![]() ![]() An every-other-year juried Arizona Biennial charts trends in the state. Julie Sasse snagged a show by Ai Weiwei, the internationally known Chinese artist-activist, and has put together with other exhibitions charting everything from the rise of contemporary string art to the new emphasis on the “nocturne” in art-sensuous night-time works in paint and print. (The patio also has a restaurant, Café a la C’Art.) TMA hosts a wide array of regularly changing exhibitions by noted artists. This up-and-coming regional museum occupies a whole city block the main building, in a 1960s brutalist style, stands harmoniously alongside a collection of historic buildings arranged around a lovely patio. Visitors to the shimmering space can peer through a window – of glass, natch – to watch the glassmakers at work, pushing the molten glass into the glory hole furnace. He and his glass-blasting team also do production work, making lines of drinking glasses, paperweights and holiday ornaments. An indefatigable champion of the art form, Philabaum invites leading glass artists from across the nation to exhibit in the gallery. Philabaum can make glass do anything he wants: he shapes it into vertical “rock” sculptures, into painted vases and into mixed-media abstractions that combine metal and glass. ![]() Master glass artist Tom Philabaum displays his glistening wares in a gallery located in the happening neighborhood of Five Points, just south of downtown. An annual spring miniature show, “Small Things Considered,” has Tucson’s favorite contemporary artists downsizing and making delightful tiny works in their signature styles. Painter Alfred Quiroz delivers acid political commentary in large-scale history paintings. Skilled colorist Claire Campbell Park makes gorgeous tapestries that are like paintings in the thread. Ceramic sculptor Joy Fox, a gallery regular, makes large figures, half-human, half-desert animal, etched with petroglyphs and then blackened and burned. The gallery also has a special emphasis on sculpture. Many artists in the Davis Dominguez stable hail from the artist colony at Rancho Linda Vista (Ranch of the Beautiful View) in Oracle, an hour north of Tucson, where they’re inspired by the Sonoran Desert and the Catalina Mountains alike. Located in a cool warehouse in the gallery-thick district around Sixth Street and Sixth Avenue, this longtime gallery, founded in 1976, delivers up a wide range of contemporary Southwest landscape painters. Named best gallery in the Best of Tucson competition for 18 years running, the gallery has been operating since 1981. Housed in the historic Odd Fellows Hall downtown, the gallery also has fine offerings of Mata Ortiz pottery from Mexico and deals in historic photos by the likes of Edward S. Etherton also showcases provocative contemporary painters, including Bailey Doogan, Jim Waid, and the late Nancy Tokar Miller, along with up-and-coming young Tucson artists. ![]() You might find Danny Lyon’s break-your-heart Texas prison photos, Mark Klett’s brilliant landscapes, grounded in the history of the West, or Kate Breakey’s gorgeous painted photos of desert birds. Nationally known for its superb photography exhibitions, Etherton mounts shows of modern-day and classic photographers alike. Here’s a sampling of Tucson galleries and museums, but keep your eyes peeled for the many other venues serving up painting, photography, glass and the many other media that thrive under the desert sun. Artists are attracted not only by the famous southwestern light and the glories of desert and mountains but by the funky, retro downtown and the warehouses that once served cargo trains when the railroads reigned. Tucson is an art town, no question about it. ![]()
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