Arts and Entertainment

An upcoming festival in downtown Phoenix plans to bring greater attention, and some profit, to local bands and businesses. South By South Roosevelt, abbreviated SXSR, will hold its second music festival along Roosevelt Street the weekend of March 1-3. Local businesses along the stretch from 10th Street to Third Avenue will provide the venues for the festival.

Saturday will mark the 12th year of the Melrose District’s M7 street fair, a well-known local event with festivities that offer a taste for every kind of appetite.

There needs to be a balance between embracing density in downtown Phoenix and preserving the integrity of the arts community, panelists said Tuesday at the semester’s second installment of Downtown Devil Discussions.

Protesting against potential expansion of State Route 202, a benefit concert for the No South Mountain Freeway group was held Saturday night at Lawn Gnome Publishing on Roosevelt Row.

Though the many downtown art spaces we covered last week provided the physical space for the local art scene to grow, it is truly the people who make a place worthwhile. Each of the below faces has contributed something unique and valuable to Phoenix’s art scene since the inception of Art Detour. This list encompasses gallerists, painters, photographers, performers, property owners and sculptors. While there are certainly many vital figures missing, we feel this array provides a diverse set of men and women who have affected Art Detour’s past, present and future.

FilmBar, an independent movie theater and bar on Second and Garfield streets, is expanding it’s programming to include specialty nights eight days a month and a themed film series once a month.

Taiko is an ancient Japanese art form used in religious, entertainment, and military contexts across centuries. The practice of ensemble Taiko, practiced at Fushicho Daiko, is a more recent form.

The Bergamot Institute is a nonprofit organization, and its new art program provides people of all ages with the space and art supplies needed to create artwork. The organization receives most of the supplies for the sessions as donations from The Art Resource Center located in Tempe, as well as from local artists.

For the second year in a row, Stacey Champion has taken on the task of producing "The Vagina Monologues," a set of skits that have been performed around the globe. The production is the brainchild of American playwright and activist Eve Ensler.

With the arrival of Art Detour’s 25th year comes an opportunity to take pause and look back at what came before. In that spirit, we present 25 spaces -- an overview of 25 locations that helped shape Art Detour and its monthly iteration, First Friday, into what they are today.