Art in America

Take a look at the Dec. 2002 issue...

Take a look at the Dec. 2002 issue for an article by John Villani covering the downtown Phoenix art scene.

Take a look at the Dec. 2002 issue for an article by John Villani covering the downtown Phoenix art scene.

RELATED ARTICLE: The downtown Phoenix gallery scene.

Over the past few decades, rapid regional growth and a culture with a deeply imbued passion for suburban sprawl have taken their toll on downtown Phoenix. An early 1990s burst of gallery, studio and alternative space development was routed when backers Of a baseball stadium for the Arizona Diamondbacks, a basketball arena for the Phoenix Suns and a massive parking garage used eminent domain to tear down much of the creative community's coveted warehouse and loft space. They also did damage to Phoenix's Chinatown, a long-standing African-American community and a neighborhood of produce markets. Ten years later a new generation of artists and gallery owners has decided that a slightly unkempt but reassuringly low-rent cluster of commercial buildings along the northern edge of downtown, nearly a mile removed from the sports centers, is an ideal setting for a new effort at infusing these palm-lined, sun-baked streets with artistic vitality.

In many ways, downtown Phoenix has the key elements that self-starting, contemporary art scenes thrive upon. Studio and living spaces are affordable, and a downtown arts academy as well as several graphic and interior design firms provide jobs for those whose art careers are just developing. There are empty storefronts that can be rented for weekend installations by groups of artists, and parking lots of artists' studio buildings can double as one-night venues for rock bands, Middle Eastern dancers or art exhibitions.

The two most ambitious commercial galleries, New Urban Art and Studio LoDo Contemporary, define the northernmost and southernmost edges of what's considered downtown. Located on McDowell Road near Seventh Avenue, New Urban Art represents a group of artists primarily from southern Arizona but with occasional visiting artists from the Los Angeles area; the emphasis is on artists grounded in mid-20th-century modernism. Among the artists showing here is Michael Stevenson, a former art instructor at the University of California at Chico, whose canvases layer geometric elements occasionally overlaid with monoprints. Also found at New Urban Art are Christina Pruitt's mixed-medium encaustics and the paintings of Mark Vinci, who derives his inspiration from the multilevel freeway systems crisscrossing downtown Phoenix.

Studio LoDo Contemporary, located to the south on East Jackson near First Street in an expansive warehouse space that survived the early 1990s development schemes, takes a more critical and adventurous approach. Jon Haddock's paintings and computer images, which incorporate digitized depictions of popular culture, are found here, as are works by nearly two dozen primarily regional artists. Among them are Angela Ellsworth, whose complex drawings deal with themes of desire; Mel Roman, who makes paintings and politically inspired assemblages; Barbara Penn, a Tucson-based artist who has shifted from installation to text-and-image paintings; and Gdansk, Poland-based artist Jaroslaw Flicinski, who will show his tartanlike paintings in December.

The east-west thoroughfare of Roosevelt Street has emerged as the de facto center of downtown's visual-arts scene; a half-dozen galleries have taken root here in the past three years. A monthly "First Friday" art walk has successfully delivered crowds of visitors to the art spaces for evenings of gallery-based socializing. This year a downtown gallery association has been formed. Most galleries have moved from appointment-only status to being open at least three days a week.

The Roosevelt Street arts corridor is anchored on its west end by Amsterdam, a nightclub with monthly shows of local work, and on its east end by Alwun House, a nonprofit arts facility presenting performing and visual arts. But its most heavily visited section is a walkable area between First and Fifth Streets that includes a handful of galleries, artist co-ops and businesses that feature monthly shows for local artists. The most prominent of the commercial galleries is Artfit Exhibition Space, a vibrant and versatile warehouse site that shares its building with the new arts magazine Shade. Found here are the intense landscape photographs of New York's Joni Sternbach; installations of draped, hand-fabricated felt and silk panels by Tokyo artist Yuko Umeda; and the iconographic, feminist paintings of Minnesota artist Julie Buffalohead, a member of the Ponca nation.

Modified Arts combines a successful alternative-music venue with a regular exhibition program. Modified Arts diligently mines the region's visual-arts scene in search of new figures, such as Thuong Nguyen, whose paintings and collaged prints are frequently pierced with nails. Paulina Miller Studio Gallery exhibits everything from landscapes to nonobjective painting. Among the gallery's dozen artists are J. Andrew Kurtz, who creates precise, elegant, metal assemblages; Los Angeles's Cindy Suriyani, whose paintings address identity issues; Karl Gustav Kroeppler, a painter of ethereal figures; and Steven Hofberger, who makes innovative paintings on glass.

The artist-run (and lowercase-loving) collective called eye lounge represents the work of its 14 members at both its Roosevelt Street headquarters and the nearby 515 art space. Each site features a monthly show for one member of the collective, while the eye lounge space also invites two visiting artists to share its back galleries each month. Among the gallery's artists are Melissa Martinez, an art-museum preparator whose sculpture and paintings mix materials in unusual ways, and Thomas Strich, whose mixed-medium photoworks deal with the southwestern landscape.

The other artists' collective in the downtown area is Holga's, which occupies the ground floor of a former hotel that has been turned into live-work space. The building's tenants use Holga's as a venue for their new work and frequently open their space to young, experimental artists from across the Phoenix area. Lastly, there is the Paper Heart, a venue that combines music and performance with monthly exhibitions by local painters and sculptors.--John Villani

John Villani is the art critic for the Arizona Republic. COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group