U.S. District Court Judge Robert Broomfield leans out over the rail on the fourth-floor balcony of the new Sandra Day O’Connor Federal Courthouse in downtown Phoenix and points out the gridwork of a freshly sealed patch of glistening gray terrazzo floor. “That floor is different from every height. If you…
Liliana Porter’s exhibition, “Secret Lives of Toys,” slipped into the Phoenix Art Museum in early September when most of the bright lights were still shining on Annie Leibovitz’s portraits of women. It overlapped the Leibovitz extravaganza for only a few weeks. But that was long enough for Porter’s quiet images…
In his 1999 State of the Neighborhoods address, Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza touted the growing number of neighborhood organizations, the groups gaining strength with the city’s explosive growth. In the previous decade, associations led by grassroots activists had jumped from a meager 28 to a robust 676. “That’s remarkable,” he…
Hernan Rivera unpuckers a bottle of Mexican Coca-Cola from his lips and nods in the direction of a family finishing a late-night meal at his mobile hot dog stand on McDowell Road, just west of 35th Avenue. “Tourists from Mexico,” he says, as they stroll into a dimly lighted corner…
Helen Brock momentarily ponders poet Ogden Nash’s Song of the Open Road, then, in a soft Oklahoma drawl, repeats it haltingly. “I think that I shall never see A billboard as lovely as a tree. Perhaps unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.” For the past…
People like to blame the pretensions of the art mob for the churchlike quiet of museums. But the more subtle truth is that great art has a way of silencing the crowd. Having already spoken the language it was meant to speak, it leaves nothing to translate or add, nothing…
Not many materials have had the schizophrenic life that plastic has. In the khaki-toned years following World War II, it looked as fresh and desirable as spun candy, a dream come true for industrial designers trying to create forms for an array of new and old functions. But as plastic…
It’s never been easy to explain the weakness of Phoenix’s downtown art scene. Art martyrs like to pin its frailty on the city’s antipathy toward culture. They say Phoenix has pumped municipal bond dollars by the millions into a few big museums while happily bulldozing smaller downtown galleries and art…
Summer comes with the cultural expectation that the farther you travel, the better the art gets. Mexico City, New York, Europe and Asia prove that equation. But cultural tourism in Phoenix’s west side remains a mystifying exception.That’s partly why “Three Generations of Great Masters of Mexican Painting,” at ASU West,…
Scottsdale gallery owners don’t often coo about competitors the way they do about Kraig Foote. They say he’s a quiet saint in a racket filled with gossipy sinners. “He really is pretty special,” says Lisa Sette, who owns the Lisa Sette Gallery a few doors away from Foote’s Art One…
Joyce Thayer eases her pickup truck onto the dirt path beside the Highline Canal in south Phoenix, glances at the water near the top of the banks and shakes her head. “That’s just not running right,” she says. “It shouldn’t be that high unless something’s plugging the grate up ahead.”…
Tempe Butte is an island of rock in the midst of a city, a volcanic and sedimentary bump that rises barely 300 feet above downtown Tempe. Yet to an increasingly vocal crowd of locals, the Butte — also known as “A” Mountain and Hayden Butte — looms as the latest…
Before the fall of the Soviet Union, you wouldn’t have measured a woman’s commitment to capitalism by the number of Communist posters she hung on her walls. But in these post-Cold War days, the West’s reply to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s early 1960s boast “We will bury you” has evolved…
The art market has done a fairly good job in the past 30 years of neutering terms like “revolutionary” and “avant-garde.” Yet the radicalism in “Painting Revolution: Kandinsky, Malevich and the Russian Avant Garde” at Phoenix Art Museum reminds us what those words meant in art before they became sales…
Last August, about 30 residents of Central City South, a few city officials and some interested outsiders gathered in the steamy summer heat at the Valley Christian Center at 13th Avenue and Hadley Street to hear what the city planned to do about this neighborhood in need of help. Stuck…
A hunger for the exotic is usually what stirs artists to jump past the humdrum of the “new and improved” to the rarer thrill of things “never before felt or seen.” But as the Phoenix Art Museum’s “Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898-1950” suggests, that hunger isn’t confined to the…
Well-known KTAR broadcaster Howard Pyle had a resonant voice and a sermonizing way with words that made him a radio natural. He was the voice of the sunrise service that KTAR broadcast every Easter from the rim of the Grand Canyon. He was the voice of the station’s popular poetry…
Jimmy Creasman was a lucky man. The proof was in the piles of letters, photographs and other memorabilia I found scattered in the alley behind his house in Tempe two years ago. They told about how he’d come home from World War II and lived out the promise of his…
Stories often wind up in the trash. But this one begins there, with letters I found in a Tempe alley two years ago. They were dumped among heaps of books, files and envelopes stuffed with bills and receipts. The discards were too dated to be those of a college roomie…
Every so often, America coughs up a hairball like Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker to remind itself of how far it has traveled from its past. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the civil rights movement was still being called a “struggle,” a white fool calling a black man a…
Editor’s note: In October, New Times published the first in a series of stories about gang problems in the neighborhood known as Las Cuatro Milpas (The Four Fields), which is situated southeast of downtown Phoenix. Many residents believed the stories — which focused on a ruthless faction of the Eastside…
Forty years ago, a sculptor could stop almost any American museum crowd in its tracks by erecting an abstract tower of metal. But as times have changed, sculptural works in fabricated steel have steadily lost that allure. They haven’t suffered the infamy of collapsing on and killing college students for…
