During the height of COVID-19, Arizona Arts Live at the University of Arizona sought to provide opportunities for and showcase Southern Arizona artists through its Tucson Studio series. Now, they are bringing it back with intimate, in-person performances at various locations.
They will kick off the series with a performance from Space Travelers Union, an acoustic/electronic fusion collective led by saxophone and clarinet player Ryan Wheless, at the Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium.
Their performance will be accompanied by projections from artist Tucker Gems, who is using the planetarium walls and ceilings as a canvas.
Each performance in the series will be recorded and available for online viewing, similar to the COVID-19 concerts.
Throughout the year, Arizona Arts Live provides a variety of music, theater, dance, and immersive art experiences. They are a part of UA’s Arizona Arts division.
Chad Herzog, executive and artistic director of Arizona Arts Live, said the Tucson Studio concerts are often held at unconventional places such as the science center and planetarium.
“One of the things we love about the Tucson Studio and really about Arizona Arts Live, being able to call Southern Arizona our stage, is that you never know where we’re going to be popping up and doing performances,” Herzog said.
“Our tagline is ‘experience the unexpected.’ We really hope that that’s what these Tucson Studio performances do.”
The series spotlights Tucson’s vibrant music scene and the Southwest’s unique cultural landscape.
Herzog said there are plans to have the Tucson Studio performances multiple times per month at different locations.
“You’re not going to see the Tucson Studio performances in places that you expect to always see music. These are going to be in places that you might not even know exist,” Herzog said.
“Many of them are places where music once was very relevant in Tucson, and then due to fires, ownership changes and other things, music stopped happening in that space. We’re looking at bringing that back.”
They are also looking at venues in different parts of the city, including the east end, South Tucson, and the Foothills areas.
“We believe that we can’t always expect audiences to meet us where we are,” Herzog said.
“We have to do our work to get to where our audiences are too. That’s really important for us and why you see us going into non-traditional spaces. Oftentimes, somebody may feel very comfortable going to the cafe that they always go to but not so comfortable going to a place like Centennial Hall.”
Herzog said Tucson Studio will spotlight a range of genres. They featured artists from different genres, including the Porch Rockers, Eric Schaffer, Elizabeth Goodfellow, Brian Lopez, Carlos Arzate & The Familia, Gabriel Ayala, Chezale, Hot Club of Tucson, Natalie Pohanic, Jillian Bessett, Flor de Nopal, PD Ronstadt & the Co. with Liz Cerepanya, The Rifle, Sophia Rankin and D. Faktion Nyne.
When it fits, they will pair music with other elements, such as visual arts or dance.
“We want it to look and feel different than what people are expecting,” Herzog said.
“With our visual artist we are working with, because we have that planetarium screen, walls and ceiling, we’re able to incorporate something like this. If we were out in the middle of the desert, it would be a lot harder to do. Chances are we wouldn’t be using a visual artist for that, but we might be using a dance performer or somebody else.”
Arizona Arts Live also hosts other types of events at unconventional spaces.
They transformed Maya Tea Warehouse into a performance space for “Indian Ink Theatre: Mrs. Krishnan’s Party” and hosted Brooklyn Rider’s Philip Glass string quartet performance at Tooley’s Café.
They have also held events outdoors at a dog park, at Tumamoc Hill, in the middle of the desert and under a freeway underpass.
For their piano series, they deliberately only sold 100 tickets so that audience members could be seated onstage around the piano.
“When the note was hit, you could feel it. We wanted people to have that kind of experience. Those are the experiences we’re working with for the Tucson Studio too. We’re not going to put an artist in a place that they don’t belong, or they’re not going to look and sound their best,” Herzog said.
When it launched in April 2020, Tucson Studio provided a platform for local artists to share their music during an uncertain time.
“It was one of our responses to what we were seeing during the early part of the pandemic, where all the musicians we knew in our world, whether it be local, regional or international, were trying to share their music again when they couldn’t do so playing out live,” Herzog said.
“If you think back to five years ago, how many musicians did we see performing from their bathrooms because that was the best-sounding room in their house? They were doing so with equipment that wasn’t made traditionally for streaming. If you remember back again five years ago, everybody had web cameras or USB microphones. As we were looking at some of these videos of musicians we were fans of, we wondered how we could help out.
“Centennial Hall and what was then UA Presents was shut down. We had our staff that were very knowledgeable on how to do this, and we also had all this equipment that wasn’t being used. Together with our staff, we created toolkits that people could come check out from us, of equipment that most people weren’t able to get at the time. “Then, we set up Zoom calls with our production team, and they could talk about ways to set it up to look and sound better during these streaming things….That progressed into us taking these artists that had been using this and recording their concerts in locations all around Southern Arizona.”
During the pandemic, they recorded close to 70 performances, which are available to view.
They stopped hosting Tucson Studio concerts about three years ago when they began to focus more on live performances as everything started to open back up again.
As part of the original Tucson Studio series, they recorded in places such as Centennial Hall, the Tucson Botanical Gardens, the UA Health Sciences Innovation Building, Wooden Tooth Records, JoJo’s, LandMark Sound Recorders and the MSA Annex.
Herzog said that many of the artists appreciated having a place to perform during the pandemic.
“What we heard from the musicians was it was the most money they had ever made playing a night for a number of them…We also learned that many of them, their neighbors now understood what they did for a living. They were touring musicians in and out of their home here in Tucson or Southern Arizona, often touring around the country or world. Now their neighbors recognized they had this incredible amount of talent. They finally had a professional-grade video and audio recording of themselves that they could use,” Herzog said.
“Part of the reason why we are recording these is they are different than music videos. A lot of times, bands will make their music video and share that with their fans… Having a true recorded video of their concert or a concert setting without the transitions or the CGI stuff is really important…. They can use it, whether they’re trying to get future gigs, grants or other funding opportunities, perhaps even teaching jobs. We can share this with them and ask people to go out and support these artists.”
Herzog said that Tucson Studio emerged when the organization rebranded from UA Presents to Arizona Arts Live. It helped them to define what types of artists they wanted to showcase.
“When we were thinking about what Arizona Arts Live was going to be, we knew that we wanted Southern Arizona to be our stage. We knew that we were going to bring the best artists from around the world to Southern Arizona, but we also wanted to take our Southern Arizona artists to the world. The Tucson Studio was how we got started doing that and why we feel so adamant that we need to be doing more of it and bringing it back,” Herzog said.
Space Travelers Union: No Surface (Arizona Arts Live)
WHEN: 6:30 p.m. Friday, June 20
WHERE: Flandrau Science Center and Planetarium, 1601 E. University Boulevard, Tucson
COST: $32 for adults, $17 for students
INFO: arizonaartslive.com
This article appears in 06-19-2025.
