Not a mirage: the rapidly growing Phoenix metropolitan area, which includes the towns of Scottsdale and Tempe, has become a substantial venue for contemporary art - Report From Arizona

Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Raphael Rubinstein

As far as contemporary art is concerned, the biggest event to happen in Scottsdale in recent years was the opening of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) in February 1999. The museum is housed in a converted cineplex, renovated according to a design by noted Arizona architect Will Bruder. Combining the spaces of five movie theaters. Bruder created 18,500 feet of exhibition space, some of it reconfigurable with temporary walls. In contrast to the low-key interior renovation, the exterior of the stucco building is now clad in curving gray steel and galvanized metal, with a large glass scrim by New York-based artist James Carpenter occupying part of the facade. The building also incorporates an elliptical rooftop aperture or "skyspace" by James Turrell titled Knight Rise (2001) in honor of Robert Knight, SMoCA's founding director. Knight shepherded the museum's emergence from the exhibition galleries and art collection of the Scottsdale Center for the Arts. Today, the collection numbers over 1,600 works. The museum also oversees the Scottsdale Public Art Collection of 50 sculptures around the city (largely a result of a percent-for-art program initiated in 1985). In 1999, the museum, which already had a collection of prints from the Tamarind Institute, acquired the archives of Segura Publishing Company, a two-decade-old printmaking operation in Tempe that has worked with Luis Jimenez, William Wegman, Claudia Bernardi and others. SMoCA's current director, Susan Kane, who assumed her post last year, has plans to expand the collection and showcase art from the Southwest and elsewhere. Writing in the inaugural issue of Shade, a new, stylishly produced visual-art magazine published in Phoenix, Kane expressed her hope that the museum would be "audience-friendly, nationally reputable and locally popular."

SMoCA's program mixes traveling exhibitions and shows originated by the museum. Recent examples of the former include a Wolfgang Laib retrospective [see A.i.A., Mar. '01], and two thematic international group shows--"The Gift: Generous Offerings, Threatening Hospitality" and "Thin Skin: The Fickle Nature of Bubbles, Spheres, and Inflatable Structures"--and a Hans Hofmann retrospective [see. p. 102]. On its own, SMoCA has organized a solo show of Maurizio Pellegrin; "Quartet," a four-person show with Kate Breakey, Mayme Kratz, Kyung-Lim Lee and Marie Navarre; and an interesting project Called "The Cultural Desert," a collaboration between SMoCA, Bentley Gallery and the Mayo Clinic (the famous Minnesota medical establishment opened a Scottsdale branch in 1987, and it has since grown to employ nearly 300 physicians). The project involved a four-month-long exhibition of contemporary sculpture on the grounds of the Mayo Clinic and in one of SMoCA's galleries. In the accompanying catalogue, the curators of "The Cultural Desert," Glen Lineberry (director of Bentley Gallery) and Kimberly Mock (a local dealer), highlighted the project's civic function, suggesting that "the lasting truth of the American West [is] not Hollywood's laconic and steely-eyed loner, but families and neighbors and communities coming together to build schools and libraries and cities that are the abiding source of our culture."