Mimes are usually mute and wave gloved hands in the air. Actors pretend to be someone–anyone–else. Yet you never know what to expect from performance artists. One day they’re masturbating in a gallery. Another, they’re having a friend shoot them in the arm with a gun, or ranting about their…
You see it in American art museums all the time: women towing men from object to object, cooing over things that make the fellers squirm or want to pull out a hammer or a chain saw. But as one official at the West Valley Art Museum/Sun Cities Museum of Art…
You knew Olympia Dukakis was an Oscar- and Obie-winning actor. You saw her in Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias and in many other films. So what’s she doing acting as creative consultant to a San Francisco dance troupe that’s making a new work here in Phoenix? No scripts in the offing?…
In the opening image of a documentary video, Meryl Tankard dances sinuously, sweatily, whipping her hair in front of the camera. “Dance really should be the ultimate form of expression,” she says when she finally catches her breath. “I wanted to act, to paint, to design. But then I thought,…
The Phoenix Art Museum has wasted little time in living up to the cultural promise of its expansion and renovation. Barely two years into its new digs, the museum is drawing record crowds with its exhibition of Egyptian art and artifacts. Since it opened in October, the mummy show, as…
For more than 150 years, photographers have been busily snapping opposing realities and versions of the truth. They’ve wielded cameras as tools of analysis and exploration, to clarify mysteries and bring the distant near. And they’ve used them as tools of expression, to make enigmas of the commonplace. There’s plenty…
The 20th anniversary of the Movimiento Artistico del Rio Salado–better known downtown as MARS Artspace–is as much a milestone of resilience as it is one of culture. The organization, now hosting its anniversary show, “20 Years On,” has outlasted the involvement of most of its Chicano founders. It has long…
For nine years Michael Cole starred as one of Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s dancers. Now he’s starring on stage and screen. Computer screen that is. The tall, gorgeous, dreadlocked dancer/choreographer could easily star on the silver screen too. Cole dances his work Command X/V, Versions 1, 2, and 3 during…
Names like “A Puncher’s Paradise,” “Reluctant Mount,” “Last Drop” and “Lickin’ Clean” leave little doubt that you’re in the company of men who wear chaps. No, this isn’t theme night at the local gay bar. This is the Cowboy Artists of America annual bunkhouse of fun at the Phoenix Art…
Great art from past civilizations always seems to contain more future than past. Some of that might be because of the money and grandiose faith we cast in the direction of old treasures and the cliche of “art for the ages.” Yet you can trace much of the verve in…
It’s fairly easy to fall into the trap of looking to a nation’s art for state department insights about its culture–one nation one art. But even before you’re through the first gallery of the ASU Art Museum’s “Contemporary Art From Cuba: Irony and Survival on the Utopian Island” it’s clear…
The primary theme of Galeria Mesa’s current exhibition, “Light Sensitive,” is photography and the photographic processes that artists are using to make their images. Yet the show’s quieter point is the difficulty this kind of exhibition has in attracting first-rate work. Like many exhibitions developed by small art centers around…
You don’t often notice the effect that a museum’s architecture has on exhibitions–the way the surroundings bolster some shows and diminish others. But it’s difficult to miss the boost that the Phoenix Art Museum’s 1998 Triennial gets from the museum’s hangarlike Steele Gallery. From the moment Carlos Mollura’s giant, black…
Joanne Rapp has always been something of a “low talker”–that Seinfeldian girlfriend of Kramer’s whose inaudible delivery got the politely nodding Jerry to agree inadvertently to wear a “puffy shirt” on national television. But the wares and wearables Rapp promoted in near whispers for 26 years at her Marshall Way…
The Internet has reduced most of us to chimpanzees in the cockpit of a jumbo jet: clicking this, clicking that, listening, waiting, waiting some more, then reloading and trying it all over again. Gamblers, pornographers and the military seem to have figured out its purpose. But artists are among those…
We may never know why sports elevated the ancient Grecian imagination to Praxiteles, and has lowered the current Phoenician one to the art at Bank One Ballpark. But the modern impulse to turn every little sports-related thing into a marketing scheme may have something to do with it. Diamondbacks spokesmen…
Some 30 years after “Mrs. Robinson,” no one wonders, in cheery Simon-and-Garfunkel tones, “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?” Everyone knows that, when his time came, the Yankee Clipper quietly limped down from the pinstriped Olympus of his day, married and divorced a tragic beauty and slipped into a life…
Nature has been the subject in search of a form in Mayme Kratz’s art for some time now–especially fragments of nature. Since 1991, when she began embedding all sorts of found natural objects in her resin sculptures, the artist has been preoccupied with drawing attention to the smallest of small…
It’s no secret that the identity of “Arizona” or “Southwest” art has been changing for some time now. As the urban forces that molded the cultures of other international cities have begun to affect our own, the art being made here has become as varied and complex as the works…
It’s tough to miss the new mural wrapping the Mercer Mortuary building, on the southwest corner of 16th Street and Thomas Road. Its big, stylized figures and scenes in bold colors radiate just the sort of up-with-people exuberance you’d hope to find in a neighborhood that has been fighting crime…
The railroad didn’t do many favors for Southwestern American Indians. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it did bring them a vital new market for their arts and crafts. Just when traditional tribal wares were losing their place to manufactured ones (also brought by train), the iron…
Hindsight through pop filters makes ’60s and ’70s sexual decadence seem like mere reductive nostalgia to a godless, TV-weaned generation–especially if one ignores the bra smoke of feminist politics and the embryonic gay-rights movement. The power of mass media dictates that recent history gets defined by way of pop-culture icons…
