From a Marion Palfi retrospective at Phoenix Art Museum to a new folk music project by Family Trade at Granary Arts in Utah, our top five arts and culture picks for the next five days.
gelatin silver print. Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Marion Palfi Archive.
Freedom Must Be Lived: Marion Palfi’s America, 1940-1978
Phoenix Art Museum
July 21, 2021–January 2, 2022
This retrospective exhibition surveys the career of Marion Palfi (1907–1978), who produced an important visual document of 20th-century American injustice. A German immigrant to the United States during World War II, Palfi arrived in Los Angeles to find a reality far from the myth of the American Dream.
The Growing Edge
Casa Otro / Mesilla
Saturday, July 24, 6-8 pm MDT
The Growing Edge is a conversation between nine works from a community of nine artists/mothers who connected during the pandemic. Made during a season of contemplation and recovery, these works invite reclamation and restoration of space, time, and growth.
Unsilenced
Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center
June 18, 2021–ongoing
An exhibition by artist Chip Thomas (aka jetsonorama) incorporates historic photos of Indigenous captives and images of former Colorado Lieutenant Governor Lafayette Head’s 1865 census of enslaved Indigenous people in Conejos and Costilla Counties. In our recent article on the exhibition, Steve Jansen writes that Unsilenced “dismantles the settler-colonial narrative in the San Luis Valley and amplifies the history of Native enslavement in southern Colorado.”
Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas
The Modern / Fort Worth
June 20–October 10, 2021
Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas features the artist’s most significant works and examines his contribution to the development of abstraction over a span of nearly five decades. The exhibition highlights the close relationship between the artist’s paintings, drawings, prints, and pastels, which are rarely shown together.
Bird’s Eye Chisel
Granary Arts / Ephraim
ongoing
Bird’s Eye Chisel is a collection of original songs written by Ashley Hanson and Brian Laidlaw of the folk band the Family Trade during a year-long Granary Arts Fellowship in Sanpete Valley. It is a “folk” album in its musical aesthetic—acoustic instruments, simple harmonies, lyrical storytelling—but it’s also a “folk” album in the process of its construction. The songs are available for listening online.
