Linda Lewis apparently has a little trouble with authority.In her solo show at the Burton Barr Central Library and group show at Mesa Contemporary Arts, she uses old historical texts and documents to wage an arty war against history’s multitude of oppressive forces. Her weapon isn’t the heady philosophical discourse…
This is a city of ghosts. Like an ancient necropolis unearthed from beneath the desert, Phoenix is a place of the dead. You see them caught in mid-scream in front of the bronze dome of the State Capitol, wandering eyeless across the dirt mounds of Pueblo Grande on Washington Street…
Philip Curtis, the Scottsdale painter who died November 12 at age 93, would have loved the Phoenix Art Museum’s farewell to him last week. He always liked a good party. And this one included some of his favorite things: a few hundred of his closest friends praising him and his…
In our daily physical world, “Sustained,” the new installation by Gene Cooper, is located at the Lisa Sette Gallery in downtown Scottsdale. The installation also exists in the cyberworld of technology and virtual reality, over a tangled web of fiber-optic cables. And on yet another level, the work exists literally…
Gardens have been a source of contemplation and inspiration ever since we were booted out of the first one for bad behavior. These havens give us order and perfection within the otherwise untamed chaos of the natural world. In the solace they provide, some religious scholars have argued, we are…
If “No Absolutes” — ASU Art Museum’s group exhibition showcasing artists working today in the Southwest — is any indication of what is truly being produced in the region, maybe it’s time to pack it up and move to Minnesota. Jointly curated by the museum’s director, Marilyn Zeitlin, senior curator…
We’ve come to know an Annie Leibovitz photograph not by any particular style or photographic technique but by the combination of two relatively simple characteristics — if the photo is of a celebrity and said celebrity is doing something unusual or rather un-celebrity-like, then it must have come from the…
Besides the obvious mind alteration and outright brainwash inflicted upon all the video game-obsessed minions who populate the elementary schools and high schools across our country, a less virulent but sad phenomenon awaits them in adulthood. It has nothing to do with the usual criticisms of overhyped sex and violence…
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea. — Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”Dylan Thomas knew the harsh truth that childhood is nothing but a myth. No matter how much we…
Rotting bodies, leering skulls, flickering candles, droopy roses — not one of these creaky, well-worn symbols for death and the passage of time makes an appearance in “Memento Mori,” the latest national juried exhibition organized by Mesa Contemporary Arts. Formerly operating under the name of Galeria Mesa, Mesa Contemporary Arts…
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…
Western tradition, in all its romanticized glory, has always appealed most intensely to the urban dwellers of the East Coast. From their cries of gold on the leftmost shore, through pulp magazines, to serialized television shows and onto New York fashion runways, the West has always been about the ideal…
If I am ever forced at samurai swordpoint to come up with solid truisms about art at the beginning of the second millennium, I would have to say there are but two I could bet on to save my life. The first is that the genuinely beautiful will never go…
Western tradition, in all its romanticized glory, has always appealed most intensely to the urban dwellers of the East Coast. From their cries of gold on the leftmost shore, through pulp magazines, to serialized television shows and onto New York fashion runways, the West has always been about the ideal…
Going to the airport for reasons other than the usual provides an entirely new perspective on the place: Suited beings traverse the empty corridors looking nowhere but ahead; strange desert-themed gift shops offer the best in plastic souvenir ware such as rattlesnake heads encased in glass, while other “high end”…
In astrophysics parlance, the term “chaos theory” refers to the hypothesis that even a simple system can manifest unpredictable and highly complicated behavior. In other words, even the tiniest uncertainty in initial conditions within a system can have far-ranging, sometimes unforeseeable effects down the line. The flap of a butterfly’s…
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…
How did a nice, quiet girl from a small town in upstate New York find herself learning to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese, traipsing all over China and other parts of Asia like Indiana Jones and eventually landing in Phoenix, Arizona?Janet Baker, new curator of Asian art at Phoenix Art Museum,…
The exhibition catalogue accompanying Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s latest offering, “do it,” makes no bones about it. The show’s title, notes catalogue essayist Bruce Altshuler, is designed to bring to mind the nostalgic rallying cry of radical Vietnam War protestor and Yippie co-founder Jerry Rubin, as well as the…
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…
Ever send out an invitation to a big wingding and no one RSVP’d? That’s basically what happened to Mesa Arts Center’s Galeria Mesa when it sent out a submission call for its third juried exhibition of work by art educators who teach in Arizona’s public schools, colleges and universities –…
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…
