The cover of Phoenix: 21st Century City invites the viewer to fly into the Valley of the Sun: PHX is printed in large letters against a blue sky and a plane is visible at a distance. One’s introduction to Phoenix continues inside the cover with a series of boldly cropped photographs of upscale shopping centers, car dealerships, desert cacti, hipster skateboarders in front of the futuristic Sandra Day O’Connor Federal Courthouse, and classic 1960s neon signs advertising laundromats, car dealerships, and florists. The photographs are linked together by swooping, aerodynamic white lines.

The bold layout continues inside. The two-page foreword by Edward Booth-Clibborn, the book’s author and publisher, is printed against a blue sky with a plane flying over the tops of palm trees and utility wires, while Nan Ellin’s introduction is set against panoramic views of downtown Phoenix, interstate ramps, and more cacti. The book’s imaginative layout and photographs immediately set the reader in a Phoenix state of mind and foreshadow the variety of artworks in the ensuing pages.

Flying into Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport (PHX), one is invariably struck by the sheer expanse of the city, covering 515 square miles, an area larger than Los Angeles. The city’s vastness is a result of its explosive growth, from some 2,500 inhabitants when incorporated in 1881 to more than 1.5 million in 2006, making it the fifth largest city in the country. As Ellin writes in her insightful introduction, entitled “Desert Metropolis,” the unifying aspect of this sprawling metropolis is the heat, which typically reaches or exceeds 100°F three months out of the year. Like the gray skies of Portland and Seattle and the lake-effect snows of Buffalo and Cleveland, the sun’s rays bind Phoenix’s inhabitants together. The city’s desert environment and large influx of immigrants have fostered a unique artistic expression that often responds to both of these conditions.

Phoenix: 21st Century is the fourth book in a series that sets out to “look inside cities through their creative community and living environment, which is what fundamentally influences their work” (16). Booth-Clibborn wonders if Phoenix, with its economic prosperity and strong support of the arts, is not becoming a city-state on the model of seventeenth-century Venice or Amsterdam. A discussion of the many arts organizations in the Phoenix area—such as Artlink, the Maricopa Partnership for Arts and Culture, the BRIO Fine Arts Center, MARS (Movimiento Artistico del Rio Salado), and PACO (the Phoenix Arts Collective)—would certainly have bolstered his claim. Nevertheless, the book makes clear that Phoenix is home to a vibrant art scene, and that the city’s youth, energy, and vitality are reflected in its contemporary art, architecture, and urban design. Those looking for more iconic views of Phoenix, such as the Wrigley Mansion or the Heard Museum, will be disappointed.

Ellin gives pride of place to Phoenix as an artistic and cultural mecca, and even goes so far as to compare it to Paris in the 1860s, New York in the 1910s, and Los Angeles in the 1950s. Ellin, professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University, and a resident of Phoenix for more than a decade, is well placed to discuss the city’s artistic milieu. She identifies four types of artistic production in the city: art that is “out of Phoenix,” meaning work derived directly from the city itself, using natural materials and found objects; “about Phoenix,” that is, work which portrays the city (both natural and constructed) or is inspired by it; “because of Phoenix,” in which work reflects on themes such as the city’s urban sprawl, car culture, ethnic diversity, and environmental devastation; and “in spite of Phoenix,” or work that has no specific connection to the city except for being created there. Examples from all four categories are amply represented in the book, with the majority consisting of the traditional media of painting, sculpture, and architecture. There are also innovative assemblage/installation pieces, fashion, photographs, furniture, and video/digital imagery. All the art is of recent vintage, with almost three-quarters of the hundred or so works dating between 2003 and 2005.

The most memorable and probing works by the sixty-five artists showcased in the book are those that reflect on the city as muse, or react to it, either positively or negatively. Erin V. Sotak exchanged the “grassy yard, taller-than-me snow drifts and 241 shades of Ohio gray sky for a granite lawn, faster-than-me tumbleweed and 241 shades of brown” (29). Her performance and installation pieces, such as A Peeling (2000), reconcile the metaphorical desert of her youth with the real desert of her adult life. Carrie Bloomston’s Dreaming/Drawing (2003), comprised of photocopies on found paper threaded by a string, expresses her state of mind as “unfettered and free from the stagnation associated with a burden of historical baggage” (47). As a historical comparison, Ellin cites Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Miller, among others, as artists who were also attracted to the West and who, along with their art, were transformed by its sheer scale and quality of light.

Not all the art is adulatory. Grandma’s Anxious Landscape (2004), by Chris Todd, is a mixed-media interactive assemblage that comments on how Phoenix’s new gated communities, while supposedly offering peace of mind and protection against the city’s “unpredictable” urban growth, have isolated and alienated residents from one another. Melinda Bergman also addresses the city’s growth. In a city supposedly vital and open, she has found that Phoenix’s sprawl and lack of street life have severely hampered social interaction. Her Playground-Swallowing Geography (2005) is an egg tempera painting depicting a playground surrounded by a high-wire fence with buildings, squares, and streets devoid of human activity—a stylized Southwest version of a Giorgio de Chirico painting.

Matthew Jason Moore’s gigantic Earthworks are very personal reflections on the effect of urban expansion on the surrounding landscape: development west of Phoenix is swallowing land that his family has farmed for three generations. Single Family Residence (2003–2004) is a 450 X 950-foot plan of a typical suburban home set in a twenty-acre field and hand hoed over a fourth-month period. Moore Estates (2005–2006), set on a thirty-five acre field, is an exact replica, at one-third the scale, of the first development built on his family’s land. Houses are planted in sorghum, recalling the reddish tones of the tiled roofs, and roads have been planted in ornamental black-bearded wheat to suggest asphalt. On a smaller scale, Theodore Troxel’s Suburb (2005) features javelinas (also known as collared peccaries) made out of wood and asphalt roofing shingles—materials common to the housing industry—to illustrate how the native habitat of these pig-like animals is being altered by suburban sprawl.

The same vastness that has led some artists to express their isolation and disconnectedness has encouraged some architects to design innovative works in tune with Phoenix’s unique desert climate, and these works are the highlights of the book. The Desert Bloom Library designed by Richard + Bauer Architecture in 2005 evokes the symbiotic relationship between a young saguaro cactus and its nurse tree, “creating a shaded microclimate, providing daylight, shelter, and a nurturing environment for intellectual growth” (40). The roof extends some sixty feet into the Sonoran desert, providing a transitional indoor/outdoor area, while coiled metal screens, whose forms recall that of the natural arroyos nearby, provide shade for outdoor reading spaces. Innovative architectural design can also be found in residential housing, with exposed concrete blocks, corrugated steel, and metal sun screens most often arranged in simple, cubic, geometrical forms. None of Frank Gehry’s organic effervescence is to be found here.

Although some works of art seem devoid of context, and one strains at times to understand why certain pieces were included in a book meant to specifically evoke Phoenix’s creative zeitgeist, the overall impression is of symbiosis between the city and its artists. Indeed, the book’s own imaginative layout, in tandem with the works of art presented inside, will suggest to the reader that Phoenix is a powerful and constant generator of creative expressions.