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…
A hunger for the exotic is usually what stirs artists to jump past the humdrum of the “new and improved” to the rarer thrill of things “never before felt or seen.” But as the Phoenix Art Museum’s “Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898-1950” suggests, that hunger isn’t confined to the…
It is not your typical art opening. There are no paintings on the wall, no spotlighted sculptures on pedestals. The usual clusters of murmuring, wineglass-wielding museumgoers, clad in black and ignoring the artwork, are nowhere in sight at the kick-off of “Club Extra,” the ongoing performance/installation created by artist Angela…
One quick look at the huge mixed-media paintings of artist William T. Wiley — now on display in “Recent and Relevant” at Scottsdale’s Riva Yares Gallery — and it becomes crystal clear that Wiley is a man who must never sleep. That’s probably because, for 40 years, this consummate artist…
Little Black Sambo, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben — all that’s missing from this classic cast of racist stereotypes is a lawn jockey at the front door of Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. No, SMOCA is not hosting a Ku Klux Klan convention or a twisted Antiques Roadshow episode. It’s just…
Every so often, America coughs up a hairball like Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker to remind itself of how far it has traveled from its past. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the civil rights movement was still being called a “struggle,” a white fool calling a black man a…
Forty years ago, a sculptor could stop almost any American museum crowd in its tracks by erecting an abstract tower of metal. But as times have changed, sculptural works in fabricated steel have steadily lost that allure. They haven’t suffered the infamy of collapsing on and killing college students for…
If the latest show in the back room of Lisa Sette Gallery reminds you of being hustled by souvenir vendors wielding lacy glass galleons and spray-painted plaster statues of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Mickey Mouse at the Tijuana-San Diego border, you’ve actually gotten the real drift of “Nouveau…
Warren McArthur knows something about the tenacity of fiction. For the past quarter century, he has been trying to undo the popular one that presents America’s über-architect Frank Lloyd Wright as the designer of the Arizona Biltmore. “My uncle Albert [Chase McArthur] was the real architect, but I guess some…
Phoenix wouldn’t be Phoenix without its illusions about water. All its boats and pools and golf greens, all its fountains, irrigated farm fields and backyards have helped to turn some fairly extravagant wet dreams into everyday occurrences. That may be why last week’s formal opening of Tempe’s Rio Salado project…
It hasn’t always been easy to pare Claude Monet’s artistic achievements from his popularity. In the later half of his life (1840 to 1926), his paintings sold so well that the writer Emile Zola suggested that he might be unloading too many unfinished works that were barely dry. More recently,…
