In the late 1950s and early 1960s Paul Coze produced arguably the first public civic art in Phoenix, and placed work in no fewer than nine major well-populated spots. This doesn't count other important Coze murals in Prescott Arizona, major old-school educational murals at Mesa Verde National Park, and other work.

If any single artist was responsible for the look and feel of Phoenix in the late 1960s, it was Paul Coze.

 

1956 Phoenix Bird, Town and Country Mall

 

 

It's a 17-foot bronze and stained-glass Phoenix bird, in front of Town and Country Mall on Camelback. For awhile it was the chosen mascot of the Hard Rock Cafe down the street before it went dark, now returned and modified and shortened and repainted and kind of mangled. It was mangled and modified during Coze's life and it made him pretty angry.

Originally it sat on a base, a hollow column maybe eight feet tall that looked like a volcanic cactus stem, and real flames shot out of it. It's still impressive if you bother to get out of your car and take a closer look, but keep in mind. It's been de-based.

 

 

 

1960 St. Thomas the Apostle Church

There were murals and a set of 14 brilliantly colored Stations of the Cross canvases at this church, on 24th Street a little south of Camelback. The architects were Weaver and Drover, the designer Herman Jacobi. Some parishioners and church figures are recognizable figures in the work.

These lasted a couple of decades until Charles Keating came along, if you remember that name. Keating left a big fat architectural footprint on Phoenix, destroying the Jokake Inn for instance to build his disagreeable Phoenician resort. Keating had arranged for his daughter's wedding at St. Thomas the Apostle but the decor wasn't to his taste. In an act that wouldn't even occur to most of us, he had the colors of the Stations of the Cross muted, painting them with overglaze. They've since been restored by the professional art conservator (and former Coze apprentice) Anddrew Alden in 1994.

 

1962 Sky Harbor Terminal 2

 

Coze's best-known and most often-seen-work is here, the spectacular 1962 three-panel mixed-media mural. This Terminal 2 is slated to be pushed over, but the curator at the airport (yes, there's a well-respected curator at the Phoenix airport, her name is Lennée Eller, that's part of the good news) says there's a real committment to move and save the piece.

They just don't know quite how, since it's made up of 52 different media, including dirt from Native reservations. How a professional conservator can clean dirt is part of another story, for the March 2008 issue of Desert Living.

(click for a larger image)

This was the first real piece of public art in Phoenix, chosen from three entries by public vote. One of the other three was from local artist Jay Datus, and if Datus wasn't exactly Paul Coze's rival, their careers were parallel. Datus actually spilled coffee on part of this mural.

In the original configuration of the building the mural was directly above the exit doors, and unavoidable when you left the building.

 

1963 Phoenix City Council Chambers

 

More good news. The image above, the mixed-media wall installation originally placed in Council Chambers in 1963, was put in storage and re-installed in a local semi-public place, in good care. There's a thorough look at this piece here.

Once the visual shock and confusion has worn off, it's brilliant.

 

1965 Veterans Memorial Coliseum

 

 

Another well-placed set of murals in another sort-of futuristic civic landmark of the time, the Coliseum. It was built in 1964. Coze's work comes up to 4000 square feet, according to his own list of commissions. Most of that work is still in place.

 

1971 Phoenix Indian Hospital

 

 

For this new-then hospital at 4212 North 16th Street, in 1971, Coze was commissioned with two pieces: outside, a 29-foot reflecting-pool fountain with four sculptures at each point of the compass, and inside a first-floor lobby area, a 25-foot back-lit translucent plastic screen showing a cornfield during a rain. Evidently this was a water feature with real 'rain' and tank enclosed in brick. The above photo is poor, I know, but it's the best we have right now.

Both of these integrated Native American symbolism and imagery from multiple tribes.

They were removed after only one year for reasons that aren't clear.... One source talks about "concerns by some about a symbol possibly creating bad luck." Wes Sylvester suggests that there was a problem with the materials, which is strange, because other sources have him very careful with the durability of his materials and glues. Another source suggests there was vandalism, which was hurtful to Coze. In any case, it seems to be gone.

 

1971 Arizona Blue Cross Blue Shield Building

 

The scale and the elongated medicine men figures are deceptive. Those figures are 37 feet tall, three stories, with a length of 120 feet. The building stood at 321 Indian School, a prominent place in the city, standing opposite from the Indian Central Valley National Bank Branch.

Remarkable how the entire building displays this mural, more or less like a billboard. It was designed by Lescher and Mahoney, built in 1970, demolished in 1995, and the original design included an 18-foot-wide 90-foot-long reflecting pool with a fountain, and copper grillwork around the entry representing Arizona industries.

Of course Coze had a significant background as a Native American anthropologist, and these three figures are authentic: they come from the murals at the Kuaua Kiva ruins in New Mexico ("considered the finest example of pre-contact mural art in North America"), the Awatovi Hopi murals, and the relatively obscure Painted Cave on Navaho land in northeastern Arizona. They're all medicine men from the 11th through the 14th Century.

The medium was polychrome granular chipped marble. This photo is courtesy Wes Sylvester, a former student and friend of Coze's in his last few years. And a friend of mine.

Judging from the remains, a critic of Coze's Phoenix public art (say, of the Arizona Republic) could and would quickly complain that they're not exactly beautiful by today's standards, which is a matter of taste.

Don't trust these photographs. To get them, you have to see them in person.

And it goes beyond taste. If honest the critic would also to forced to admit they're powerful, complicated, they repay attention, and if you want to talk about 'cultural authenticity', I'd challenge you to name anybody else with Coze's anthropological credentials, anybody else with such a command of specific native imagery, or anybody else who had worked out how to present it on large scale.

In a city starving (whether it knows it or not) for a sense of identity, the funny thing is that this problem was already solved in 1963. Phoenix was given a sophisticated and well-developed set of public icons and civic imagery. Coze's work is still valuable and viable as a civic asset -- if anything, more so, with the passage of time and the interest in the city's mid-Century Zeitgeist he was part of. This city has forgotten where it came from twice. The funny thing about Paul Coze is that nobody in Phoenix knows his name.