In 2015, Lisa Sette Gallery celebrates three decades exhibiting pioneering contemporary art in Arizona. The gallery will commemorate its anniversary with a March exhibition of contemporary art luminaries from near and far. The Lisa Sette Gallery 30th Anniversary show promises to delight followers of contemporary art and devotees of gallery founder Lisa Sette’s adventurous and discriminating curatorial eye.
In the art world at large, Lisa Sette Gallery’s 30th anniversary is cause for celebration, as its enduring commitment to aesthetic experimentation, and an unflinching engagement with up-and-coming international artists, has proved a template for success in the creation of a lasting contemporary cultural institution.
A North Star of contemporary art in the Southwest, Lisa Sette Gallery navigates a unique trajectory in the US art scene, producing annual shows and international appearances that challenge geographical and cultural perceptions. The gallery opened in the mid 1980’s, and in the years since, Gallery artists like James Turrell, Julianne Swartz, Enrique Chagoya, and Angela Ellsworth have risen to prominence while remaining committed to exhibiting new work at Lisa Sette Gallery. Sette seeks out artists working on the leading edge of concept and media, setting a bar for curatorial experimentation and fostering fruitful working relationships with artists, collectors, and museums. This personal touch and fearless spirit has paid off: In summer of 2014, the gallery moved to Midtown Phoenix: Lisa Sette Gallery now inhabits an exquisitely renovated 1979 Al Beadle structure, a Modernist oasis in the urban desert that encompasses unique new spaces for expanded programing and reflects the gallery’s forward-thinking philosophy.
In this newest iteration–the culmination of decades of challenging and beautiful curatorial investigation coupled with a commitment to good business practices – Lisa Sette Gallery inhabits an area of burgeoning urban vitality, serving as a lynchpin for the region’s growing cultural sector and an archetype of successful contemporary inquiry in the heart of the Southwest.
Lisa Sette Gallery offers the art world a sense of self—a considered reaction to the circumstances of time, beauty, and geographical place. Rather than distancing itself from what it means to live in a desert city, the Sette aesthetic embraces this idiosyncratic existence; nearing the edge of the hemisphere, simultaneously exhilarating and precarious, and fertile ground for contemporary artwork.
As seen over the past 30 years, and most recently in its expansion and move to the Beadle building on East Catalina Drive, Lisa Sette Gallery exemplifies a striking contemporary trajectory: toward the transcendent and the supremely centered, geographically defined and aesthetically advanced.