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…
I remember one night in college, my classmate Carol and I were cramming for Dr. Deleuze’s art history exam, smoking up a storm and bitching about the absence of women in our art history texts. One of the books was H.W. Janson’s History of Art. I remembered that night because…
If you want to see the state of contemporary art in Arizona, you’ll have to go down to Tucson–and down the stairs at the Tucson Museum of Art. The Arizona Biennial, the only statewide juried exhibition open to all artists and craftspeople from or living in Arizona, and a show…
“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…
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,…
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, 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…
