Maybe I’m just getting old. Or maybe Art Detour is just getting too complicated. After spending seven straight hours boarding buses and pounding the pavement on Art Detour Sunday, I still didn’t see half of the stops on the two separate art routes offered. And much of what I saw…
Since 1979, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres have lived in the dark heart of the South Bronx, collaborating on the making and painting of plaster life casts of the habitus of the inner-city neighborhood once described by writer Jane Kramer as “arguably one of [New York’s] poorest, saddest, shabbiest, most…
Since 1979, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres have lived in the dark heart of the South Bronx, collaborating on the making and painting of plaster life casts of the habitus of the inner-city neighborhood once described by writer Jane Kramer as “arguably one of [New York’s] poorest, saddest, shabbiest, most…
Sexuality is the theme of two exhibitions, one deadly serious in its approach to the subject, the other, for the most part, lethally boring. “Brian Weil: The AIDS Photographs,” on display at ASU’s Matthews Center, is a nationally touring collection of AIDS-related photographs taken around the world by this internationally…
Sexuality is the theme of two exhibitions, one deadly serious in its approach to the subject, the other, for the most part, lethally boring. “Brian Weil: The AIDS Photographs,” on display at ASU’s Matthews Center, is a nationally touring collection of AIDS-related photographs taken around the world by this internationally…
Sierra Vista sculptor Robert Wick has a heart bigger than his art. And that’s pretty big, considering that some of his bronze sculptures are more than 13 feet high and weigh so much they have to be lifted by cranes and transported by flatbed. Wick was the featured artist and…
Given the recent increase of ugly–and often violent–anti-Mexican sentiment in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, it took a lot of huevos for Scottsdale Center for the Arts to mount “Cruzando Fronteras/Crossing Borders.” The center should be saluted for its brave farsightedness in exhibiting what has turned…
@body:After seeing the work in “South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination” at Phoenix Art Museum, if I knew nothing about Mexican art history, I would have to conclude that all American artists who traveled to Mexico between 1914 and 1947 were required to undergo frontal lobotomies before…
@body:After seeing the work in “South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination” at Phoenix Art Museum, if I knew nothing about Mexican art history, I would have to conclude that all American artists who traveled to Mexico between 1914 and 1947 were required to undergo frontal lobotomies before…
@body:After seeing the work in “South of the Border: Mexico in the American Imagination” at Phoenix Art Museum, if I knew nothing about Mexican art history, I would have to conclude that all American artists who traveled to Mexico between 1914 and 1947 were required to undergo frontal lobotomies before…
Recently, the Tucson Police Department’s child-abuse detail confiscated artwork by local artist-photographer Robyn Stoutenburg from the city’s downtown Gallery Six & 13–without a validly executed search warrant. Twelve of the artist’s photographs were seized after the principal of an adjacent middle school complained of the propriety and accessibility of the…
I’ll be honest. “Too Late for Goya,” the multimedia exhibition of Spain-born artist Francesc Torres currently showing at ASU Art Museum, is not for the politically or philosophically impaired. If the only thing you know about Hegel is that it rhymes with “bagel,” if the only Marx you’re familiar with…
If artist Frances Whitehead had lived in 16th-century Europe, she probably would have been burned at the stake for being a witch. Whitehead’s sculptural installations, which can be seen at Scottsdale’s Lisa Sette Gallery in an exhibition titled “The Dream,” use unorthodox botanical materials classically associated with ancient divination and…
You can’t miss the funky, Thirties motor court next to Shep’s Liquor on Main Street in downtown Cottonwood. Hallucinogenic folk art on its front porch makes your head swirl and throb, like a recurrent acid flashback. Someone has turned the first four units into an artist’s studio, but often, there’s…
Always borrowing, American artists are the greatest cultural debtors on Earth. And few among them owe the world more than potters do. Over the years, potters have rummaged the cupboards of virtually every mud-baking civilization–often extending their slippery reaches overseas and into the grave–to come up with what we like…
Anne Coe is a captivating conversationalist. Her passion for environmental issues is evident in her dialogue and in her artwork, and she can hold forth for hours on aspects of life in the desert you’ve never considered before. Too bad her paintings are so lousy. Coe’s current exhibition, on display…
Artist Linda Mundwiler used to collect pieces of dead birds. Today she gathers lists of stupid questions about her art instead. Among her favorites are: Do you ever paint the tender moments?” Do you do a lot of drugs before you paint?” Don’t you ever paint in earth tones?” (Her…
It’s just before midnight on a Saturday evening, and Rose Johnson is putting the finishing touches on a 25-foot mural outside her downtown Phoenix art studio. Inside, Johnson’s studio-mate, Anne Thompson, is displaying glass etchings and mixed-media paintings. Around the corner, at arty hangout Metropophobobia, a group of volunteers is…
Canadian artist ManWoman is accustomed to giddy questions about his peculiar name. He responds politely when asked how he’s listed in the telephone book (“ManWoman”); whether his friends call him Man (“No, because then strangers would have to call me Mr. Woman”); and what his mother calls him (Nothing: “She…
In her 1944 oil painting “Arizona,” Dorothea Tanning stands at the edge of a cliff. She’s surrounded by the spires, buttes and mesas of the red rock country around Sedona. Only here, the rocks are blue and green in the eerie, ambiguous light of early dawn. You can’t see the…
Phoenix gave performance artist Frank Moore and his Chero Company a pleasant surprise on October 5 by showing up in record numbers for his controversial “Passions Play” at Gallery X. Eighty people doesn’t sound like a lot, but Moore is a self-described “spastic,” palsied from the neck down and unable…
Marilyn Butler remembers reading the handwriting on the wall. It was early 1989, and she was putting together an invitational show of landscape paintings at the gallery she owned in Santa Monica. She called a neighboring gallery to borrow one of its pieces. Such intergallery borrowings are common in the…
