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…
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,…
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…
Putting features on the faceless hordes of homeless that roam the streets and back alleys of urban America is the goal of Galeria Mesa’s juried exhibition “Going Home-less.” The show successfully dredges up some real humanity, with some very real emotions, from the bottom of those overflowing grocery carts typically…
The October 10 cover of Time magazine boldly proclaims the advent of a black renaissance here in America. The cover declares that “African-American artists are truly free at last”–at least in an aesthetic sense. But photographer Rene Cox, an African-American artist from New York, would probably take great issue with…
When audiences went to Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, expecting to see a sexy comedy in a restaurant, they were perhaps among the most unprepared audiences in film history. Rather than a knockabout farce, Greenaway served up a baroquely ferocious black comedy…
Neither rain nor smog nor threat of armed insurrection can keep any really hard-core Mexican folk art aficionado, including me (and, at one time, Nelson Rockefeller), from tracking down the objects of this insane aesthetic obsession. Recently, as Mexico was in the throes of electing a new president amid highly…
In 1992, the world celebrated–or at least acknowledged–the quincentennial of America’s discovery by Italian explorer Christopher Columbus. During that glorious year, open season was declared on good ol’ Chris and on those who followed in his wake. European conquerors were enthusiastically pressed into service for target practice by artists who…
“Fish Out Of Water,” Mesa Southwest Museum’s summer art show, is about the closest I’ve gotten to baiting a hook in 30 years. That’s when my father gave up trying to convert me to the church of fishing–and also gave up dragging me, kicking and screaming, on family fishing expeditions…
After seeing the works on paper in the latest group show being hosted by MARS Gallery, a snide adage pops to mind: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” Imported from Richmond, Virginia’s 1708 Gallery, a well-established artists’ cooperative, the current show at MARS (Phoenix’s own 15-year-old co-op) boasts…
The title of Widows’ Peak, a comic mystery set in Ireland in the 1920s, refers to a sort of colony of happy widows. It’s a high hill which overlooks the town of Kilshannon, and upon which, by some vaguely explained decree of antiquity, only widows are permitted to live. Presiding…
Valley Art Theatre in Tempe opens the Second Annual Gay and Lesbian Film Festival on Friday. The festival consists of four features and a collection of shorts, all of which are more intriguing than anything new you’re likely to see at the multiplexes this summer. Here, briefly reviewed, are this…
Italy’s Venice Biennale is considered the oldest, largest and most important art party in the world–and Phoenix has just received its engraved invitation to attend. The person who has bagged the invite for the Valley of the Sun is Marilyn Zeitlin, director of the Arizona State University Art Museum. Zeitlin…
Mention the word “graffiti” and most people will go ballistic. What scrolls up on the average man-on-the-street’s mental monitor are visions of once-virgin buildings, fences and even freeway overpass signs scarred by the unsightly spray-can “tagging” of godless vandals. Tucson’s Sixth Congress Gallery’s current show, “Spraycan Art,” gives us a…
If an art collection is the unconscious manifestation of the collector, then two folk-art shows on display in the Valley underscore the enormous disparity in the visions of different collectors in the same genre–a genre that’s increasingly popular but still jockeying for position in the world of fine art. Scottsdale…
From the street, the pieces on the walls of Scottsdale’s Bentley Gallery look like large, somber, color-field paintings of the mid-1950s to late 60s. Pivotal Mark Rothkos, maybe. Or early Frank Stellas. But those mysterious, striped “paintings” happen to be 18th- and 19th-century ceremonial Aymara textiles from the Andean highlands…
Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe Art Detour is just getting too complicated. After spending seven straight hours boarding buses and pounding the pavement on Art Detour Sunday, I still didn’t see half of the stops on the two separate art routes offered. And much of what I saw…
Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe Art Detour is just getting too complicated. After spending seven straight hours boarding buses and pounding the pavement on Art Detour Sunday, I still didn’t see half of the stops on the two separate art routes offered. And much of what I saw…
Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe Art Detour is just getting too complicated. After spending seven straight hours boarding buses and pounding the pavement on Art Detour Sunday, I still didn’t see half of the stops on the two separate art routes offered. And much of what I saw…
Since 1979, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres have lived in the dark heart of the South Bronx, collaborating on the making and painting of plaster life casts of the habitus of the inner-city neighborhood once described by writer Jane Kramer as “arguably one of [New York’s] poorest, saddest, shabbiest, most…
Since 1979, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres have lived in the dark heart of the South Bronx, collaborating on the making and painting of plaster life casts of the habitus of the inner-city neighborhood once described by writer Jane Kramer as “arguably one of [New York’s] poorest, saddest, shabbiest, most…
Sexuality is the theme of two exhibitions, one deadly serious in its approach to the subject, the other, for the most part, lethally boring. “Brian Weil: The AIDS Photographs,” on display at ASU’s Matthews Center, is a nationally touring collection of AIDS-related photographs taken around the world by this internationally…
