BEST Things To Do In Phoenix Today
Tuesday, June 25, 2019

The Event Oracle knows ALL the fun things to do in the land of the Phoenix sun. Select your date above then scroll down for all the Arts, Entertainment, and Events in my crystal ball...

• Carnival of Illusion

  Arizona Biltmore Resort
  2400 E Missouri Ave
  Phoenix, AZ 85016
  

  Carnival of Illusion is an evening of Old-World Magic in the style of classic entertainers such as Buster Keaton, Mae West, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Harry Houdini. The hosts have performed as house entertainers at the world's top resorts, Fortune 100 CEOs, to the 200 Most Powerful Women in America and operate the longest-running Arizona theater show. Carnival of Illusion is "Magic, Mystery, and OOOH La La."

• Cranes, Trains and Airplanes: Constructing Sky Harbor

  Phoenix Airport Museum Gallery
  3800 E Sky Harbor Blvd
  Phoenix, AZ 85034
  

  It all began with a farm field and a dirt runway in 1928. No one could have imagined the tremendous growth that would come to Phoenix, and as a result to the airport. In fact, City planners thought the state-of-the-art Terminal 2 that opened in 1962 would be sufficient for airline traffic until the year 2000. However, Terminal 3 was built in 1979, and a little over a decade later, Terminal 4. Through the years, Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport continued expanding, improving and keeping pace with travel demand. It even became one of the busiest airports in the nation. 

  This exhibition captures Sky Harbor’s development with images of its design and construction throughout the past 90 years. Creating airport control towers, terminals and the PHX Sky Train^® are major undertakings. Their immensity is matched by a multitude of people that help materialize ideas, from architects, engineers and designers to builders, installers and fabricators.

• Shaping Sound The Art of Guitar Making

  Phoenix Airport Museum Gallery
  3800 E Sky Harbor Blvd
  Phoenix, AZ 85034
  

  In our fast-paced, technological world of seemingly endless mass production, there are still some who desire to create with their hands. This is especially true for guitar players who design, build and repair their own instruments. The art of guitar-making, or Luthiery,allows skilled craftsman to turn raw materials into unique instruments.

  The Roberto-Venn School of Luthiery, based in the heart of Phoenix, has supported aspiring guitar builders for over four decades. Students from around the globe come to attend North America’s oldest and only accredited guitar-making school. At Roberto-Venn, people that are passionate about music can learn the old-world craft of creating a guitar by hand.

  From selecting wood to finishing techniques, students learn every aspect of guitar construction. They discover how the design and assembly of each element affects how the guitar will play as well as the instruments visual aesthetic and artistry. By merging tradition with innovation and creativity, students at Roberto-Venn are shaping sound.

• 100 Years, 100 Ranchers, Photographs by Scott Baxter

  Phoenix Airport Museum Gallery
  3800 E Sky Harbor Blvd
  Phoenix, AZ 85034
  

  Wide open landscapes dotted with grazing cattle and sheep herded by the rancher on horseback have become an iconic symbol of our western culture. For more than 100 years the ranching tradition has been an integral part of Arizona’s history and growth. In celebration of Arizona’s Centennial in 2012, Scott Baxter photographed 100 Arizona ranchers whose families have been ranching for a century or more.

  For more than 10 years Baxter has been traveling to ranches across the state, getting to know the individual ranchers and their operations. He chose to use large-format cameras, a traditional process which takes time and allowed him to engage his subjects in a personal manner. Using black and white film Baxter captures a sense of timelessness and directs the viewer’s full attention to the subject in the frame.

  The strength and independent nature of this unique group of Arizonans is apparent in their portraits. Baxter’s collection of photographs is a tribute to Arizona’s ranching legacy by preserving an important piece of Arizona character and history.

• Water in the Desert: Photography

  Phoenix Airport Museum Gallery
  3800 E Sky Harbor Blvd
  Phoenix, AZ 85034
  

  Water in the Desert: Photography exhibition showcases photographs from 10 Arizona artists, who capture a wide range of images - from snow on saguaros to an urban hydroelectric plant.

  From the Colorado River to Glen Canyon Dam, artists consider where Arizona’s water comes from and how we use it. Some artists find inspiration in the calming and reflective quality of water’s surface, while others use water as an art material. From its aesthetic quality to conservation, this exhibition reflects various artistic interpretations of water in the desert.

• Intimate and Expansive Ceramic art by Tiffany C. Bailey

  Phoenix Airport Museum Gallery
  3800 E Sky Harbor Blvd
  Phoenix, AZ 85034
  

  Steep bluffs, fields of corn and herds of cows are some of the picturesque features ceramic artist Tiffany C. Bailey remembers about her hometown. Growing up in Southwestern Wisconsin, Bailey was raised in a rural community with an abundance of pastures, farmland and a population of only 300 people.

  After moving to Arizona to continue her ceramic studies, she revisited her memories of the architecture and topography near her childhood home. Now, in her artistic practice, she distills those elements into small-scale artworks to interpret a landscape that is both intimate and expansive.

  Bailey uses a slip-cast method to make her ceramic artwork. The process begins with a model that is either hand-sculpted or is a found object. From the model, a plaster mold is produced. Porcelain slip (liquefied clay) is poured into the mold, dried and then fired in a kiln. The plaster mold can be used repeatedly to replicate the form creating artworks in series. She embellishes the art object with ceramic stains, underglazes or graphite drawings, resulting in one-of-a-kind pieces. 

• Agnes Pelton

  Phoenix Art Museum
  1625 N. Central Ave. Central Avenue and McDowell Road
  Phoenix, AZ 85004
  

  Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist is the first survey on the obscure American painter in more than 24 years. A graduate of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, she began experimenting with abstraction in the early 1900s in New York, eventually exhibiting in the Armory Show of 1913 at the invitation of Walt Kuhn. She painted conventional desert landscapes to make a living, but it was her abstract studies of earth and light, biomorphic compositions of delicate veils, shimmering stars, and atmospheric horizon lines, that distinguished her work.

   

  A believer in numerology, astrology, and faith healing, Pelton’s abstract compositions propelled her into an esoteric world epitomized by the Transcendental Painting Group (1938-1942), a short-lived group that promoted abstract, non-objective art. Although Pelton received some attention during her lifetime, she has been relatively unknown within the field of American Art. Approximately 40 – 45 works will comprise this exhibition shedding light on Pelton’s artistic contribution to American Modernism.

• Point of View at Wonderspaces

  Scottsdale Fashion Square
  7014 E Camelback Rd
  Scottsdale, AZ 85251
  

  “Point of View” presented by Wonderspaces is a roughly 80-minute experience featuring artwork from 13 artists from around the world. The artwork presents visitors with experiential installations including a virtual reality dinner party and an installation that encourages digital painting through body movement.

• Fragments: Broken Bowls Tell More Tales

  Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park
  4619 E. Washington St.
  Phoenix, AZ 85034
  

  Hear the stories pottery sherds have to tell archaeologists when theses pieces of the past are rediscovered and studied. Fragments: Broken Bowls Tell More Tales, is a temporary exhibit at Pueblo Grande Museum that explores researchers use sherds to uncover a variety of details, such as how the pottery was made, used, and where it was produced. These details aren’t always obvious during examinations of gorgeous whole pottery vessels.

  Visitors typically see the most unique and complete pottery vessels of a museums’ collection on display. They seldom see, or know about, the thousands of broken pottery fragments called ‘sherds’ that are preserved in storage. Using local and traded examples, Fragments invites visitors to see how sherds help archaeologists piece together new ideas about the ancestral O'Odham, more commonly known as the Hohokam.  The exhibition also features sherds that connect the Hohokam with their neighbors across the Southwest and northern Mexico during the time of the European Renaissance. Visitors can listen to local Native perspectives on archaeology and cultural preservation while experiencing traditional O’odham songs that tell of the mountains surrounding Pueblo Grande and their deep connections to past, present, and future O’odham generations.

• At the Doors of Perception

  Lisa Sette Gallery
  210 E. Catalina Drive
  Phoenix, AZ 85012
  

  The full realm of the human psyche exists beyond the technological shackles and mundane logistics so pervasive in the early 21st century. The artists of “At the Doors of Perception”, a group exhibition at Lisa Sette Gallery employ various mediums to present artworks as potential methods to escape the confines of the conforming ego and self-conscious brain, and access radical aesthetic and psychic transformation in worlds beyond the sublunary.

• Oblique Views: Southwest Aerial Landscapes by Charles and Anne Lindbergh and Adriel Heisey

  Chandler Museum
  300 S. Chandler Village Drive
  Chandler, AZ 85226
  

  The exhibit pairs then and now photos of the Southwest to show changes in the land over time. In 2008 Adriel Heisey rephotographed the same vantage points from his plane that Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne captured in 1929.

• Color in Play

  Shemer Art Center
  5005 E Camelback Rd
  Phoenix, AZ 85018
  

  A juried exhibition that features outdoor sculptures combining color and whimsy with a touch of sophistication!

• Change Agent: June Wayne and the Tamarind Workshop

  Asu Art Museum
  SE Corner of Mill Avenue and 10th Street
  51 E. 10th St.
  51 E. 10th St.
  Tempe, AZ 85281
  

  “Change Agent” highlights June Wayne’s legacy as an artist, printmaker, educator and activist. Wayne refused to follow a signature style, taking on a variety of themes such as personal history, modern science and social issues. In the Dorothy Series, she narrates the life of her mother, a Russian Jewish immigrant and traveling saleswoman for a garter company. In the Stellar Winds and Solar Flares Series, she mines natural phenomena as metaphors for the human condition.

  Wayne was a catalyst for the revival of fine art lithography in the United States, a medium which had all but vanished by the 1950s. She championed lithography as an art form as vital as painting after studying the technique in Paris with the printer Marcel Durassier.  With a grant from the Ford Foundation, Wayne founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in 1960. The experimental workshop created a pool of printers and apprentices, as artists from across the country were invited to master the process of lithography. Now known as the Tamarind Institute of the University of New Mexico, it continues Wayne’s visionary plan as a major training center for fine art printers. 

• Clayblazers: Women Artists of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s

  Asu Art Museum
  SE Corner of Mill Avenue and 10th Street
  51 E. 10th St.
  51 E. 10th St.
  Tempe, AZ 85281
  

  With close to 100 artworks, “Clayblazers” celebrates women in the ceramic field during the mid-20th century. Legendary artists like Maija Grotell, Susan Peterson and Marguerite Wildenhain were educators, mentors and masters of their craft and inspired future generations. All of the works in the exhibition are drawn from the ASU Art Museum’s ceramics collection of 3,800 objects, representing the full range of technique, aesthetic approaches and possibilities within the field. The exhibition also includes photographs and materials from the ASU Art Museum Ceramics Research Center’s Susan Harnly Peterson and Studio Potter archives.

• Particle and Wave: PaperClay Illuminated

  Asu Art Museum
  SE Corner of Mill Avenue and 10th Street
  51 E. 10th St.
  51 E. 10th St.
  Tempe, AZ 85281
  

  "Particle and Wave" is a groundbreaking exhibition of 45 works created by international artists who incorporate paper pulp and organic fibers into their clay bodies, with the result of increased strength and lighter weight. The exhibition showcases a wide range of visual forms, which would not be possible with traditional methods, as the artists utilize this technique to express contemporary social and cultural ideas.

• Reversal – Lunch Time Theater

  Herberger Theater Center
  222 East Monroe Street
  Phoenix, AZ 85004
  

  In an alternate reality, the norm involves those who have disabilities and those without have to adjust and maybe fight for accessibility. In a comedic vaudevillian style, this play will keep you laughing while demonstrating a different perspective on living a “normal” life.

• The Addams Family

  Arizona Broadway Theatre
  7701 W. Paradise Lane
  Peoria, AZ 85382
  

  When You’re an Addams!
  
  It’s the ultimate nightmare:  daughter Wednesday, the ultimate Princess of Darkness, has grown up and fallen in love…with a sweet young man from a respectable family! While her parents wonder Where Did We Go Wrong, all Wednesday wants is One Normal Night – but everything is about to change as they host a dinner for her fiancé and his parents. Whether seasoned with “salt, pepper, or cyanide,” this is one family dinner you won’t forget!

• Million Dollar Quartet

  Phoenix Theatre
  1825 N Central Ave
  Phoenix, AZ 85004
  

  Relive the now-legendary 1956 impromptu jam session of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis. Featuring a score of your favorite rock hits including “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Walk the Line,” and “Hound Dog,” Million Dollar Quartet is a scorching show packed with red-hot talent.

• Grand Canyon Centennial Summerfest and Star Party

  Grand Canyon National Park
  S Entrance Rd
  Grand Canyon Village, AZ 86023
  

  During the day, the centennial summerfest will bring together park partners to showcase everything Arizona has to offer.
  
  At night, park visitors can explore the wonders of the night sky at the star party. To kick off its star party, Grand Canyon National Park will celebrate its designation as an International Dark Sky park. Grand Canyon National Park's South Rim visitors can learn about dark skies with the Tucson Amateur Astronomy Association and on the North Rim with the Saguaro Astronomy Club of Phoenix. Amateur astronomers from across the country volunteer their expertise and offer free nightly astronomy programs and telescope viewing.