Best Place to Act Like a Tourist Old Town Scottsdale.Best Place to Take an Out-of-Towner Musical Instrument Museum.Best Holiday Light Display Mel and Patti Tasker's House.Best Bricks The LEGO Model of Downtown Phoenix.
Tunnel vision marked much of the year, as massive misinformation campaigns, alternative realities, and social media algorithms magnified existing fissures in the country's political landscape.
Here, both art aficionados and the art-curious find work that stretches their ideas and perceptions, delivering that perfect mix of questions and answers.
Lisa Sette Gallery is also a great place to discover emerging talent, such as collaborators Merryn Omotayo Alaka and Sam Fresquez, whose large-scale suspended sculptures made with synthetic hair and braid crimps were shown alongside Angela Ellsworth's bonnets made with thousands of corsage pins for this year's "Things We Carry" exhibit exploring identity and radical self-expression. Walking into her gallery, you'll always see a fascinating mix of materials, from Annie Lopez's cyanotype photography on tamale paper to Mayme Kratz's delicate animal bones encased in resin. Sette's midtown gallery is also distinguished by its artist roster, which includes Sonya Clark, Claudio Dicochea, Mark Klett, James Turrell, and many more. For part of the past year, she showed works organized around the color blue, highlighting the color's historical, aesthetic, and political significance (from ancient times, the color has represented the sky and the sea, and served as a symbol of power, wealth, and status today, of course, Americans identify it with the Democratic Party). Gallerist Lisa Sette has a gift for finding connections between contemporary art and contemporary society.