25 Year Anniversary Exhibition

Over the past 25 years the arts community has been given the privilege to view well over 200 exhibitions that have lived up to Lisa Sette Gallery’s personal vision: a perception that demands the work be stimulating and moving – a visual voice that is relevant to the times in which we live.

Director and president Lisa Sette, who founded the gallery when she was in her mid-20’s, has shaped an art space that remains as vital and relevant today as when it was started, and is now well known in the global art scene. In a business that can be notoriously difficult and transitory, Lisa Sette Gallery has carefully maintained its unique aesthetic vision and sincere relationships with artists, collectors and the arts community.

A 1997 ArtNEWS article described Lisa Sette Gallery as “the linchpin of the Scottsdale gallery scene.” Beyond being a good business influence, however, Lisa Sette Gallery offers the art world something of almost indefinable value: a sense of self. The gallery’s particular aesthetic reflects a considered reaction to its context—in both time and geographical place. Through its tenacity and deeply philosophical approach to choosing and exhibiting new work, Lisa Sette Gallery has come to define a new idea of art in Arizona.

For an arts community that is often disturbed by its connection to the realist Western art or New Age-y desert mythology found at any Arizona tourist spot, Lisa Sette Gallery offers an irony-free conception of contemporary art of the West that is both sophisticated and avant-garde. Rather than seeking to distance itself from what it means to live in a desert city, the Sette aesthetic encapsulates an understanding of this idiosyncratic existence; nearing the edge of the hemisphere - simultaneously beautiful, threatening, and precarious, and, as such, fertile creative ground for contemporary artwork.

Although by now an established gallery, Lisa Sette Gallery still exudes the playfulness and idealism of a new gallery. This past year the gallery has exhibited the contemplative photographs of Mike and Doug Starn, the hybrid sculptures of Jessica Joslin and introduced to the United States artist Fiona Pardington from New Zealand. Also in 2010, the works of Lisa Sette Gallery artists Angela Ellsworth, Enrique Chagoya, and Claudio Dicochea were exhibited at the 17th Biennale of Sydney: "The Beauty of Distance: Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age" alongside a select roster of 166 international artists and art-world luminaries.

This March, Lisa Sette Gallery’s 25-Year Anniversary Exhibition is an opportunity to celebrate a quarter century of contemporary art through an exhibition of work by gallery artists from 1986 forward. The exhibition will include works by: Enrique Chagoya, Kim Cridler, Binh Danh, Einar & Jamex de la Torre, Claudio Dicochea, Angela Ellsworth, Lalla Essaydi, Gilbert Garcin, Luis González Palma, Valeriy Gerlovin & Rimma Gerlovina, Rick Hards, Alan Bur Johnson,Jessica Joslin, Mark Klett, Mayme Kratz, David Kroll, Nissa Kubly, Carrie Marill, Matthew Moore, Marie Navarre, Fiona Pardington, Arnaldo Roche Rabell, Mike & Doug Starn, Julianne Swartz, James Turrell, and William Wegman.