The Tucson Museum of Art seems to be expanding its mission to cover a panorama of various artistic traditions, and over the past few years the institution has succeeded in introducing art lovers to a wide array of big names along with the more obscure; internationally renowned and local talents alike.
With its major spring exhibits, widely disparate works by a trio of utterly dissimilar creators will probably have viewers scratching their heads and muttering “what do these guys have to do with each other?” Or perhaps they will delight in a brand-new opportunity to contemplate and absorb the work of three pros, Andy Warhol, Ed Mell and David Tineo.
Warhol is, of course, beyond famous (his renown lasting well beyond the 15 minutes he so presciently predicted everyone would get in the future), Ed Mell’s name is, to quote a TMA press release, “synonymous with the desert southwest,” and the radiant murals of homegrown David Tineo are almost ubiquitous in Tucson. By linking up these radically different artistic styles, media, traditions, execution, methodology, and prominence, The Tucson Museum of Art brilliantly presents the art-loving public with a rare chance to feast its eyes on an all-encompassing purview of what “color” can consist of, how it can be manipulated, finessed, exploited and otherwise used for ends that range all over the aesthetic landscape.
Warhol starting experimenting with printmaking as early as 1962, when he began doing photographic silk-screens and turning out thousands of symbolic images of popular culture. His multiple portraits of such beloved figures as Marilyn Monroe and other celebrities are somehow emblematic Americana, in spite of the derision his work has often elicited from those who prefer their pictures to be rooted in representational solidity á la Norman Rockwell and Thomas Hart Benton. However, Warhol has the last word in a way, in spite of having died unexpectedly at the age of 59 from complications following gallbladder surgery, because his illustrations, paintings, sculptures, films and even performance art have become a permanent part of the depiction of 20th century America.
Ed Mell is a native Arizonan, born in Phoenix and educated in LA. He began as an advertising illustrator and enjoyed a successful career in that field, but spent a summer teaching art on the Hopi Reservation in 1971 that resulted in his reconnecting with Western landscapes. Flying in a helicopter over Arizona in the late 70s, Ed was inspired to expand his interest in landscapes painted in oil rather than the commercial work he did with his brother for their Phoenix business. By the mid-80s, he had added sculpture to his repertoire, including the prominent “Jack Knife,” a large-scale cowboy on a bucking bronco gracing downtown Scottsdale’s Marshall Way-Main Street intersection.
Mell’s most recognizable canvases portray the luminous and florid cloudscapes and canyons that make the Southwest a majestic subject for all manner of art. The shapes, hues, dimensions, size and horizontal nature of how the land has arranged itself is irresistible to any painter who is compelled to try to express its magnificence. Ed Mell has branched out, due to the success of his landscape painting, to try his hand at other subject matter, including desert flowers, long horn cattle and cowboys. It is said of him that he is “prolific and unrelenting, painting as if he is on a mission and not wanting to miss a single moment with the stuff.” This is obvious if his output is tallied up – the man has devoted his life to both realism and abstraction; the serene classical paean to nature being the expressive realism and the energetic and dramatic articulation of land and clouds being the abstraction.
David Tineo’s thirty-year career as a muralist, easel painter and art educator will be celebrated (ˇViva David Tineo!) with a retrospective that includes a small but select group of fifty artworks on canvas, burlap and paper gathered from Tucson collectors. The beloved artist has been recently profiled in local media and now gets a prestigious venue in his hometown in which to display the fruits of years of striving to promote and publicize the Mexican-American population’s situations and circumstances as it has assimilated and disenfranchised. Photographs and writings, as well as audiovisual and interpretative materials will be on display.
The exhibits open February 27 with a members’ reception on February 26. Tucson Museum of Art is located at 140 N. Main Ave., TucsonMuseumofArt.org, 624-2333.
