installation view of Born Again #3  lazyboy chair, guitar, portable dvd player, video

From “The Other Mainstream II”, ASU art museum, Tempe Arizona.  from the collection of Mikki and Stanley Weithorn

The Other Mainstream II is the second exhibition at the ASU Art Museum that focuses on the adventurous contemporary art collection of Valley residents Mikki and Stanley Weithorn.  True to its name, the exhibition reflects the dominance in the contemporary art world of artists from diverse backgrounds working with new issues of identity - a new “mainstream.”  With most of the works in the exhibition created since 9/11, the collection is bold in imagery and in its commentary on global societies.  It reaches beyond simply examining the assigned powers in politics, gender, and race, and moves to a broader examination of our humanity through humor or fantasy or blunt honesty.

The Weithorns focus their collecting on the narrative form of figurative paintings, drawings, and sculpture.  The artists are regional and international, well-known and emerging.  Included in the exhibition are: Emma Amos, Gordon Cheung, Marcel Dzama, Clinton Fein, Chitra Ganesh, Marcia Kure, Chris Ofili, Masami Teraoka, Mickalene Thomas, and Amy Wilson. The artist collaborative and husband and wife team, Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry, will create a site-specific installation in the exhibition. The bi-racial couple confront continuing concerns of racism in America drawing on photography from the early twentieth century of lynchings and the Civil Rights Movement. Their video installation, Exchange, poetically and powerfully refers to the “One Drop Rule” in which a person with one drop of black blood in their heritage was considered “colored.”

Local artists Steve Yazzie and Roy Wasson Valle are also included in the exhibition. Yazzie’s work, Born Again #3, comments on the idea of rebirth and renewal through the transforming of a broken-down guitar into a work of art. Wasson’s Cleaning Up is a powerful yet humorous sculpture related to Global Warming, with a polar bear (the first animal on the endangered list as a result of Global Warming) operating a leaf blower. Wasson is also well known in the Valley for his t-shirts and figurines, which will be featured in a special trunk show at the exhibition opening on Friday, September 26, 7-9 p.m.

Mikki and Stanley Weithorn live surrounded by their collection in their homes in Scottsdale and New York.

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Steven Yazzie 2009