Western tradition, in all its romanticized glory, has always appealed most intensely to the urban dwellers of the East Coast. From their cries of gold on the leftmost shore, through pulp magazines, to serialized television shows and onto New York fashion runways, the West has always been about the ideal…
If I am ever forced at samurai swordpoint to come up with solid truisms about art at the beginning of the second millennium, I would have to say there are but two I could bet on to save my life. The first is that the genuinely beautiful will never go…
Western tradition, in all its romanticized glory, has always appealed most intensely to the urban dwellers of the East Coast. From their cries of gold on the leftmost shore, through pulp magazines, to serialized television shows and onto New York fashion runways, the West has always been about the ideal…
Going to the airport for reasons other than the usual provides an entirely new perspective on the place: Suited beings traverse the empty corridors looking nowhere but ahead; strange desert-themed gift shops offer the best in plastic souvenir ware such as rattlesnake heads encased in glass, while other “high end”…
In astrophysics parlance, the term “chaos theory” refers to the hypothesis that even a simple system can manifest unpredictable and highly complicated behavior. In other words, even the tiniest uncertainty in initial conditions within a system can have far-ranging, sometimes unforeseeable effects down the line. The flap of a butterfly’s…
People like to blame the pretensions of the art mob for the churchlike quiet of museums. But the more subtle truth is that great art has a way of silencing the crowd. Having already spoken the language it was meant to speak, it leaves nothing to translate or add, nothing…
How did a nice, quiet girl from a small town in upstate New York find herself learning to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese, traipsing all over China and other parts of Asia like Indiana Jones and eventually landing in Phoenix, Arizona?Janet Baker, new curator of Asian art at Phoenix Art Museum,…
The exhibition catalogue accompanying Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest offering, “do it,” makes no bones about it. The show’s title, notes catalogue essayist Bruce Altshuler, is designed to bring to mind the nostalgic rallying cry of radical Vietnam War protestor and Yippie co-founder Jerry Rubin, as well as the…
Not many materials have had the schizophrenic life that plastic has. In the khaki-toned years following World War II, it looked as fresh and desirable as spun candy, a dream come true for industrial designers trying to create forms for an array of new and old functions. But as plastic…
Ever send out an invitation to a big wingding and no one RSVP’d? That’s basically what happened to Mesa Arts Center’s Galeria Mesa when it sent out a submission call for its third juried exhibition of work by art educators who teach in Arizona’s public schools, colleges and universities –…
It’s never been easy to explain the weakness of Phoenix’s downtown art scene. Art martyrs like to pin its frailty on the city’s antipathy toward culture. They say Phoenix has pumped municipal bond dollars by the millions into a few big museums while happily bulldozing smaller downtown galleries and art…
Don’t expect to see the luminous resin shrines and mysterious opalescent spheres for which Valley artist Mayme Kratz previously has been known when you go to see “Waking in the Dark,” an exhibition of Kratz’s most current work at Scottsdale’s Lisa Sette Gallery.The only stylistic remnant of her older artwork…
Summer comes with the cultural expectation that the farther you travel, the better the art gets. Mexico City, New York, Europe and Asia prove that equation. But cultural tourism in Phoenix’s west side remains a mystifying exception.That’s partly why “Three Generations of Great Masters of Mexican Painting,” at ASU West,…
Scottsdale gallery owners don’t often coo about competitors the way they do about Kraig Foote. They say he’s a quiet saint in a racket filled with gossipy sinners. “He really is pretty special,” says Lisa Sette, who owns the Lisa Sette Gallery a few doors away from Foote’s Art One…
As I swing open the heavy, carved wooden door to the West Valley Art Museum in Surprise, the odd juxtaposition of the serene paintings of Phoenix’s own 92-year-old Philip Curtis with the in-your-face artwork of 78-year-old Leonard Baskin throws me completely off guard. I’ve come to see “Leonard Baskin: The…
Before the fall of the Soviet Union, you wouldn’t have measured a woman’s commitment to capitalism by the number of Communist posters she hung on her walls. But in these post-Cold War days, the West’s reply to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s early 1960s boast “We will bury you” has evolved…
Phoenix video artist Sloane McFarland is the first to admit that he’s not quite sure exactly what “PHACAEANS,” his laptop video installation at ASU Art Museum’s Experimental Gallery at Matthews Center, is about. A part of the extensive citywide programming for “Sites Around the City,” the museum’s current art exhibition…
The art market has done a fairly good job in the past 30 years of neutering terms like “revolutionary” and “avant-garde.” Yet the radicalism in “Painting Revolution: Kandinsky, Malevich and the Russian Avant Garde” at Phoenix Art Museum reminds us what those words meant in art before they became sales…
Artist Roger Shimomura’s earliest childhood memories are etched into his psyche. He is 3 years old and living in a U.S. government internment camp in a forlorn corner of Idaho — a camp set up to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II. Shimomura has drawn on those vivid, often poignant…
Loose brick and rubble lie scattered in the vacant lot next to the Modified gallery space on East Roosevelt Street near downtown Phoenix. The remains from a recent demolition create a fitting sidelight for the theme of the gallery’s current show, one installation in the Valleywide “Sites Around the City:…
“Any time you introduce a large body of water into an art museum, it’s a little hair-raising,” Heather Lineberry, senior curator at ASU Art Museum, confides with a nervous laugh. Lineberry is making uneasy reference to an expansive, 19-by-22-foot reflecting pool brimming with several inches of water, which was recently…
When fine woodworker Steve Makin became sufficiently frustrated by the lack of gallery and museum exhibition opportunities available to Arizona woodworkers, he decided to do something about it. The most recent fruits of Makin’s persistence can be seen in “Makin Furniture,” an exhibition of fine wood furniture and functional objects…
