My friend Paul is, among other things, a devoted Titanic enthusiast. While other little boys were playing kickball, Paul was playing “Capsize,” a game he’d invented about being trapped on a sinking luxury liner. As a teen, he spent his milk money on membership in the Titanic Historical Society; today,…
An artist usually has to be stone cold dead before his work is ever shown in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, however, has managed to escape the bureaucratic guillotine and now stands among the handful of living artists whose work has been deemed important enough to…
Nearly 35 years ago, Ernesto “Che” Guevara — radical Marxist revolutionary, trained medical doctor and severe asthmatic — was captured and killed in Bolivia by Bolivian military forces. Guevara had gone there to spread the political revolution he had successfully fomented in Cuba during the 1950s side by side with…
Long before the economy took its most recent nosedive, the state of the contemporary art scene in the Valley of the Sun could be labeled as pretty abysmal. Only a handful of decent contemporary galleries still open their doors, especially ones willing or financially able to show the work of…
“Stories and Souvenirs,” an exhibition of documentary and portrait photography now lining the walls of ASU’s Northlight Gallery, inspires confidence that classic film-based photography, as practiced by camera masters in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, still survives and thrives, despite the world’s present predisposition to All Things Deeply Digital.Located in…
Turf-building ranks second only to body-building as an American obsession. Our lawns have grown into a 25 million acre habit, costing roughly $7 billion a year in grass-care materials and machinery alone — and that’s not counting the chunks of lava rock strewn all over Sun City.They guzzle immeasurable gallons…
It’ll be 10 years this fall since the Smithsonian Institution turned down the lights on one of the most infamous art shows of the 1990s — “The West As America,” a cynical six-month exhibit that marked the art world’s first awkward introduction to the notion of political correctness. The show’s…
Having been born and raised 15 minutes from the Mexican border, it’s no surprise that I have a deep and abiding love for Mexican folk arts, crafts and culture. I’ve spent years traveling through Mexico’s interior, boarding buses, hiring drivers, renting cars, all in the ongoing quest to root out…
What a difference almost a decade makes in the ever-morphing world of contemporary art. I can really appreciate this fact when I think about the very first article I wrote for New Times. It was a review of “Alternative Identities,” the 1993 Triennial at Phoenix Art Museum curated by Bruce…
You don’t notice the powder-blue hat at first. Its hue is too cool to steal your eye from the surrounding candy-wrapper yellows, oranges and reds. Yet once you see it, rising almost headless above a candy aisle in Andreas Gursky’s large photographic mural 99 Cent, the hat becomes one of…
New York painter Donald Sultan long ago abandoned the tried-and-true tools and materials customarily associated with an artist. Eschewing canvas, Sultan instead opts for heavy-duty Masonite topped with cheap, run-of-the-mill linoleum tiles — the kind seen on the floors of old cafeterias and kitchens — as a base for his…
I’m being far from hyperbolic when I say that the most searingly memorable art event in the Valley this summer is Iranian-born Shirin Neshat’s critically acclaimed 1998 video installation, Rapture.And, after seeing this 13-minute piece, on loan from Santa Monica’s Broad Art Foundation and staged locally in a stripped-down, shadowy,…
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all? Apparently, it’s high-profile art collectors Jacques and Natasha Gelman, judging from all the glitzy portraits commissioned from famous Mexican artists that now grace the walls of the Phoenix Art Museum as part of “Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and Twentieth-Century…
No birthday party in this town seems to be complete without the tradition of breaking a piñata. And why should it? After all, nothing says “Happy Birthday” better than taking a giant wooden stick and beating the complete crap out of, say, a life-size Barbie or a smiling yellow Picachu…
Too much digital or ‘Net.art’ suffers from an anemia that comes from a steady diet of neo-Conceptualism and raw, uncut theory,” sputters Mark Dery, author of Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century, during an e-mail-generated discussion with several prominent museum curators in March’s Artforum magazine. “Let’s face…
Walk around on Mill Avenue, or any other disaffected-youth-magnet sort of locale, and you’re bound to see a proliferation of bad tattoos. It’s symptomatic of a generation of 20- to 30-year-olds who years ago grew an affection for tattoos as a mark of rebellion and not artistry; scratchwork is omnipresent…
It’s difficult to make a convincing case for the comforts of things you can’t touch. Yet there’s clearly a physical ease about the fashions and furnishings in Phoenix Art Museum’s exhibition “Sophisticated Moderns: Claire McCardell and Edward Wormley.”Both were masters of the kinds of material subtleties that are often better…
For years, I’ve harbored two secret but obsessive desires. The first is to furnish an entire house solely with swap meet treasures in truly terrible taste — you know, resin-on-wood wall clocks decorated with praying hands, garish orange floral crushed velvet couches, faded plastic flower arrangements, glitter-splashed plaster of Paris…
It’s tough to name the feeling you get being rolled, head first, into James Turrell’s Gasworks — maybe a little anxious, maybe a little silly. Yet when the friendly attendant in a white lab coat reminds you not to sit up once the light show begins inside the spherical chamber,…
Artist Joy Episalla is a student of the past. The history that she documents through the lens of her trusty 35mm camera isn’t one of political turmoil, international conflict or even the lives of great figures. In fact, people don’t show up in her work at all. Rather, the history…
If you need an antidote for the diabetic coma you may have fallen into after seeing Phoenix Art Museum’s syrupy “Norman Rockwell: Pictures for the American People” exhibition, we suggest hightailing it — stat — to Bentley Gallery in Scottsdale. The gallery’s current group exhibition, which includes recent work by…
Considering what’s now on display in “Swans and Portraits” — an exhibition of screen prints and two large paintings by Julian Schnabel at AZ/NY Gallery in Scottsdale — the New York artist better not be giving up his film directing day job anytime soon. AZ/NY Gallery, new to the Scottsdale…
