“Hector Ruiz: La Realidad (Reality)” at the Heard Museum: Phoenix artist Hector Ruiz fires a shot between the eyes of American values with wood carvings, block prints, and mixed-media assemblages that address racism, border issues and capitalism. A King Kong-size blonde crushes a hapless businessman in her manicured hands in…
Art photography doesn’t get its due. Because everyone has a camera, most people figure taking art photos is as easy as pointing the lens at something, uh, arty, and pushing the shutter button. We’re a bit skeptical of art photographers because we think they aren’t as skilled as someone who…
Carlos Batts is a big-deal Los Angeles-based photographer who, since the mid-1990s, has shot models for fashion spreads, rock and rap bands for CD covers, and hot gals for sex magazines. Hustler, NBC and Skechers have all used his work to inject a dash of edgy alterna-cool to their image…
Once upon a time, creating an animated film meant drawing and painting each frame individually. Animation was a painstaking, time-consuming process. A few seconds of Bugs Bunny waggling a carrot required hundreds of drawings; a single feature-length film could take years to complete. Then along came computers and animation programs…
There’s no art show more egalitarian than a mail art show. Just make a drawing or painting or collage or mixed-media piece that can be mailed, and you’re in the exhibition. There’s no curator, no jury process, no commercial concerns, no snobbery. There are also no standards, which means there’s…
“Super Heroics” by Mark Newport at Arizona State University Art Museum: Fiber artist and ASU professor Mark Newport pokes fun at traditional gender roles by using the feminine art of knitting to make manly superhero costumes. His empty Aquaman, Batman, Daredevil and Spiderman suits hang flaccidly from the museum walls,…
“Super Heroics” by Mark Newport at Arizona State University Art Museum: Fiber artist and ASU professor Mark Newport pokes fun at traditional gender roles by using the feminine art of knitting to make manly superhero costumes. His empty Daredevil and Spiderman suits hang flaccidly from the museum walls, waiting for…
Phoenix artist Hector Ruiz fires a shot right between the eyes of American values in his “La Realidad (Reality)” exhibition at the Heard Museum. The show, which addresses Mexican-American identity, border issues, race, misogyny, capitalism and the injustices of the global economy, is notable because it’s a highly politicized exhibition…
Most of us spend our 20s trying to understand the mix of parental influence, pop culture, personality and irrevocable decisions that put us on our current path in life. Figuring out how and why you became the person you are is the most basic puzzle one can try to solve…
“Super Heroics” by Mark Newport at Arizona State University Art Museum: Fiber artist and ASU professor Mark Newport pokes fun at traditional gender roles by using the feminine art of knitting to make manly superhero costumes. His empty Daredevil and Spiderman suits hang flaccidly from the museum walls, waiting for…
Mark Newport makes goofy art about subjects that are anything but goofy. He knits superhero costumes from the sort of overly bright, plastic-y acrylic yarn elderly ladies sew into afghans. Aquaman, Batman, Daredevil, Spider-Man, they’re all here in his “Super Heroics” show at Arizona State University Art Museum. At least…
“Surrealism U.S.A.” at Phoenix Art Museum: This spirited exhibition that includes works by artists such as Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Joseph Cornell and Robert Motherwell is the first major survey of American surrealism in 25 years. Some of the works are as melodramatic as a 13-year-old’s art project. But whether…
Technology and inhumanity and greed, oh, my! Those wild beasties have been lurking in the shadows alongside the yellow brick road to progress for generations. Spend some time at the spirited “Surrealism USA” exhibit at Phoenix Art Museum, and you’ll realize we were worried about the dark side of our…
Leandro Soto at Paulina Miller Gallery: There’s no place like home when you’re far, far away. Maybe that’s why the mixed-media assemblages about Cuba, Leandro Soto’s lost home, are so much more powerful than the ones about his adopted hometown, Phoenix. Soto’s landscapes of saguaro and rock are technically accomplished,…
The group exhibition “Fur, Feathers and Family: Our Relationship With Animals” at Arizona State University Art Museum is far better than its name. The show of animal-themed art is aimed at children, which explains the facile title. It’s the centerpiece of the museum’s sixth annual Family Fun Day (July 16,…
Mercifully, the work in “Water, Water Everywhere” stays clear of the obvious themes you would expect to see in an exhibition in the desert about water. There isn’t a single piece in this group exhibition of artists from around the world that settles for the simple “water equals life” concept…
Deborah Butterfield makes horse statues, but don’t hold it against her. Her horses are not the ones of civic monuments, rendered in elegant marble and carrying some dead white war hero. Nor are they the romantic bronze beasts of flaring nostrils and lush manes cranked out by mediocre Western artists…
Like it or not, guns are as American as Happy Meals and maxed-out credit cards, so making them the theme of a group exhibition invites all kinds of timely and biting cultural criticism. The pieces in “The Gun Show: No Background Check Required” at reZurrection Gallery in Tempe are mixed…
Don’t pigeonhole Nissa Kubly . . . she’s an artist, but also an inventor and a scientist. What’s clear is her passion for one place — the brink of discovery. Almost any day, you can find Kubly, 29, tinkering in her Phoenix studio — a converted garage crammed with books,…
Marcia Myers grooves on color, texture and ancient Italy. Her abstract diptychs and triptychs — artspeak for paintings made of two or three panels attached to one another — are floating fields of sun-soaked Mediterranean color that will remind you of an ancient Roman villa crossed with a cool, downtown…
Virgil Ortiz, ceramicist, fashion designer and Cochiti Pueblo Indian, makes visual mash-ups by putting designs inspired by traditional tribal pottery in contemporary places. In “La Renaissance Indigène” at the Heard Museum, Ortiz’s black-and-white swirls, lines and animals show up on purses, corsets and skirts; in a jerky black-and-white video; and…
Some women enjoy being a girl, but Elizabeth Bretharte Lyon isn’t so sure. The Phoenix artist vents her doubts about sugar and spice and everything nice in a powerful exhibition of photographs at the Paulina Miller Gallery. Beware, Lyon’s images say, there’s poison in being pretty. At first glance, Lyon’s…
