Etherton Gallery Celebrates 25 Years
by Anne Seidler
his month marks the 25th anniversary of Etherton Gallery, one of Tucson’s most groundbreaking and respected art spaces. In its quarter of a decade, the gallery has been defined by a level of sophistication and dedication to professionalism rarely encountered in this corner of the Southwest, helping to put Tucson on the map as a city that takes art seriously. This month Etherton celebrates its quarter of a decade with an anniversary celebration showcasing some of the best pieces from its sizable inventory.
Terry Etherton, who has been proprietor of the gallery since its beginning in 1981, remembers his decision to start a contemporary photography gallery in Tucson while on a visit from San Francisco. The gallery originally opened in the building at Sixth Street and Fourth Avenue now occupied by Toxic Ranch Records. At the time, there were no contemporary photo galleries in Tucson, despite the prominence of the U of A’s Center for Creative Photography. Etherton was attracted to Tucson due to the Center and its impressive faculty, as well as Tucson’s lower rent that would make opening a gallery more feasible than in the Bay Area.
The gallery originally showed only contemporary photographs, mostly by faculty from the University as well as San Francisco photographers. Soon, though, Etherton branched out to show work by more well-known photographers and then further expanded to include paintings and drawings. With its steadily increasing inventory, the gallery soon outgrew its 6th Street space. In 1988, Etherton was approached by the owner of the historic Odd Fellows Building on South Sixth Avenue. Etherton made the move and the building’s second floor, once a 1920s ballroom, was transformed into a thoroughly modern art space. In 1990, Etherton also began managing the Temple Gallery, a smaller gallery located upstairs at the Temple of Music and Art which hosts six or seven shows a year.
Etherton, who holds a BA in Cinema and Photography, acknowledges that his background is in the arts rather than business. Still, he has managed to make the gallery both respected artistically and financially successful. It has been voted “Best Fine Art Gallery” in the Tucson Weekly’s annual “Best of Tucson” issue twelve years in a row and has received press coverage from such notable publications as Architectural Digest and Black & White. Proprietor Etherton attributes this success largely to the fact that his is not run like a typical local gallery. “I do a lot of trade shows in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Santa Fe” he says. “I get to meet a lot of dealers and collectors who wouldn’t normally come to Tucson. We are not just a local gallery. We have artists from all over the place.”
Rather than leaning towards any one style or trying to attract a certain type of buyer, Etherton has embraced riskier artists along with more comfortable and accessible aesthetics. “People will come in and say, ‘How can you show Dykinga and Joel Peter Witkin?”, Etherton says. “We’ve had some very edgy and controversial work. Those shows are always very heavily attended and covered by the press.”
Etherton’s 25th Anniversary Summer Celebration show features work from over twenty different artists who have exhibited at the gallery in the last twenty-five years. Rather than choosing a theme, Etherton says that the goal was “just to have really good examples of people we’ve shown in the past.” This goal has been realized with a well-chosen sampling of works by some of Tucson’s finest artists, including Bailey Doogan, Chris Rush, Kate Breakey, and Daniel Martin Diaz. The show, which will run through August 31st, is intended to slightly change and evolve as its pieces, many of which have been significantly discounted, are sold and replaced by other works.
Some of the pieces selected for the show could be called definitive of their artists, such as Kate Breakey’s brilliantly-colored still-life close-ups, Sturnis Vulgaris, European Starling, Eschscolzia mexicana, and Mexican Goldpoppy. Breakey hand-colors gelatin silver prints of birds, flowers and artifacts from the natural world, putting a contemporary spin on the care and precision of naturalist’s drawings. Two recent pieces: “Three Nests and Things on a Table,” also on display, use more austere subject matter and muted tones than much of her earlier work, suggesting a progression toward a more subtle aesthetic.
The pieces by Bailey Doogan are less readily attributed to the artist, but intriguing nonetheless. Many are familiar with Doogan’s brutally honest, often slightly confrontational renderings of the human form. Her serigraph “JAM” (2001) shows a more playful side of her oeuvre. A woman’s face in various states of agitation is overlaid with three circles of red, yellow, and green. A neat column on the left lists items causing traffic delays on Bay Area freeways over a period of three months. “Wonderland,” a 1994 linoleum cut, looks like a preliminary version of her more well-known 1996-97 charcoal “Assman” with the addition of a verse from Lewis Carroll.
One focal point of the show is a grouping of works by Chris Rush, a Tucson artist best known for his drawings on found documents from Tucson streets as well as from 18th- and 19th-century Europe. Along with four of these intriguing drawings on antique ephemera, two of Rush’s Conte crayon pieces show his mastery of another medium. Coil, the image of a pallid but still eerily lifelike snake resting in a jar of formaldehyde against an austere white background, is just as haunting as Rush’s best human portraiture.
During the anniversary show, which will run through the end of August, Etherton’s Masterworks gallery will display photographs by modernists including Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, Danny Lyon and Alfred Stieglitz; an assemblage that would make a worthwhile show in its own right. The vintage photographs and Mata Ortiz pottery in the Southwest Gallery are also worth more than a passing glance. There’s no excuse to miss such an eclectic show where the only thing consistent about the work is its relevance and quality.
1. chris rush
coil
conté crayon on paper
courtesy etherton gallery
2. l to r - artwork by nancy tokar miller, teresa villegas, gail marcus-orlen, mark klett, deborah bloomfield, and jack dykinga. courtesy etherton gallery
3. l to r - artwork by mark klett, deborah bloomfield, and jack dykinga, adriel heisey, gordon whitten, daniel martin diaz, bailey doogan, and james g. davis. courtesy etherton gallery
4. kate breakey
three nests from the series loose ends
hand-colored gelatin silver print
courtesy etherton gallery
5. terry huseye
of-4-80 from the series ocotillo flat
iris print
courtesy etherton gallery
6. manuel alverez bravo
daughter of the dancers, 1933
gelatin silver print
courtesy etherton gallery
