First Friday
August 1, 2025 | 5-8 pm
TICKETS: Voluntary Donations, begins at 5pm
Separate tickets are required to view special exhibition The World of Anna Sui at an additional cost. Click HERE to purchase special exhibition tickets.
Laugh out loud during August First Friday at PhxArt. Inspired by our newest photography exhibition, Funny Business: Photography and Humor, enjoy a lively evening of art, comedy, and community.
Programming includes:
· A comedy show with Bridge Improv Comedy // 5:30-6:30pm
Celebrate the art of improv with this fast-paced show inspired by audience suggestions and blending humor with a touch of artistic flair.
· Art-side Chat: Liz Cohen and Steffi Faircloth // 6:30-7:30pm
Hear from artists Liz Cohen (Professor, School of Art, ASU) and Steffi Faircloth (BFA Photography 2019, ASU) in the galleries, as they discuss how their works featured in Funny Business playfully and irreverently combine photography with elements of humor and performance to address the topic of identity.
· Take-home caricature portraits
· Docent Led Tours (5:30 pm + 6:30 pm)
· Music by DJ JME-LEE
· In-gallery sketching with Aileen Martinez
· Drinks by ARTenders
Speaker Bios:
Steffi Faircloth (b.1997) is a Mexican-American interdisciplinary artist who received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in photography at Arizona State University in 2019. Faircloth’s work spans from photography, video, text, to sculpture and explores her experience growing up in the borderlands, focusing on aspects of community and using mundaneness and humor to scrutinize stereotypes. Faircloth has exhibited work nationally, including at the Tucson Museum of Art, Chicano Park Museum, The Latinx Project at NYU, and Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Steffi Faircloth currently lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona.
Liz Cohen (b.1973) Liz Cohen is an artist whose decades-long career focuses largely on the intersections of immigration, industry, labor, and women’s representation in popular media. Cohen is perhaps best known for her BODYWORK project, in which she simultaneously transformed a dilapidated East German Trabant into an American El Camino lowrider while inhabiting a new identity as a car customizer and bikini model. Through this immersive series, Cohen produced a body of work that challenges American cultural norms regarding the eroticization of the automobile industry and the complicated role of women’s bodies in that space. The artist’s newest investigation was recently the subject of the solo exhibition, Liz Cohen: Café Pan-Soviético Americano, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit (MI). In early 2021, Cohen was the subject of the survey retrospective, Body/Magic, at the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe (AZ). Recent group exhibitions include Flow States – LA TRIENAL 2024 at El Museo del Barrio (NY), accompanied by a catalog. Cohen's work was recently featured in Xican—a.o.x. Body, a traveling exhibition that was on view at the Perez Art Museum Miami (FL), also with an accompanying catalog. Other recent group exhibitions include transfeminisms Chapter V: Hidden Labours at the Mimosa House in London (UK) in 2024; Desert Rider at the Phoenix Art Museum (AZ) in 2022; and the landmark exhibition With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art Since 1932 at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills (MI) in 2021, which also included an accompanying catalog. Cohen is a Professor at the School of Art at Arizona State University, Tempe, where she has taught since 2017. In 2020, Cohen received a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. Other awards include the Fountainhead Residency (2024), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award (2019), the Creative Capital Foundation Project Grant (2005), and a MacDowell Colony Grant (2001).
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First Fridays are made possible through the generosity of APS and Lexus with additional support by Arizona Community Foundation.