#ArtLitPhx: ‘Aladdin’ by Rhythm Dance Company

Rhythm Dance Company presents: Aladdin, Ek Anokhi Prem Kahani—A unique love story

Enjoy a Bollywood musical presented by Rhythm Dance Company production team that shares the classic love story of Aladdin and Jasmine in the good old city of Agrabah. The Bollywood dancers promise an extraordinarily colorful and extravagant event that is sure to impress!

EVENT INFORMATION

Date: Saturday, August 24

Time: 5 p.m.

Location: Tempe Center for the Arts, 700 W. Rio Salado Pkwy.

For more information, click here.

#ArtLitPhx: Draw-A-Thon

Participate in an indoor festival celebrating the arts and sciences of drawing on June 22 from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. at Tempe Center for the Arts, 700 W. Rio Salado Pkwy.

Family Focus: 10 a.m.–2 p.m.
Booths include exhibiting artists Brandi Lee Cooper, Emily Ritter, Abbey Messmer and Maria Salenger and organizations including Crayola Experience Chandler, Edna Vihel Arts Center, Tempe History Museum and Xico Inc. Activities include printmaking, Suminagashi floating ink painting, topography map drawing and a fantasy station dedicated to dinosaurs and unicorns.

Teen Focus: 2–6 p.m.
Booths include exhibiting artists Jerry Jacobson and Justin Rodier and organizations including Architekton, ASU School of Art, Tempe Public Art, Scottsdale Artists School and FABRIC of Tempe. Activities include virtual reality drawing, portfolio reviews, animation, costume design, fashion design and open studio sessions with a live model and artist Matt Dickson.

Adult Focus (with live music and happy hour): 6–10 p.m.
Booths include exhibiting artist Laura Spalding Best and date night activities including competitive drawing games, fashion show by FABRIC designers and open studio sessions with live model and artist Matt Dickson.

For a complete Draw-A-Thon schedule, click here.


Summer Parking: Enjoy free cart rides from your vehicle to the Tempe Center for the Arts’ front door! Due to construction, the parking lot is located at Hardy Dr. and Rio Salado Pkwy. Just follow the signs.

#ArtLitPhx: The Messenger is the Message: Voicecraft and the Personal Essay with Gregory Pardlo

artlitphx

Date: Thursday, March 21, 2019
Time: 6:30 p.m
Location: Tempe Center for the Arts, 700 W Rio Salado Pkwy, Tempe, AZ 85281
Cost: Free

Event Details:
One of the tragic consequences of being confined to a single body is that we will never know what other people experience when they meet us for the first time. We can’t know how someone will register the slight change in the atmosphere that our presence causes when we enter a room. We will never know what another person feels while keeping us company. Memoirists choose to make themselves, someone they can never objectively grasp or fully represent on the page, the primary subject of most of their writing. But there are ways to cultivate a kind of out-of-body-relationship to the self that does get on the page. Voice is the messenger we send to greet the reader. We can craft voice the way one might craft a social media presence. Voice can conjure an entire world in a few phrases, images or references. The question is how do we want to be represented on the page?

Join Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gregory Pardlo for his talk, “The Messenger is the Message: Voicecraft and the Personal Essay” on Thursday, March 21, 2019 at the Tempe Center for the Arts (700 W Rio Salado Pkwy, Tempe, AZ 85281) at 6:30 p.m.

While encouraged, RSVPs are purely for the purposes of monitoring attendance, gauging interest, and communicating information about parking, directions, and other aspects of the event. You do not have to register or RSVP to attend this event. This event is open to the public and free.

For more information and to RSVP, visit the Eventbrite page here.

About the Author:
Gregory Pardlo’s collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection Totem was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and currently teaches in the graduate writing program at Rutgers-Camden University. Air Traffic, a memoir in essays, was released by Knopf in April.

About the Book:
The long-awaited extraordinary memoir and a blistering meditation on fatherhood, class, education, race, addiction, and ambition from beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gregory Pardlo.

Gregory Sr. is a charismatic air traffic controller at Newark International Airport, leading labor organizer and a father to two sons, bookish Greg Jr. and musical-talent Robbie. But, when “Big Greg” loses his job after the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Strike of 1981, he becomes a disillusioned presence in the household and a disconcerting model for young Greg’s ambitions. As Big Greg succumbs to addiction and exhausts the family’s money on ostentatious whims, Greg Jr. rebels. He hustles off to boot camp at Parris Island, falls in love with a woman he follows to Denmark, drops in and out of college, and takes a job as a bar manager-cum-barfly at the family’s jazz club.

Rich and lyrical, Air Traffic follows Gregory Pardlo as he learns to be a poet, father, and teacher, as he enters recovery and hosts an intervention for his brother on national television. Throughout, Pardlo grapples with the irresistible yet ruinous legacy of masculinity he inherited from his father. This is his deeply-felt ode to Greg Sr., to fatherhood, and to the frustrating-yet-redemptive ties of family, as well as a scrupulous, searing examination of how manhood is shaped in contemporary American life. (Knopf)

To learn more about Air Traffic, you can visit the author’s website or order the book from Changing Hands.

Contributor Update: Emily Matyas

TCA Walk in My ShoesWe are happy to announce that Emily Matyas is one of several artists appearing in the Walk in My Shoes exhibit currently on display at the Tempe Center for the Arts Gallery (TCA). The exhibit, which features work from Emily’s I am My Ancestors, started on January 19th of 2018 and will be running until May 12th. For information on viewing, please visit the gallery website.

Emily’s work first appeared in issue 14 of Superstition Review. “Heading Home,” which also appears on TCA’s site for Walk in My Shoes, is additionally accompanied by three more photographs. Emily also wrote guest post for the SR blog, “The “Selfie” and Assimilation” and “Oddly Important Combinations.”

 

#ArtLitPhx: Elizabeth Kolbert at Tempe Center for the Arts

Elizabeth-Kolbert-Tempe-Center-for-the-Arts

 

 

 

 

 

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert will be talking about her latest work, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, at Tempe Center for the Arts. The author will also present on the role human beings have played in climate change. The event takes place on Thursday, October 20 at 7 p.m. A Q&A and book signing will take place after the presentation. This event is free and open to the public.

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. Her series on global warming, “The Climate of Man,” appeared in The New Yorker in the spring of 2005 and won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine award, among numerous other accolades. Her work has appeared in The New York Times MagazineVogue, and Mother Jones, and has been anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Political Writing. She edited The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2009. A collection of her work, The Prophet of Love and Other Tales of Power and Deceit, was published in 2004. Prior to joining the staff of The New Yorker, Kolbert was a political reporter for The New York Times.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction, was a New York Times 2014 Top Ten Best Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle awards for the best books of 2014. Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change was chosen as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year in 2006 by The New York Times Book Review.

For more information, please visit the Facebook event or the Eventbrite website.

Interview with Monica Aissa Martinez

SR conducted this interview with Issue 9 contributor Monica Aissa Martinez.

Monica Aissa Martinez

Superstition Review: If you could give your past self any advice what would it be?

Monica Martinez: I would tell my past self to get out of her comfort zone more readily and as often as possible where art is concerned.

SR: How did you first get involved in your field? 

MM: I made the decision to attend college and headed right to art school. It was the only thing I thought I could really do. One thing led to another and here I am. Continuing to make art is probably my greatest achievement continuing to exhibit follows. But I am also pleased that private and public collectors have purchased my work, as it continues to be seen and experienced. That means a lot to me. I want my work out in the world. And it is.

élan vital, my first solo was a hugely important experience for me. It was a beautiful space, with a professional organization. The brochure was well written. The show ran six months; many, including foreign visitors, saw it. I sold numerous works. It stands out as a turning point because I solicited them and they accepted my proposal. I had that wonderful experience as an initiation exhibit, which lead to many more opportunities, and solidified the idea that I could work as an artist.

SR: Have you ever tried to work in other creative areas?

MM: I have a knack for illustration but I’ve not thought of going into that area. I enjoy photography, and photograph people now and again. Not for exhibition, but yes, professionally. I did do stage design. I have been a teaching artist for a number of years now.  I used to go into the schools around the valley and teach mask making, story telling through art making. Currently I am an adjunct at Phoenix College. I teach Drawing. I enjoy the work very much. And with all my years of experience it allows me to pass on what I have learned, and what I know.

SR: Please give us some background biographical information. 

Monica’s Studio

I am originally from El Paso, Texas. I come from a large family. Education, arts and culture are a priority in my family. I am currently living in Phoenix with my husband and cat.

I received a BFA in Ceramics and Metals, at the University of Texas at El Paso.

I received my Masters of Fine Arts at New Mexico State University. Area of emphasis was Drawing and Printmaking. I covered 2D AND 3D both before I settled into my current areas of work: drawing, painting and printmaking. I also make masks. Though I don’t exhibit my masks.

I have been awarded solo exhibitions. That’s pretty valuable for development and growth as an artist.

My work has exhibited in the Phoenix Art Museum (Local’s Only), the Tucson Museum of Art (AZ biennial ’09), the ASU Art Museum (Here and Now), and Tempe Center for the Arts, Mesa Arts Center, and the Scottsdale Center for the Arts (solo). My work has been seen internationally, and is part of numerous private and public collections including: New Mexico State University, Mesa Arts Center, Phoenix Municipal Court House, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary of Art, Arizona State University, and Brigham Young University.

My drawing, paintings and prints are featured in three publications through the Hispanic Research Center and Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue of Arizona State University. Both ASU and the University of Norte Dame have commissioned me to create limited edition prints. My alma mater, New Mexico State University has purchased four of my works, three of those purchases were more recent. They invited me to come back as a visiting artist and lecture. It was a bit out of body. I also exhibited and lectured at the University of Texas (my other alma mater).

My work has been published in a number of books put out by the Hispanic Research Center on the ASU campus a number of years ago. Since then I have received emails from students across the country, and including an MFA student in Monterrey Mexico connecting with me only to discuss my artwork. The latter included my work and commentary in her thesis. All of that means a lot to me.

SR: Do you have any projects or pieces you’re currently working on?

MM: Right now I am preparing for a 3-person exhibit scheduled to open January 25 and run thru May 5, 2013, at the Mesa Center for the Arts. The artwork in Superstition Review will be featured.

SR: What inspired you to create your piece for Issue 9 of Superstition Review?

MM: That particular drawing is influenced by a book I am reading titled New Self – New World by Philip Shepherd. It deals with planet earth, man and animal, the connection between them. It also deals with the need for balance of the masculine and the feminine / matriarchy / patriarchy, in current times.

It’s my very current direction, all new artwork. A new direction. I am working out new ideas. The one main piece is the largest I’ve ever worked on, and it took such a long time to complete. I am glad to have a photo for you. This image I am including with this text, is the second large work of the series.

SR: Do you have a website or is your work linked to any other websites, blog posts, or news stories?

You can read more about Monica Aissa Martinez at http://monicaaissamartinez.com/ and  http://monicaaissamartinez.wordpress.com/

Work in Progress, Detail