Tucson Weekly: Cherry On Top (July 9

Local Girl Elizabeth Cherry Brings Up-To-The-Minute European Art To Her Grant Road Gallery.
By Margaret Regan
ON A GRIMY industrial block of East Grant Road, in between an alternator repair shop and the remains of The Scary Guy's burned-out tattoo parlor, stands a forlorn brick house. Leftover from the throughway's residential days, the homely beige structure rises up two stories over the clogged road, keeping an eye on its four, hot, furious lanes of traffic. An unlikelier place for up-to-the minute European art could hardly be imagined, but that's what the old house is. A tasteful brass plaque by the front door discreetly announces the art outpost's name: Elizabeth Cherry Contemporary Art.
Review Grant Road was not the first choice of the gallery's eponymous proprietor, Elizabeth Cherry, a 29-year-old native Tucsonan, but it has at least one advantage: It's cheap.
"We were looking downtown," acknowledges Cherry, who moved her year-and-a-half old gallery to Grant Road last fall. "But this place had a shop. And it was just $130,000 for the two buildings."
Never mind that the rental shop next door, leased out to The Scary Guy, a tattooed man now internationally known both for his name change and his full-body decorations, exploded in an arson fire in late May. The gallery itself was undamaged, and its current group show, Artists of the Gallery, is a triumphant recap of Cherry's first seven exhibitions. And if Cherry's location is a puzzle, her international stable of artists is amazing.
There's hotshot Swiss video artist Sylvie Fleury, who's now showing two video stills, featuring a cool American car and herself dressed in outré high fashion. Then there's the painting team of Alice Stepanek and Steven Maslin, a Cologne-based pair who collaborate on landscapes altered by human hands; Cecilia de Medeiros, a Brazilian sculptor and conceptual artist also living in Cologne; and Swiss painter Olivier Mosset. Among the Americans are Bisbee painter Peter Young, photographer Valerie Galloway, formerly of Tucson, and San Francisco poster artist Frank Kozik.
So how is it that a local girl can attract art stars old and new to her Old Pueblo digs?
"It's amazing how easy it is to show these artists here," says Cherry, lounging in the gallery's cool office one blistering day last week. "They can take a vacation here, and it's another line on the resume...And it's partly knowing the big names and caring about them."
That's the short answer. The long answer traces Cherry's elliptical route up to the heady art heights. As an art history major at the UA in the late '80s, Cherry put together a gallery management emphasis with the help of Professor Sheila Pitt. (The UA now has an official program, run by galleries director Julie Sasse.) Cherry worked at the Union Gallery for then-director Karin Erickson, and after graduation Erickson helped Cherry land a job at downtown's Sixth Congress Gallery, now defunct. But it was a move to Europe in the early '90s that made the difference.
"I lived in Europe, in Germany, for three years," Cherry explains. "My dad's wife had a scholarship there (in Constance) and I went over but I got stuck in Cologne."
To while away the time until she made it to Constance, Cherry volunteered at the Philomene Magers Gallery. Magers, the daughter of a big-time art dealer who once showed the likes of Joseph Beuys, was plugged into the avant-garde scene. She ended up hiring her young American volunteer, and Cherry stayed three years. She never made it to Constance.
"Cologne was the hot spot in the '80s for art. I was kind of at the end of it," she says, but still she made fortuitous contacts--with her future husband, for instance. Cherry met and married Mosset, a Swiss painter who represented his country in the 1990 Venice Biennale. Fleury, the Swiss video artist, has a partner who is a close friend of Mosset's. And Fleury also showed at Philomene Magers Gallery.
Cherry missed the desert terribly while living in rainy Northern Europe, but she says she made herself "stick it out." Eventually, though, she and Mosset moved back to Tucson.
"What I wanted to do more than anything was open a gallery," Cherry says. She put the first version of ECCA in the living room of the couple's rental house on Broadway, while her husband painted in the garage. Since last fall, the gallery has spread out in the elegantly refurbished front rooms of the Grant Road house, and Mosset is set up in a studio in the old Poblano Hot Sauce factory.
Cherry says she maintains strict criteria for the art she shows. "My program is very contemporary, with a conversation (like the one) that happens in Flash Art and Art Forum. Art that's aesthetically attractive but with a conversation beyond that. For example, Cecilia (de Medeiros) does things with wonderful wit. My mantra is 'no representational painting'...I don't show reproductive paintings, unless it gets conceptual," like the "landscapes with a twist" by Stepanek and Maslin.
Cherry doesn't exhibit photography either, though she makes an exception for her friend Galloway, whose photographs, she says, "are really objects, too."
Her first show of the upcoming fall season, called simply C, will be a gathering of seven famous artists with C names, Chuck Close and Bruce Connor among them, to be organized by New York curator Robert Nickas. Another Galloway show follows. Much of Tucson's art, known for lushly painted and even decorative works suggested by the landscape, doesn't exactly meet Cherry's criteria. As she says, "I'm trying to bring in contemporary art from the outside," though she has made some overtures to locals. Tucson artist Catherine Eyde will open an installation for Día de los Muertos in October. And local photographer Darren Clark curated last winter's witty Olestra show, filled with works by Arizona artists.
Nevertheless, Cherry says, "I get a lot of support from the artists' community. People came to the Peter Young show and said, 'My God, how nice to see a show about painting!' Here I don't get a lot of walk-by traffic, but a lot of people come back."
She has sold some things, even at the higher prices name artists command. And with a thick résumé now under the gallery's belt, Cherry hopes to bring her enterprise up to the next level by showing off her artists at invitational art fairs. Meantime, she keeps her day job "dressing ladies" at the Arizona Opera.
"My (gallery) motives are not monetary. The'd better not be monetary in Tucson!" she exclaims. "I don't have any dreams that there will someday be a big art boom in Tucson. But I don't like New York. If I did this there, no one would care. It's appreciated locally."
And in Tucson, even on Grant Road, Cherry can walk out the door and see the desert's big skies. "I like to go outside and open my arms and see from here to there," she says. "I love it here."
Artists of the Gallery continues through Saturday, August 1, at Elizabeth Cherry Contemporary Art, 437 E. Grant Road. Summer hours are noon to 4 p.m. Friday and Saturday. For images and artists' bios, check the gallery's website at http://www.cherry-art.com. For more information, call 903-0577.

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