Artist Reception December 1 6pm

Pela Contemporary Art and The Walter Art Gallery present Annie Lopez: True Blue, a new exhibit of work from the renowned local artist. The show features Lopez’s newest hand-sewn cyanotype dresses and the written stories that accompany them. A new series of smaller, framed dresses will also be on display.

"I use my art to deal with my issues and to say what I have to say,” Lopez says. “I make dresses because, as a girl, that was how I was taught to express myself. I felt if I wore these dresses, I wouldn’t have to deal with the subject matter because I wouldn’t see it.” The garments are made from vintage dress patterns, cut and sewn from Lopez’s cyanotype prints, a nineteenth-century printmaking technique that creates vivid blue images using sunlight. Family photographs, childhood report cards, love letters, and medical records are printed onto paper, fabric, or tamale wrappers. They depict memories of growing up in Phoenix in the Sixties and Seventies; racial and cultural issues; the loss of her father to Alzheimer’s disease. Lopez, a fourth-generation Arizonan, has been instrumental in the downtown art scene for decades. She was an early member of MARS Artspace and cofounded the Grand Avenue gallery Deus Ex Machina.