Through August 4, 2019, Julio César Morales: Invaders and the 2018 Phoenix Art Museum Artists’ Grants Recipients Exhibition showcase various works by the recipients of the 2018 Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award and the Phoenix Art Museum Artists’ Grants.

The Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award recognizes a mid-career Arizona artist who has demonstrated a sustained commitment to their chosen medium, continuous artistic growth, and consistent artistic production, while the Artists’ Grants encourage emerging contemporary artists in Arizona.

Julio César Morales: Invaders features work by the 2018 Arlene and Morton Scult Artist Award recipient, Julio César Morales, who is known for exploring the movement of people, narcotics, contraband, and American popular culture across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Featuring multimedia installations, mixed-media drawings and paintings, and photography, the mid-career survey depicts life along the border without adopting a moral position, instead capturing people as they are, living in a liminal space where there is no right or wrong, only tactics of survival. Invaders includes new and recent pieces by Morales, whose past works are featured in the permanent collections of Los Angeles County Art Museum (Calif.), Deutsche Bank, The Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.), and Pérez Art Museum Miami (Fla.), among others.

The 2018 Phoenix Art Museum Artists’ Grants Recipients exhibition features works by 2018 artists grants’ recipients Taylor James, Malakai, Elliott Jamal Robbins, and Papay Solomon. Photographs by James document the unforgiving nature of the U.S.-Mexico border and depict artifacts left by travelers or human remains. Works by award-winning filmmaker Malakai focus on the black experience and those of disenfranchised communities. Using appropriated and self-generated imagery, Robbins’ works serve as both personal narrative and an interrogation of the performative nature of blackness and masculinity in Western culture. Paintings, sculpture, videos, and large-scale portraits by Solomon challenge the preconceptions of young people of the African Diaspora in the West.