The Joy of Sacks

Diane Upchurch sees considerably more in shopping bags than “paper or plastic.” Just how much more is apparent in the 80 or so examples dating from 1985 that she has assembled into “Portable Design: A Selection of Shopping Bags,” an ASU College of Architecture show highlighting the ingenuity and marketing…

Tempest in a Toilet Bowl

Kate Millett hadn’t heard much about the uproar her artwork “The American Dream Goes to Pot” had caused in Phoenix. The piece shows an American flag stuffed into a toilet basin in a wooden cage. Speaking by phone from her home in upstate New York, she chuckled to hear that…

Holy Roller

Jose Benavides spent almost a year begging or buying the 500 license plates that he has since pounded into a gigantic depiction of the Virgin Mary attached to the chassis of a 1979 Datsun pickup truck. Benavides’ “Madonna” is a 17-foot-tall, fully drivable shrine to Our Lady of Grace–a sort…

Sexpots

‘The sign posted on the door of Tempe Arts Center warns that the center’s current ceramics exhibit, “Master’s Touch: Akio Takamori,” contains images of adult themes. What it doesn’t tell you, however, is that the work within is a poetic paean to the myth and magic that have always surrounded…

Deja Wow: Red, White and Snooze

According to artist Hans Haacke, all art becomes purely nostalgic after a period of ten years. Haacke’s own 1991 mixed-media sculpture “Collateral,” included in Phoenix Art Museum’s “Old Glory: The American Flag in Contemporary Art,” falls premature victim to this gloomy, but fairly accurate, pronouncement about the staying power of…

Video Village

Deposit all linear thinking at the shadowy portals of “Buried Secrets,” Bill Viola’s five-part, multimedia installation at ASU Art Museum at Nelson Fine Arts Center. That’s because this potent visual and auditory experience is consciously designed to be understood on a purely intuitive plane, a level on which just about…

Getting Over Ansel

“Image Conscious,” a juried photography show geared toward altered and experimental work, proves yet again that there’s viable photographic life after Ansel Adams and his arcane Zone System–and that it’s alive, well and being shown in, of all places, Mesa, Arizona–specifically at Galeria Mesa. “Our focus for this particular show,…

Webb Design

When Del Webb Corporation brought plans for its huge New River development to Maricopa County for approval early last year, the ensuing donnybrook was about as lively and entertaining as land planning gets. On one side was Del Webb, assuring the county that its 5,661-acre community–the Villages at Desert Hills–would…

Cast From a Different Mold

If you are desperate for some postmodern deconstruction or hankering for angst-ridden art, don’t bother to stop in at Lisa Sette Gallery to see “In the Garden,” the current exhibition of sculptural and two-dimensional mixed-media work by Valley artist Mayme Kratz. You won’t find much of either in the quiet,…

FLIGHTS OF FANCY

Touring the artworks at the three terminals at Sky Harbor International Airport provides a lesson in Phoenix’s progressive sophistication in relation to public art. The big bird mosaic at Terminal Two looks as dated as a Depression-era mural. The big metal turds and huge woven wall hangings at Terminal Three…

Looming Large

If I can only have a dress made from Junichi Arai’s fluid stainless steel fabric in time for Halloween, I can go to the big party as Queen of the Martians. The arresting fabric, which moves like mercury in the hand and could have come straight out of some secret…

UP AND ATOM

Get out your Raybans and suntan lotion because the Valley’s art season opens with a nuclear blast this year. Ground Zero is Scottsdale Center for the Arts, currently housing “Critical Mass” and “The P2 Project,” two exhibitions which examine the relationship between human beings and their seemingly genetic propensity for…

RED ROCK TEST

When I first moved to the Valley two years ago, I did the expected thing–I made a visit to Sedona. I was interested in the town for many reasons: the allure of the name, which comes from Sedona Schnebly, who founded the town with husband Carl in 1902; the spot’s…

MOM-AND-POP ART

“When you photograph me, I feel everything leave me. The blood drains from my face, my eyelids droop, my thoughts disappear. I can feel my facial muscles go limp. All you have to do is to give me that one cue, ‘Don’t smile,’ and zap. Nothing. That’s what you get…

AMAZING RACE

Long before Spike Lee and John Singleton made their first films, African-American cinema had had a 50-year history as an alternative genre that few people, even film buffs, knew about. Made independently by African-American directors for African-American audiences, “race films” flourished from after World War I until the late 1940s,…

TOYING WITH OUR EMOTIONS

If Marcel Duchamp, Pieter Brueghel and Franz Kafka had somehow been commissioned to build a playroom for disenchanted philosophers, it may have looked a lot like deCompression Satellite Gallery does right now. The Arizona Center gallery is presenting the work of Bay Area sculptor Bella Feldman in an exhibition titled…

ART DETOUR SNEAKS INTO TOWN

Art Detour, the yearly open house of downtown Phoenix art studios and galleries, came and went this year without much fanfare. No trolleys to shuttle folks along the circuit of art spaces, no “mystery” galleries (empty downtown storefronts turned into art spaces for the event), no juried exhibition. In other…

PRODIGALLY TALENTED SON

Robert Anderson had just finished his first year of art school at St. Francis College in Fort Wayne, Indiana. “I had won just about everything I entered in the Midwest,” he recalls. “My teachers were entering the same art contests, and I was winning. I expected them to congratulate me,…

DADA’S GOT A BRAND-NEW BAG

The term “neo-Dada” was used in a very negative sense by art critics, and only for a short time at that. Hence, it’s somewhat surprising that Susan Hapgood has pressed it into service as the title of the exhibition she has curated at Scottsdale Center for the Arts. “Neo-Dada: Redefining…