When the King of Spain sent Christianity to the New World in the 1500s, he hardly counted on finding heathens living as well as the ones Hernan Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, first met in 1519. Cortes reported the ancient Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan–now Mexico City–to be filled with “large and beautiful…
The case of Andres Serrano, whose photographs are on view at the Bentley Gallery, suggests that your household variety of aversion doesn’t get artists anywhere anymore; that it takes a downright revulsion to make their careers. Up until 1989, when his photograph “Piss Christ,” depicting a crucifix immersed in two…
Not many people are familiar with the sculptor Lawrence Tenney Stevens, who lived and worked in Tempe from the 1950s until his death at age 76 in 1972, but those who are all take the same sobering gulp of air before exhaling, “Ohhhhh, he was a character, all right.” Irascible,…
The subject of illness blips onto the cultural radar screen with regularity, but usually under the aegis of fund raising. Formal balls, dinners, 10K races–those are the public faces of disease in the Western world. Lately, however, an art/illness hybrid seems to be, if not blooming, at least growing. The…
German choreographer Pina Bausch came to our own Arizona desert several times looking for material for her latest work, Nur Du, whose Arizona premiere is Thursday night at Gammage Auditorium in Tempe. Translated into German from the 1955 Platters hit “Only You,” the title song, one of 34 blues, pop…
In the bumpy 1960s, a number of irascible artists reached the neo-Dada conclusion that an “installation” could be something other than a military depot with radar, missiles and rusting weapons from earlier wars. It could be a room filled with unlikely materials and even more unlikely experiences in the arts…
“When the Unabomber’s in his cabin, he’s thinking about blowing people up, not about making the bomb,” says Al Price. Four of Price’s kinetic sculptures–which he calls “Traps”–are on display at Scottsdale Center for the Arts until September 1. They are carefully balanced, welded steel structures, mounted on Swiss watchlike…
In the 20 years that Mark Klett has been making pictures of the American West, his photographs have come to symbolize its ongoing revision in the American mind. No longer an eternal paradise of opportunity and natural splendor, it has become a lesson in the rub between the two. Take…
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…
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…
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…
‘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…
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…
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…
“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,…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
I fell for it. I believed, after glancing through the book Why Cats Paint, that the authors had really managed to document the unleashing of feline artistic finesse. And, indeed, at first blush, this slim volume, which outsold nearly everything last holiday season, seems to explain the little-known phenomenon of…
