Art showcase entertains; exhibits variety

Robert Henry Becker Arizona Daily Wildcat Sherri Franks (left), history graduate student, and Paula Hawkins, a UA graduate, look at a painting by Alfred Quiroz, a UA art professor, called "Munefest Destiny." The painting was featured in the Tucson Museum of Art's Bienniel opening Friday. Arts and crafts, including photography, painting and silverwork, are on display as part of the exhibition.

Biennial shows are a tradition in the art world from New York City to right here in Tucson.

The 1997 Arizona Biennial at the Tucson Museum of Arts showcases substantial work from the political to the religious and the traditional.

The show, which opened Friday at the museum and runs through August 17, is worth the price of admission.

The pieces tend to stay away from the contrived and garish works feared by traditionalists. There was a sense of warmth and life to almost every piece. Proof positive that today's art is not just a bunch of squiggly lines.

But what do I know about art.

I do know that most of the Biennial is neat to look at.

For example, Daniel Martin Diaz's "Saint Peter The Martyr" features a gray and large headed, almost alien, Peter with a hatchet buried in his head. The work is framed in thick wood and brings to mind both the medieval and the surreal.

Linda Lewis' "Barrier," a wall hanging of stitched paper, uses context and texture to ask us what keeps us apart. The hanging is constructed from the pages of a dictionary that looked washed, beaten and fragile. The barrier is weak, but it exists, the wor k seems to say.

A sense of the playful pervaded several of the works, most obviously Scott Massey's "Unhappy Cow," a hanging in the shape of a side of beef made from old baseball mitts.

Chris Rush's "End of Modernism" is a detailed painting of a window and a soap dish in a shower. It is simple, realistic and a great joke. It is post modernism at it's witty best.

Among the political pieces, Alfred Quiroz's "Munefest Destiny" is a vicious multimedia piece parodying the conquest of America. Quiroz is a bitter Red Grooms. The work is a timeline that sweeps white America across the plains into the south and west, beca use, as Quiroz's God says "You R De Chosen."

On a more serious, but no more less chastising note, Tarah Rider Berry's "Dusk, South Phoenix" and "Alicia and Katrina" are photographs haunted by the eyes of poor children right down the street. The details of "Dusk's" Volkswagen graveyard reeks of pover ty and uselessness.

The show also features crafts of various artists, from jewelry to wood working.

Jeffry Shriver's table of pine and maple is simple and elegant. The grain of the wood is without flaw and the they eye glides up the leg across the surface and back down again.

Other well crafted pieces include Sam Chung's teapots and Kerry Vesper's birch bowls.

The works show that the simple and the familiar can be combined into the sublime.

Every time you turn the corner of the museum you see a different piece, the sheer variety is exciting and, yes indeed, neat to look at.

Admission to the museum is $2 for adults, $1 for students and seniors, and children under 12 are admitted free.