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 Local Artists Paint The Town Red In A Slew Of Summer Shows By Margaret Regan EVERY DAY LAST year--and lest we forget, there were 365 days last year--John Louder made a painting. And all 365 paintings were of the same subject, the desert landscape around his home. Louder's prodigious painterly diary, done in acrylics in a small format, charts not only the season's changing colors but the artist's changing moods. The painter lives not far from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, in some of the most beautiful country around these parts, and the museum is returning Louder's compliment to their shared land.
Summertime group shows annually sprout in Tucson's dry season, taking the temperature of the artistic climate in the Old Pueblo. Metamortiphied: A Commentary on the State of Art in Tucson closes tomorrow, Friday, May 22, at the Tucson/Pima Arts Council, 240 N. Stone Ave.; but it's worth a visit to see the astringent visual commentary of the members of the Thursday Art Group (TAG). Twenty members are showing here, but they can often be seen in smaller numbers at member George E. Huffman's Raw Gallery, 43 S. Sixth Ave. Davis Dominguez Gallery has mounted its usual hot-weather Small Works Invitational: Tucson Collection '98. Forty-five Tucson artists, including gallery regulars Jim Waid, James Cook, Alfred Quiróz and Lynn Taber-Borcherdt, try their hand at the tiny 12-inch-square format. This annual show is always an entertaining survey of names big and small in Tucson art, but this year there's a twist. The revealing subtitle The Last Picture Show alludes to the big leap the gallery is making to the warehouse district downtown this summer, a much-anticipated move that has art watchers declaring that, finally, the Arts District is turning around.
Philabaum Contemporary Art Glass is showing Esprit de Corps: The Glass of Artists of Tucson, clear through August 15 at 711 S. Sixth Ave. Headliner is Tom Philabaum, Tucson's glass arts godfather and recent Governor's Arts Award Artist of the Year. Twenty others, including Janet Miller and Louis Via, are exhibiting, proving Philabaum's oft-repeated point that Tucson has become a glass powerhouse. Apparatus, 299 S. Park Ave., runs its Summer Soon Season Finale, a potpourri of offerings by artists who exhibited during the 1997-'98 season. It closes June 6. Seven young Latino/a artists open Raices Nuevas: Spaces Revisited at T/PAC. The group, whose name means "New Roots," includes Emily Tellez, a gifted and energetic painter who made a mark during her studies at the UA. Their show runs June 1 through July 3.
Cristina Cardenas, for instance, a popular local painter, speaks for free at noon on Wednesday, June 3, on "How Colonial Art Influenced My Work." San Juan Day, June 21, marks both the traditional beginning of the monsoons (Tucsonans used to have water fights in the streets to celebrate, back when there was water running in the arroyos to celebrate with). TMA hosts a day of storytelling and other fun stuff. The blow-out closing reception on August 1 includes a barbecue dinner and live chicken scratch music. (On a more somber note, visit Amy Zuckerman's installation/photography show in the lower lever through June 21: Point of Fracture is a multimedia work about Tucson families who have lost loved ones to murder.) Elouise Rusk at Obsidian, 4340 N. Campbell Ave., also has the right idea about monsoons. Every year she puts on her Outdoor Sculpture and Monsoon Party, featuring a day-long sidewalk show outside the gallery in posh St. Philip's Plaza, and an evening artists' reception with hot dogs and beer for all. This year's extravaganza is slated for Saturday, July 18.
If Greenfield's show is up to the Monica Lewinsky moment, Etherton Gallery looks to the past in its summer exhibition, running through July 15. The Arizona Tribes: Vintage Photographs and Native Crafts puts the photographs of Edward S. Curtis, John Hillers, the Buehman Studios and others side by side with a gathering of Navajo weavings, Pima and Apache baskets, and Hopi pottery. The show takes a serious look at the ways turn-of-the-century photographers brought their own cultural biases to the images they made of Native Americans. Tohono Chul Park likewise exhibits Indian crafts, from Tohono O'odham baskets to Pueblo pottery, drawn from the Agnes T. and Don Leigh Smith Collection. It runs through August 20.
If you have to stay in town, pay a visit to the studio-bound Patrick Dunne, the Tucson Arts District Partnership artist-in- residence in its "storefront studio" program. Painter Dunne moved into the studio at 61 E. Pennington St. in January, and promises to work there every day--and welcome visitors--from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and on Downtown Saturday Nights and Thursday evening Art Walks. And there's just one more week to see an installation piece by another Partnership artist-in-residence: Martina Thies has set up 5 rooms--5 senses at 439 N. Sixth Ave., at Sixth Street, in a renovated car dealership that's part of the same booming warehouse neighborhood where Davis Dominguez is moving. Her innovative show closes Thursday, May 28. For those who like their art on the wall, try New Paintings at Dinnerware, 135 E. Congress St., a show of work by locals William Blomquist, Michael Chittock and Gary Swimmer (May 26 through June 20); and Peter Young: Three Small Paintings in the remote art outpost of Elizabeth Cherry Contemporary Art, 437 E. Grant Road. The work of the Bisbee painter, a New York abstractionist in the late '60s/early '70s, can be seen through June 13.
Who says there's nothing to do in Tucson in the summer?
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Nearly every day this summer, Desert Museum visitors can
peruse Louder's Calendar Series: A Landscape Diary at the
museum gallery. His pictures have been assembled in a grid, along
with his written diary entries. The show doesn't last 365 days,
but it does go on for a good 111 days of summer, until August
26. Art lovers who so choose can visit his pictures every single
day at the museum, preferably during the cool morning hours (the
museum's open from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily). But lovely as a
daily Louder would be, there are plenty of other artsy doings
this summer, too. Here's an annotated, abbreviated list of Tucson's
slower summer scene. (Check The Weekly's City Week listings
all summer long for more complete information. Some galleries
may close intermittently for vacations, but The Weekly
never sleeps.)
The old gallery closes in its fancy foothills office park at
6812 N. Oracle Road on July 11, making room for a pair of psychiatrists.
The gigantic new digs, in a to-be-renovated warehouse at 154 E.
Sixth St., at Seventh Avenue, will open in September or October.
The Tucson Museum of Art, 140 N. Main Ave, has also gone almost
entirely Hispanic. Continuing through August 2 is its big show
El Alma del Pueblo: Spanish Folk Art and Its Transformation
in the Americas. The cornucopia of folk arts, from antique
sculptural Virgins to turn-of-the-century models of sailing ships,
is spiced up by a roster of fun companion events, including a
series of lectures.
Over at the University of Arizona Museum of Art, local artists
David Andres and Ann Simmons-Myers take a more cerebral look at
water in their show Immersions: Andres in paintings suggested
by the Sea of Cortez, and Simmons-Myers in photos that search
out Tucson's elusive waters. This Sunday, just in time for the
scorching weather, the Center for Creative Photography shuts down
its cooling Sea Change, a wonderful show of contemporary
ocean photographs. Its deep-green seas will be replaced by Crafting
Light, a retrospective of photography by the late Laura Volkerding,
drawn from the Center's archives (May 31 to July 26), followed
by the crayon brights of Lauren Greenfield's Fast Forward:
Growing Up in the Shadow of Hollywood (August 2 to October
4). It's the culmination of a four-year investigation of kids
of all social classes who come to adulthood in the kingdom of
artifice.
Art can also take you on a cooling day trip out of town.
Choose the slightly higher temps of Tubac, a hop skip south on
I-10, for a gander at the aptly named Long Hot Summer Art Show
at Otero Street Gallery, 5 Otero St. Running though September
28, a long summer indeed, it's showing off fine arts media and
crafts. Or go all the way up to the downright cool Mount Lemmon,
where the village of Summerhaven is the scene of A Celebration
of the Visual Arts in the Cool Pines, the weekend of June
12, 13 and 14. Crafts demos and a show of paintings of the Catalinas
are on the agenda.
