Filed under: Art, The Route to Work | Tags: Art, Greater Good, Parks, Scottsdale
We’ve had some rainy days lately…which is good in the desert, although I personally don’t like rain. These horse gargoyles are on my route to work but Tony and I went over to see them on this past gloomy Sunday, after a lot of rain…and right before a lot more.
We were at Water Mark in Indian Bend Wash in Scottsdale, part of a flood control system. This road was washed out many times so a solution was needed and, fortunately, art was part of it. The five aluminum 14-foot-tall gargoyle horses were installed in March, 2010. They were created by Seattle artists Tom Drugan and Laura Haddad. I guess they know about rain up there.
This above photo will give you an idea of the scale. A bike and walking path runs under the horses, parallel to the road, but we didn’t feel like ruining our shoes. “Directed towards the passing traffic, each gargoyle strikes a different pose and stands sentinel, some with ears pricked back to hear impeding flows, which can envelope but never overtake them. During dramatic flash flooding, water pours from the gargoyles’ mouths.” Each horse’s front legs are in different positions, too.
Watch this great video done by local artist and avid bicyclist Dayvid LeMmon to see the horses spouting water the other day.
Check out Phoenix blogger and cyclist John Romeo Alpha’s blog, too. He was at the Wash on Sunday, too, and got great shots and another video of spouting horses.
The lake behind the horses is full of geese every time I drive by.
They totally fascinate me every time I see them, which is almost daily now.
Ten Geese A-Landing
Do you see them all?
Filed under: Art, Phoenix | Tags: Amanda Adkins, Angel Diaz, Art, Calle 16, Colton Brock, Downtown Phoenix, Gennaro Garcia, Global Community, Greater Good, Hugo Medina, Isaac Nicholas Caruso, JB Snyder, Katie Beltran, Kyllan Maney, Lalo Cota, Lauren Lee, Murals, Phoenix, Sebastien Millon, Thomas Breeze Marcus
This is a mural that was done in August at an event called the Great Paint Escape. Several local muralists, many of whom I have blogged about before, participated in the making of this mural: Hugo Medina, Colton Brock, Thomas Breeze Marcus, Angel Diaz, Gennaro Garcia, Isaac Nicholas Caruso, Amanda Adkins, Katie Beltran, JB Snyder, Lauren Lee, Sebastien Millon, and Kyllan Maney. Hugo Medina (curator) and Colton Brock did the hands and Phoenix skyline ahead of time. It represented someone laying on the ground, looking up, and framing the blank canvas of Phoenix with their hands.
On the night of the event, the other artists painted the rest of the mural. While the painting was going on outside, the artists were also painting smaller pieces inside to be sold at a silent auction benefiting Free Arts for Abused Children of Arizona on First Friday in September. That is JB Snyder painting above. I was unable to attend the second event so I don’t know if more has been added to the mural; I’ll have to go check it out again soon.
This one (above) was just done a couple weeks ago on a new bar and gastropub “committed to craft beer,” Angels Trumpet Ale House, in downtown Phoenix. It’s a collaboration between Lalo Cota and Thomas Breeze Marcus. I took this photo 2 days ago and saw today on Facebook that it has had additions to it since then. I shot too soon!!!! Someday I’ll give you an update. In fact, you can see it on Breeze’s blog here.
On the back of Por Vida Gallery on Calle 16, by Angel Diaz. It used to look like this.
This mural (above), Painting Smiles, was painted by Lalo Cota, Gennaro Garcia, others of the Calle 16 Foundation, and children of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Metropolitan Phoenix last May. It was sponsored by Blue Bunny Ice Cream to give the children the opportunity to participate in creating a mural in the center of the Hispanic community, which reflects their heritage, diversity, culture and love for our community.
A wheat paste by Jetsonorama. It is on Calle 16 on the wall next to this mural. And, I have several more to visit soon. I keep a running list of murals to visit and I never get to the end of the list…that’s a good thing.
p.s. I became aware on my last post, much after the fact, that the first photo, which is actually an animated gif of a hummingbird, was not animating spontaneously on all computers. If you click on it, it will animate, but I think maybe a lot of people did not see the animation 
Filed under: Art, Phoenix | Tags: Arizona State University, Art, Downtown Phoenix, Global Community, Greater Good, Isaac N. Caruso, Lalo Cota, Lauren Lee, Murals, Niba DelCastillo, Parks, Phoenix, Roosevelt Row
This new Lalo Cota mural is just a couple blocks down from the Lauren Lee mural in my last post. And, being in a busy downtown area, I have had the same problem catching it with no cars in front of it. So I gave up on that plan, wanting to capture it before it might change.
I wanted to make sure I photographed it, even with cars, because I’m wondering if this is one of those walls where the mural may change regularly. Until a few weeks ago, this wall looked like this:
Gold, Oil, Drugs also by Lalo Cota. I blogged about it then here. And it was a fairly recent mural, too, so maybe the current one will not be there long either. Maybe it’s a revolving Lalo wall…not a bad thing.
You can see Niba DelCastillo’s shot of it sans cars here.
Just a little down the street from this mural is a new, temporary park with a big community mural done in late February that I posted about here. Since then, other improvements have been made to make the park a nice gathering place for people in the neighborhood (when it finally cools down).
This piece was at Arizona State University until recently.
There are little benches and shaded areas inside.
The “ribs” were just painted red a few weeks ago.
You can see monOrchid in the background with the Isaac N. Caruso mural I wrote about here.
We have some awesome downtown community activists, artists, homeowners, and business owners who work very hard to turn a formerly blighted area into a dynamic, attractive, fun place to go.
Filed under: Art, Phoenix | Tags: Art, Downtown Phoenix, Flora, Global Community, Greater Good, imagine, Learning, Phoenix, Valley of the Sunflowers
This is the last growing season at the Valley of the Sunflowers.
The bulldozers and cranes are encroaching and soon this former dirt field that became gloriously yellow will be a construction site for the future Phoenix Biomedical Campus and the Arizona Cancer Center, already in progress the next lot over. Fortunately, for those of us who loved seeing the sunflowers, there are plenty more vacant lots in downtown Phoenix and the sunflowers have been such a hit that they will probably be back a few blocks away.
The sunflowers have been an A.R.T.S. (Adaptive Reuse of Temporary Space) project sponsored by the Roosevelt Row Community Development Corporation in collaboration with Arizona State University, University of Arizona, Intel, Bioscience High School, and others.
Filed under: Art, Phoenix | Tags: Art, Downtown Phoenix, Global Community, Greater Good, Murals, Phoenix
I just discovered this mural in the Roosevelt Row area the other day. It’s certainly not a typical mural by our downtown standards but I totally love the way it fits in with its surroundings and makes all the poles and wires part of the installation. It is on the APS Garfield Substation. APS (Arizona Public Service) is one of our 2 electric companies.
It was designed by Laura Spalding Best, an artist who “turns the banal into art.” No birds on the wires, though.
It says “Centennial 2012,” referring to Arizona’s recent centennial on 2/14/12. All of the murals in this post were created in March, shortly before the annual Art Detour event in the downtown arts district. About 800 volunteers from HandsOn Greater Phoenix and AmeriCorps Vista assisted in beautifying the area, many helping to paint the new murals.
This one, below, was designed by Carrie Marill, of Combine Studios, and depicts a bicyclist named Pat racing home with two baskets full of food that he bought at our local downtown farmers market.
Others of the volunteers helped weave ribbons into a Navajo-inspired mural:
These murals join the many others in the Roosevelt Row district that I have blogged about numerous times. You can just walk around and literally see them in every direction in that area. Read more about the spring beautification project here.
