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IT'S CHERRY: There's really no simple way to explain it.
But it goes something like this: On their nuptial road trip, gallery
owner (she prefers "gallerist") Elizabeth Cherry and
artist-groom Sylvie Fleury stopped off in San Francisco to visit
iconographic printmaster Frank Kozik. "He'd done some
album covers for some friends of mine, and another friend had
curated a show with him in Geneva," Cherry explains between
orders to contractors working on her new gallery space.
"I asked him if he'd be interested in doing a show in Tucson, and he was. He actually created a limited edition poster just for the Tucson show; the rest of the exhibit is mostly music-related prints and posters--Screaming Cheese, Siouxie and the Banshees, and some other funky stuff--everything from basic prints to collectors' items," she says with characteristic understatement.
Hers is a little slice of the art world underground in our dusty, graveled-over backyard. Formerly near downtown in a converted house on East Broadway (OK, the "gallery" was housed in the guest bedroom), the plucky venture has taken up more spacious residence in the unlikely shell of an East Grant Road building new owner Cherry says with a hint of irony "lays claim to being Tucson's first delivery restaurant." The studio/gallery has two rooms, one for rotating exhibits, the other an "office/library space with a cozy fireplace," where visitors can curl up and peruse a collection of international art catalogues and other references. You'll spot it next to Earl Kaufman Fine Art (a tattoo parlor), which rents the space from Cherry. Also new is the gallery's website: www.cherry-art.com. "Every exhibition will be up, including graphics--eventually," she says. "We just started it about a month ago." Here you'll find previously exhibited works by the likes of Cecilia de Medeiros, Tucson photog Valerie Galloway, Olivier Mosset, and hubby Fleury, a painter whose bio says he lives and works mainly in Geneva, Switzerland. These are no slouches: Mosset, currently a Tucson resident, had his abstract works exhibited in the Swiss Pavilion of the 1990 Venice Biennale; and included in de Medeiros' impressive résumé are solo exhibitions in the XXII Bienal de Sao Paolo, as well as galleries in Milan, Munich and, well, Tucson. Log on or stop by: Works by Kozik are on display through November 11. Elizabeth Cherry Contemporary Art, 437 E. Grant Road, is open from noon to 4 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, and by appointment. For information, call 903-0577. BIG YARN: The annual Tales of Arizona, Then and Now storytelling festival opens Friday, September 26, on campus in the UA Center for English as a Second Language auditorium, with African storytelling and drumming at 7 p.m. Festival continues throughout the weekend, with top-storytellers from across the land spinning yarns and workshops for all ages. See the City Week calendar for details; or call 327-4809. Admission to the opening performance featuring Gloria Myers and Denise Bey is $6 at the door, $4 for kids ages over age 6, students and seniors.
INK SPOTS: Among this week's readings and signings, Tucson
author Patricia Lucas visits Antigone Books, 411
N. Fourth Ave., at 7 p.m. Friday, September 26, to unveil Desperada-Desperada.
Call 792-3715 for information. John Proudstar and Ryan
Huna Smith sign their Tribal Force comic from noon
to 3 p.m. Saturday, September 27, at Comics & More,
2243 E. Broadway. Call 792-9660 for information. And Demetria
Martinez kicks off the Border Beat reading series at
8 p.m. Tuesday, September 30, at Cuppuccinos Coffee House,
3400 E. Speedway. Call 323-7205 for information.
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Understatement, that is, in explaining what she does. In fact,
the first year of Cherry's salon-styled receptions, modest exhibits
of avant-garde works, and the over-the-top Ultravivid fashion
show that closed the old location last winter with a parade of
wild choreography, cross-dressing to the nines, and a young woman
qua sushi platter splayed out on the kitchen table, have been
anything but. Of the latter, she says, "That was based on
the idea of a surrealist dinner that Marriet Oppenheim did in
the 1940s." Cherry's self-realized experiment, operating
under the subdued moniker Elizabeth Cherry Contemporary Art,
has infused a sometimes stagnant local gallery scene with some
broad, eccentric strokes.
