One of the perks of being an artist is that you usually end up with a fabulous art collection, compensation for all those years of living in an unheated studio and subsisting on beans and ramen noodles. An artist’s private stash is generally the product of a good eye, good…
British sculptor Anthony Caro is most famous for the lean, linear metal abstractions he made in the 1960s, playful pieces that seemed to float in the air. So it’s surprising to see the lumpy, earthbound assemblages of clay and steel in “A Life in Sculpture: The Kenwood Series,” an exhibition…
Eric Finzi at Perihelion Arts: It’s a pop culture tenet that Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a perv whose fascination with little girls appears, to contemporary eyes, to be very Michael Jackson. Maryland painter Eric Finzi explores Carroll’s oddness in a series of epoxy resin paintings based…
“Keeping Shadows: Photography From the Worcester Museum of Art” Photos lie. You knew that. What you probably didn’t know is that photos were lying more than a century before Photoshop became a verb. Photographers were mucking with their images way back in the 19th century when the medium was still…
It’s a pop culture tenet that Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was a perv. Carroll, who wrote Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, was a shy, stuttering deacon and lifelong bachelor with an interest in little girls that, to contemporary eyes, appears very Michael…
Jennifer Bartlett at Bentley Projects: If you want to see how a painter’s brain differs from the gray matter of people who don’t know which end of a paintbrush to hold, go see this retrospective of work by the famed California-born artist. In a piece titled Boats, Bartlett places a…
If you want to see how a painter’s brain is different from the gray matter of people who don’t know which end of a paintbrush to hold, go look at Jennifer Bartlett’s retrospective at Bentley Projects. The show, composed of 30 paintings, sculptures and constructions chosen by the artist herself,…
Most Americans don’t think much about China. The nation that’s home to 20 percent of the people on the planet is a murky place that hovers behind low price tags and bird flu. Few of us think of China as a producer of first-rate contemporary art that gazes out at…
“Big City” at Phoenix Art Museum: There isn’t a single image of the PHX among the cityscapes and urban life scenes drawn from PAM’s permanent collection. That’s odd, seeing as how we’re the nation’s fifth or sixth largest metropolis. The omission is partly because of the age of the work,…
There isn’t a single image of Phoenix in the “Big City: Cityscapes and Urban Life” exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum. Which is odd, seeing as how there are only a handful of cities in the country bigger than this one. Don’t we rate at least one tiny watercolor in a…
Hector Ruiz is one of the most talented artists in the city. His visceral woodblock prints, woodcarvings and papier-mâch&ecute; installations show what life in America in 2005 is like for anyone who isn’t a white male. He also runs a gallery in an old auto repair shop on Grand Avenue,…
Ruben Maqueda at Museo Chicano: Ruben Maqueda brings contemporary kick to some of the work in this show of photography and folk art. His glitter-bedecked, candy-colored photos of descansos are digital age-meets-dollar store, a knowing wink at the anti-intellectualism that runs beneath much folk art. And his Day of the…
Live in the Southwest long enough, mi’ja, and you would rather eat live fire ants than look at one more gallery full of quaint, decorator-friendly Latino folk art. Ruben Maqueda makes art in this tradition, but mercifully, Maqueda manages to bring some contemporary kick to “Tradiciones de Mi Gente (Traditions…
Some superstars of photography come together in a fascinating exhibition of photographs at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. “Private Pictures: Photography From Arizona Collections” features work by classic shooters like Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, Cindy Sherman, Henri Cartier Bresson and Tina Modetti. It’s a greatest-hits show, the art world…
Colin Chillag’s paintings at Modified Arts make you feel like you’ve seen them before, in an earlier life. The one of a grandmotherly woman holding a baby is eerily familiar, as is the one of the middle-aged couple standing in front of an elaborately decorated cake. We’ve all lived these…
Stella Lai at ASU Art Museum: Lai’s deceptively pretty paintings are about how ugly it is to be a woman or an animal in her native Hong Kong. Sad yellow chicken carcasses and plump pink pork chops morph into faceless silhouettes of swimsuit-clad women, and a roasted pig, cherry tomato…
Michael Eastman’s “America” at Bentley Projects: The ambient desolation of Michael Eastman’s photographs of empty streetscapes and seedy interiors seems prophetic in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s leveling of New Orleans. At least two of the photos in this exhibition were made in the city, pre-storm. His portrait of a…
You can’t chuck a Grand Canyon snow globe in the Southwest without hitting a Luis Jimenez sculpture. His biliously colored, Pop Art-goes-Chicano depictions of cowboys, horses, Indians and other iconic figures of the West are a fixture of university concourses and art museum sculpture gardens from Phoenix to Houston. Jimenez…
At first glance, Stella Lai’s paintings look like benign decorations, all delicate flowers, bright colors and pretty Chinese calligraphy. Look closer, and you’ll see her Asian-influenced pieces are actually about how rotten it is being a woman or an animal in her native Hong Kong, where the culture is apparently…
Michael Eastman’s unpopulated photographs of empty streetscapes and seedy interiors occupy the same desolate ward as Edward Hopper’s diner and Walker Evans’ still lifes. Boarded-up theaters, abandoned houses and shabby rooms tell of entropy, imploding communities, empty dreams, and a center that cannot hold. You know the drill. That’s why…
The Arizona Print Group and Writers Bloc team up for “Urban Legends,” an exhibition of prose, poetry and prints about those apocryphal stories that float around the culture and illuminate our fears by their very silliness. You know the ones: poisoned ATM deposit envelopes, the escaped serial killer with a…
Walking through “Emilio Pucci,” the fashion exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum, is like going back in time. The bikinis, gowns and mini-dresses covered in the Italian designer’s singular geometric patterns and acid-bright colors are relics of an age when it was okay to call a flight attendant a stewardess, when…
