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…
In Valley art circles, “Lisa Sette, Lisa Sette, Lisa Sette” is a mantra intoned by young artists anxious for a chance at the nirvana of showing at her gallery. Unlike her high-profile Scottsdale neighbors, where art means Southwestern glitz and glamour, Sette consistently shows serious, and, at least for the…
Melvin Killeen is an artist, but Melvin Killeen looks like my dad. Out on the town, Killeen is apt to wear brown polyester trousers with a telltale hint of a flare below the knee and a patterned cream Qiana shirt, open at the neck, exposing a triangular patch of graying…
Square One, at the corner of Washington and Central in downtown Phoenix, is a block of vacant storefronts, boarded up and painted with murals. Although beginning to show their age, the murals are bright; they’re optimistic. When you’re right up against them, walking by, the murals do a great job…
Jon Planas was a fixture on New York City’s club circuit in the late Eighties, a party boy with a flair for fashion and flash. He became known for the painted jackets that draped the famous forms of Madonna, Cher, Cyndi Lauper, and Deborah Harry, to name but a few…
Remember the rash of movies two or three years ago where everybody was switching bodies with everyone else? Fathers with sons? Women with men? Judge Reinhold with Fred Savage? As far as I know, body switching exists only in the minds of desperate screenwriters. Too bad. If it were a…
It sounded like pretty good news when the Phoenix Art Museum announced the opening of a show entitled “Five Centuries of Italian Painting, 1300-1800.” So along with, apparently, most everyone else in town, a friend and I trooped over to the museum on a recent Friday night to get a…
Mary Stokrocki’s contribution to the ASU Faculty Art Show at the Nelson Fine Arts Center neatly summarizes the hollow feeling one is left with after viewing the exhibition. Titled “THE UnBAREable lightness of being,” the piece is a vertical rectangular outline traced in flesh- and blue-colored crayon on the surface…
Everything in the picture was plastic, except Our Lady of Guadalupe and the dirt floor. Plastic flowers, plastic fruit, plastic saints, plastic covering the statue of Jesus, and behind it all, a pale blue plastic backdrop that looked like a used swimming-pool cover. It should have been the tackiest scene…
I was standing in front of Bud Helbig’s painting, “Almost Smell the Coffee,” wondering why I felt so betrayed. It’s an innocuous painting, a winter scene with one cowboy opening the gate while his mounted companion waits nearby. The bunkhouse in the distance beckons with its promise of warmth. They…
It’s 6 p.m Friday, October 19. You’ve paid your $125 admission fee to the 25th Annual Cowboy Artists of America Exhibition and Sale. A sea of Stetsons crowds the exhibition area. Beside each painting and sculpture stands a man and a little box with a slot on top. The man…
Art always keeps one eye on technology, taking the advances of science to make something beautiful, provocative and useless. Artists grabbed cameras almost as soon as they were invented, first for anatomy classes and later to make fine art. They have done the same with film, video, computers and lithography…
Four recent exhibitions at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, all opening on the same night, sent me scurrying to my Roget’s Thesaurus, searching for the right word to describe this melange, this pastiche, this potpourri, this gallimaufry, this hodgepodge–that’s it!–of art. One exhibition showed a single work each by…
In the 1990 Phoenix Triennial at the Phoenix Art Museum, both technique and subject matter drive home the point that life is serious business. Here you can see a large drawing depicting a child beaten to death. Over there, three headlike shapes, covered in velvet, hang from steel-gallows forms, like…
Art decorates the white-collar walls of many Phoenix business high-rises. Most of it is more decor than art. Given the setting and atmosphere of the modern corporation, it almost has to be low-voltage stuff, drawn from the stocks of interior designers and meant to coordinate with dominant color themes. So,…
Art is where you find it in the dog days of summer. You’ve done the Scottsdale art tours until white wine pours out of your ears. You’ve done the local museums and those galleries still braving the heat. Everybody seems to be gearing up for the fall season or lying…
The art critic Lyn Smallwood wrote, “Finally, there’s a selection of large and cheerfully counterfeit dollar bills painted by Robert Dowd and Phillip Hefferton, of which the less seen the better. Dowd’s `Van Gogh Dollar’ of 1965 was indeed prophetic, but it doesn’t prevent it from being stupid. At its…
Visiting the current exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum is like taking a nostalgic stroll through a supermarket. On display are everything from Ritz cracker boxes and Wrigley gum packets to magazines and newspapers, tourist guides and WPA posters. Coca-Cola packages compose one entire installation–even the ring-top can looks outmoded…
