It’s no secret that the identity of “Arizona” or “Southwest” art has been changing for some time now. As the urban forces that molded the cultures of other international cities have begun to affect our own, the art being made here has become as varied and complex as the works…
It’s tough to miss the new mural wrapping the Mercer Mortuary building, on the southwest corner of 16th Street and Thomas Road. Its big, stylized figures and scenes in bold colors radiate just the sort of up-with-people exuberance you’d hope to find in a neighborhood that has been fighting crime…
The railroad didn’t do many favors for Southwestern American Indians. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it did bring them a vital new market for their arts and crafts. Just when traditional tribal wares were losing their place to manufactured ones (also brought by train), the iron…
Hindsight through pop filters makes ’60s and ’70s sexual decadence seem like mere reductive nostalgia to a godless, TV-weaned generation–especially if one ignores the bra smoke of feminist politics and the embryonic gay-rights movement. The power of mass media dictates that recent history gets defined by way of pop-culture icons…
Given the long partnership that words and pictures have had in the evolution of alphabets and books, it isn’t surprising to find contemporary artists dedicating prints and drawings to a favorite author, or joining writers in the production of limited-edition books and folios. But you rarely see them going to…
“Domestic Pottery,” the title of the current show at the Joanne Rapp Gallery, seems less a holiday sales pitch than a lesson in how far the reputation of useful, handmade pottery has sunk in the past 50 years. Praised through mid-century as the art of the people, it was gradually…
You ordinarily wouldn’t consider a cheese-loving Yorkshire inventor named Wallace and his mute dog, Gromit, the stuff of cinematic stardom. But in Toonland, where cults and corporations rise from the zany fiction of talking crickets, mice, ducks, moose, flying squirrels, the Simpsons and their heavy-metal cousins Beavis and Butt-head, just…
From his office in Los Angeles, Michael Greene, head of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS)–the Grammy people–is waxing passionate about the similarities between playing musical instruments and playing baseball. “The concentration, the focus, the losing of oneself in what you’re doing,” he says quickly in a…
The family values Arizonans seem to know best are the ones that say: Slash social-service budgets and smash programs that provide aid to kids and battered women. This being Domestic Violence Awareness Month, several Arizona choreographer/performers apparently decided to score a few defensive whacks for the family with some chillingly…
Aaah, the unspoiled West: Big space. Big light. Big view. Big lure for the millions who yearly go searching for the serenity and wilderness behind this popular yet fading image. For the most part, it is the image featured in Phoenix Art Museum’s “Canyonland Visions,” a show highlighting artists’ portrayals…
A quarter mile northeast from the Church of the Orbital Orgy, a family–mom, dad, big brother, sis–sat on a couch, watching television. “They’re toast,” I thought. And they were. The couch suddenly lurched forward, jerked to a stop for a second, then hyperaccelerated and smashed into the TV, which was…
When Scottsdale began talking about developing a new downtown transit center several years ago, urban-design junkies had plenty of cause to roll their eyes and mutter, “Here comes more Frontiertown.” The doodads the city had added to its downtown streets in the early 1990s had only bolstered its reputation for…
Not long into a tour of Sky Harbor International Airport’s Terminal Four (T-4), Lennee Eller changes from the curator of the airport’s art program into a disconsolate housekeeper. She can’t believe the dust accumulating in the display cases; the chocolate, chewing gum and worse ground into the carpet nearby; the…
Ron Carlson steps to the lectern at Changing Hands Bookstore. The podium sits beside the store’s “writing” section, next to the books designed to instruct and inspire budding authors. Copies of Carlson’s own new volume, The Hotel Eden Stories (Norton), are stacked nearby. The new book is a collection of…
There was an angry one in Boston harbor, a Mad one in Alice’s wonderland. Now comes the Tempe Tea Party–a diverse assembly of artworks related to tea. It is the third such bash hosted by the Tempe Arts Center in the past six years. Its cups, saucers, jewelry, books, sculpture…
By almost any measure, “An Excess of Fact,” Lee Friedlander’s photographs of the Sonoran Desert at the University of Arizona’s Center for Creative Photography, is an extraordinary event. It pairs one of the nation’s most distinctive photographers with a subject that’s relatively new to him and consistently elusive to most…
Impressionism has become so lovable and precious ($78.1 million for a Renoir painting in 1990) that we tend to forget what a poke in the eye the paintings of Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro, Cezanne, Sisley and friends once seemed to be. Or that the movement’s name was coined by a…
Beyond sex, drugs, Top 10 marketing and the self-indulgences of youth, it’s hard to name many lasting cultural associations with rock ‘n’ roll. Politics, maybe, but only from time to time. Satan, I suppose, if embarrassment doesn’t keep you from saying so. Yet one rarely thinks of fine art. With…
For the past 16 years, the Arizona Museum for Youth in Mesa has thrived on the fact that children would rather “just do it” than listen to or watch grown-ups tell or show them how to do it. The museum averages about three major exhibits a year, and its hands-on…
With the Kennedy reference in its title and its promise to choreograph “the hits of a generation,” Ballet Arizona’s new work–“Ask Not . . .”–could easily have been a shameless grab at baby-boomer bucks. “There’s a generation out there who should have very vivid memories, who are the new powers…
As luck would have it, my epiphany about “Art on the Edge of Fashion,” a show of some 30 works by eight artists at ASU’s Nelson Fine Arts Center, came last Saturday night in the museum’s men’s room. I was taking care of some personal business when a woman’s voice…
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…
