Lucky Charms fame) are in a purple convertible lowrider; Crunch is riding shotgun, firing a semi-automatic handgun at a Keebler elf and that…
The middle of a scorching summer seems like the worst possible time to open a coffee shop and art space. Especially since, restricted by anal Tempe business ordinances about announcing your “grand opening,” you don’t dare advertise the place until students come back to Arizona State University. But Three Roots…
A fire last September forced Amsterdam co-owner Todd Colin to consider a major restoration to the nightclub. On Central just north of the downtown core, the gay bar has been known for its swank interior, so Colin naturally set about making the place as cushy as it had been before…
Of its many owners, surely the strangest person to purchase Phoenix’s first skyscraper, the Westward Ho hotel, was Roger Rudin, a fundamentalist preacher who briefly took over the building with a business partner in the late 1970s. Only after his death in 1998 was it revealed in New Times that…
On a recent Sunday evening, a good while after dusk, the artist known simply as Rodgell led a caravan of cyclists to his downtown Tempe studio to unveil his latest work, a mounted sculpture of a steam locomotive coming out of a wall, its headlight lit, and behind it a…
The last show I remember at the old space that once housed Art Lab 16 was so haunting, it’s never left my mind. The storefront on East Roosevelt Street was nothing to look at; even today, the thing you notice first is the weatherworn corrugated aluminum covering the front window…
You could belt out Blondie’s “Call Me,” or ABBA’s “Dancing Queen.” Maybe “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles. Fitting snugly in the cushiony pod, you select a song — David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” seems the most appropriate — and sing into a microphone, your voice echoing against a chorus of…
How exactly to characterize Perihelion Arts? As a little shop of horrors, delights and complexities? That seems just about right. Not that this art gallery/bookstore and occasional music venue is teeny. The good-sized space with its pocked concrete floors and white-and-black interior adds heft to the oasis of art life…
I couldn’t help but scoff. A friend had forwarded me a notice about “Art & Society,” a new lecture series taking place at Arizona State University, and the kickoff event sounded too precious by half. For one thing, there was the setting: brunch at a posh resort, the Grayhawk Golf…
Edward Dominguez’s studio door was wide open. He was waiting for Chinese food, and had only just begun to survey his previous night’s work, large oil paints of his visions of Phoenix’s fifth tallest building, the Viad Tower. I called the former architect turned painter from the curb in front…
My father disliked comic books, even smart, deep ones, like Art Spiegelman’s Maus. He just couldn’t get past the words-and-pictures-in-boxes thing. To him, the comic book was a crude, impoverished vehicle, and its content became less significant by virtue of its form. This frustrated me. After all, he liked art,…
