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The artist can see the whole crazy town from here: the patchwork of crooked streets snaking up the steep hillsides below, the cottages precariously perched on cliffs, the copper-colored mountains and canyons soaring up above.
The ceramic masks hang outside, on the patio inside a jungle of flowering plants and exotic fruits. A kiln stands in the yard and, up a little slope, a freestanding studio is crammed with drawings and paintings. And she keeps work by friends, too. Out front, Ben Dale's metal sculpture of a woman warrior rises up over the driveway. Nearby, his concrete body cast of another woman lies in the grass.
Cowboy pointillism doesn't raise a single eyebrow in this mile-high city. It's a once-and-future copper mining town that's filled to the brim with artists, musicians and poets.
Nobody minds when a gay Bisbee Pride celebration takes over the downtown of Old Bisbee for a full weekend, as it did in mid-June, or bats an eye when a graffiti artist splatters Che Guevaras on walls all over town. Art cars decked out with plastic dolls ostentatiously roam the streets. Galleries joust for storefront space on Main Street, and if you pay attention, you might just come across the West Texas Millionaires rehearsing their country-twanged rock in a street-front room on Brewery Gulch.
Alongside these highly regarded abstractionists are homegrown folks like Gene Elliston, who never drew until she stepped into art-mad Bisbee back in 1978 with her husband, who came to work as a lawyer. The couple had decided they wanted to raise their three children in a small town.
Painter Michael Cadieux is a high flyer who sells his work mostly outside of town. "I have a couple of collectors in the Midwest who buy every phase I do," he says. And another collector is coming to Bisbee soon to see his giant "Baby Buddha," a gridded painting of a baby's face, based on a Wal-Mart photo.
Seven miles from the Mexican border, the old mining town is loaded with artist-enticing visual charms. Besides the urban-dense streets and hillside stairs of Old Bisbee, it has those looming mountains and a climate cooler than Tucson's. (Elliston clocked the temperature at 92 degrees on a recent day when Tucson hit 111.) The architecture is a wild hodgepodge. The Cochise County Courthouse is an art-deco gem, and St. Patrick's Catholic Church, paid for by an Irish miner back in the teens, is unexpectedly elaborate. Houses can be historic or hippie homemade, and sometimes, the two genres merge. On my visit, I stayed in a rambling upstairs-downstairs house that grew from an old one-room miner's cabin.
It was cheap real estate that reeled in many of the town's pioneering artists. By the early '70s, Bisbee's copper mine was about to go bust, and terrified miners were fleeing for jobs elsewhere. They unloaded their little houses at fire-sale prices, fearful they wouldn't be able to sell later.
Breault and her previous husband, a new professor at Cochise College, bought their first house in town for $300--that's one three and two zeros--a payment for taxes owed. Since then, she's bought and sold multiple houses, many of them tiny wrecks, after living in them and fixing them up. One, she says, cost her $500; she sold it years later for $45,000, "cash." It helps explain why she doesn't feel so pressed to sell her work.
Painter Cadieux also benefited from the real estate bust. The professor plunked down $6,000 for a two-bedroom house "in a nice part of town" that he's had ever since. In the subsequent years, he spent sabbaticals and summers in Bisbee. Five years ago, he took early retirement and settled here permanently.
Once enough artists had settled in town, in their miners' shacks and rundown hotels and bungalows, they created a distinctive small-town arts community. They support each other's work as much as they can--one artist swears that everybody in town owns a crucified-doll piece by local artist Philip Estrada--and they developed arts co-ops and events of a caliber almost unheard of in such a small town. (The population was 8,000 in the 1980s.)
"A perk of board membership is the ability to rent a studio," Gregory says. "We're not in the studio-rental business."
As of July 1, after 23 years, Gregory was ceding his post as director to a young woman, Melissa Holden. If the best-known Bisbee artists arrived in the '70s, some of the younger ones, including Estrada, are homegrown. And new upstarts have been turning up to carry on the art-rebel tradition.
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Did Your Tucson Home’s Property Tax Go Down?
By now you should have received your 2009 Property Tax Statement from Pima County. If you’re like me and most people I’ve talked to about it, the notice arrived Oct. 1 — the same day it was due to be paid. (Didn’t Congress pass a law saying credit card companies couldn’t do such things?)
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Home Sales Down In September But Median Price Flattens
Home sales in the Tucson market fell 2 percent in September compared with the same month last year, while the median price was down about 9.5 percent, according to the most recent report from the Tucson Association of Realtors Multiple Listing Service.
In the third quarter compared with the first quarter, sales were up 39.5, the median price was down 1.7 percent and active listings were down 20 percent.
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Home prices in the Baltimore metro area were among the weakest in the nation this summer, but there are some hopeful signs for frustrated sellers, according to a new report by a real estate data firm.
Clear Capital draws its data from recorders’ and assessors’ offices, calculating price by comparing repeat sales of the same homes over the years. Its most recent period is four months rather than the typical three, Marshall said, because the company wants to balance out the desire to include the most up-to-date numbers with the fact that the newest data is often incomplete.
The metro area’s healthiest spot seems to be the 20723 ZIP code in Laurel, where prices fell less than 1 percent vs. a year ago. The report credits the community’s location between Baltimore and Washington.
Science Foundation Arizona has secured a $12.1 million loan from one of its donors to cover bills that Arizona so far hasn’t paid.
In 2007, the Legislature committed $100 million over four years to the foundation, through the 21st Century Fund, on the condition that the foundation match the public dollars with private donations.
But the Legislature, led by Rep. Sam Crump, R-Anthem, gutted the foundation’s funding this year and swept the money into the state’s general fund to narrow the state’s budget gap, which exceeded $1 billion.
This week, the Arizona Supreme Court agreed to hear the foundation’s argument on why the state’s high court should take jurisdiction over the funding battle.
The group already has spent about $6 million of that donation on grant awards. The loan amount of up to $12.1 million will be repaid by money collected from the court judgment as well as future budget allocations, said Margaret Mullen, the foundation’s chief operating officer.
TRE Daily’s team of agents are experienced, and we are having no issues finding and serving new clients. It must be the way that we market ourselves and how we are positioned in this industry. You may be looking to purchase a home through a foreclosure or a short sale, but just remember that you want to find a Realtor who is knowledgeable and skilled at that matter. We are. This year of 2009, those are the kinds of deals we’ve been handling by the majority. Give us a call at 1 (800) 536-7480.
Arizona Home Sales Prices Down 20%
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