{I} was in Phoenix in December for a board meeting. I’d never been there. In Ye Olde Vermont, where I live, we rarely see the sun after Halloween. We get our treats earlier in gorgeous fall color for a couple of weeks but our tricks not too long afterward in sullen, gray skies, cold, snow, ice, and mud lasting, alas, through March. The weather in Phoenix was sunny, warm, and dry, the desert a moonscape, and the sprawl impressive. Mesas are aloof, totemic, and complete. Those shapes must enter the mind through the eyes and promote an acceptance of fate. I love seeing cactuses. They look like Cubist trees.

Two weeks ago I wrote about Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home, studio, and think tank near Phoenix. I learned about it years ago, strange to say, not because of Wright but because of Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, who lived there after she sensationally defected and soon married William Wesley Peters, Wright’s protégé and acolyte. Wright’s widow, Olgivanna, had introduced the two, believing — and this is the weirdest thing in Wright Land — that Svetlana was the reincarnation of her own daughter, also named Svetlana, who’d died in a car crash years before and who’d also been married to Peters.

Stalin’s Svetlana, the second Mrs. Peters, loved Arizona until she hated it and Olgivanna and Peters. Reading about this as a precocious teenager in the early ’70s, and knowing Barry Goldwater was from Arizona, I filed the Grand Canyon State — and Taliesin West — in my list of places to visit. It took 50 years to get there.

Of course, I went to Scottsdale to visit Wright’s compound and then to Phoenix’s big civic art museum.

The Phoenix Art Museum (PAM) is a sprawling, lovely campus with a nice but spotty collection. The museum is new, or at least newer than I, having opened in 1959. America being what it is, art museums west of the Mississippi got a very late start, long after the best pickings from the Old Masters to the Pop era were plucked.

Phoenix itself is a major city with enormous wealth, but it’s a new city. Its rich people mostly come from someplace else. If they’re inclined to leave money to art museums, the ones in that “someplace else” tend to get it. Phoenix’s weather, at least while I was there and, I suspect, during a big chunk of the year, is perfect. Getting people through the doors is a challenge.

I especially wanted to see Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory, the first retrospective of an artist I’ve liked and followed from my early days as an art history graduate student. Mesa-Bains (b. 1943) is an American artist of Mexican ancestry — a Chicana — whose art starts with the old Mexican Roman Catholic tradition of home altars, shrines to the dead, or ofrendas, and roadside rest stops that incorporate altars.

These aren’t things you order online or buy at the mall. They’re bespoke. In the case of home altars and ofrendas, they’re made at home using family photos, souvenirs from travel, religious tchotchkes, paper flowers, shells, dishes, candles, personal relics, and, since the potential repertoire is nearly endless, “whatever.” They usually honor ancestors. Altars along the road evolve as travelers add objects. Mesa-Bains starts with these genres to tell stories of her life and examine the Mexican-immigrant experience in America. The exhibition has about 60 objects.

An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio from 1984 (revised in 1991) is there. I saw it in the early ’90s and think it’s the work that established her as an extraordinary artist. Mesa-Bains made it for an exhibition at the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, but the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington smartly bought it.

Del Rio (1904–1983), who had just died when Mesa-Bains made the work, was from Mexico City and became famous to Americans in Hollywood movies. Her bicultural career fascinated Mesa-Bains, whose own life features tensions between her Mexican heritage — her father was a farm worker and here illegally — and her own American upbringing, education, and professional life.

Americans knew Del Rio as a star who specialized in exotic, ethnic roles from the ’20s into the early ’40s. She danced with Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio in 1933 and was later part of Orson Welles’s circle. Her Hollywood career waning in the early ’40s, Del Rio returned to her native Mexico, where she was a star in the golden age of Mexican cinema.

Mesa-Bain’s Ofrenda is 96 x 72 x 48, so it’s big. It starts with sumptuous pink drapery, which gives it both a ceremonial feel and the look of an Old Master portrait by Van Dyck. It looks like an altar but also a woman’s vanity. It’s framed by movie stills from Del Rio’s career, one side from her Hollywood days, the other from her time as a silent screen actress in Mexico and as a star of Mexican films in the ’50s and ’60s.

It’s feminine and bubbly, with a fan painted with a knock-off of a Watteau painting, costume jewelry, lace, and dried flowers.

The ofrenda format is central to Mesa-Bains as an architectural mediator between the living and the dead and a personal place of remembrance. She selected Del Rio because the movie star was one of the few Mexican icons Americans of Mexican heritage knew. Mesa-Bains tells people she came of age at a time when Mexican culture was in the shadows among Chicanos. Younger Chicanos were pressured to assimilate. She never learned Spanish and hadn’t visited Mexico until she was an adult. This, of course, is no different from the experience of Italian Americans and many others.

What Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio doesn’t have are references to indigenous Mexican Roman Catholic traditions and iconography. Queen of the Waters, Mother of the Land of the Dead, from 1992, recreates one and suggests an act of excavation. Framed icons of Mary, Jesus’s mother, flank a grotto altar at the base of which are shells, little clay figurines that are vaguely Mesoamerican, dried flowers and pomegranates, a tiny model skeleton, and Mass cards.

In her Venus Envy series of installations, Mesa-Bains looks at gendered spaces like convents or harems. It’s four parts, with all four included in the exhibition, looking at women as girls, brides, virgins, or objects of lust. Chapter I, for instance, considers the subject of a girl’s First Communion. In Chapter II, owned by the Williams College Museum of Art, she references the library and music and poetry salon of the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695). These are built environments imagining the nun’s library. The objects are big — Chapter I, for instance, is 20 feet wide, counting its sweeping white curtain.

Mesa-Bains calls Sor Juana “a fierce woman” who evokes the strong women she’s known in her own lifetime. She includes in the installation four small, framed medallion photographs of her grandmother’s eyes to suggest the power of today’s women to channel women from the distant past. Mesa-Bains sees Sor Juana’s story as creating a sense of community among Chicana women but also investing the individual with pride and confidence.

It’s a very good exhibition, organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Firm Archive, and a deserved tribute to Mesa-Bains, a pioneer in the Chicano cultural revival. She’s been making art since the 1970s, and also working as a teacher in San Francisco, but showing the art of Chicano artists was the province of art spaces, not museums. Her work loses some of its improvised feel in the more formal spaces of a museum, but it’s good to see her get the recognition of a retrospective with a grand tour and a fine catalogue. The interpretation in the galleries has too much jargon on colonialism and the patriarchy. I ignored it more often than not.

Like most art museums west of, say, Kansas City, PAM’s permanent collection is idiosyncratic. The place initially took a stab at aspiring to a New England museum. They’ve got a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart, some 19th-century American marble sculptures, and some Hudson River School pictures. Among them is a Bradford iceberg painting, which reminds visitors during the hot Phoenix summer that the weather could be worse. Eastman Johnson’s lovely Portrait of Clara Hall (The Tea Party), from 1873, is there.

At some point, the museum’s masters realized a New England museum it ain’t, and oughtn’t be. They’re in the Wild West. Julius Stewart’s Spring Flowers (in the Conservatory), from 1890, is a dazzler. It’s an eight-footer, a scene of proper Victorian young women with a massive arrangement of peonies on the table. It’s chaste but luscious and arch. It belongs over the bar in Gunsmoke. This isn’t meant to be insulting. I loved it.

The museum owns a group of Thorne Rooms, those precious miniature rooms made by Narcissa Niblack Thorne in the early 1930s. Gérôme’s Pollice Verso from 1872 is there. It’s his big painting of gladiators and ancient Rome’s version of the Shootout at the OK Corral, coincidentally in Tombstone, Ariz.

In the realm of surprises, there’s Gerald Brockhurst’s splendid portrait of Clare Boothe Luce from 1940. She and her husband, Henry Luce, had a home at the luxe Arizona Biltmore. Frank Lloyd Wright, coincidentally, consulted on its design in 1928, which brought him to Arizona for the first time. Its Hollywood glamour — Clark Gable and Carole Lombard, among others, cavorted there — attracted Mrs. Luce, who was the ultimate piece of work.

And one of Frida Kahlo’s few first-rate paintings, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, from 1939, is at the museum. I wrote about this picture when I reviewed an exhibition on Kahlo and autobiography in 2021. Hale was a starlet and part of Clare Luce’s circle who threw herself from the top of Hampshire House, the Central Park South apartment building, after her fiancé, FDR adviser Harry Hopkins, dumped her. Luce commissioned Kahlo to paint a portrait of Hale to present to Hale’s mother. What she got was a slow-motion suicide leap. Luce, furious, kept it and gave it to PAM in 1960.

Now, the museum’s acquiring work by living Native American, women, gay, and black artists, which makes sense. PAM’s an encyclopedic collection with decent Latin American and Asian art, too.

PAM is on its third director since 2015, which isn’t ideal. Jim Ballinger, a dead ringer for John Wayne, retired in 2014 after nearly 35 years as director. Jim led two capital campaigns and built two additions, stewarded visitors, volunteers, and donors, and vastly expanded the collection. I liked him a lot when we were both museum directors. Still, that’s a long reign during which he essentially created the modern museum. The board hired Havana-born Amada Cruz, who’d directed an artist residency program in San Antonio and the very good art museum at Bard College.

To her credit, it’s tricky to follow a director like Jim whose epoch was so long.

Expectations and habits at the staff and volunteer level might or might not fossilize but they do tend to settle. Cruz cured a deficit habit — never fun — and tilted the exhibitions program toward Hispanic visitors and contemporary art. She also feuded with longtime docents. “She had spies everywhere,” one ex-docent told me. Lots of volunteers quit, some noisily, all seething. Most were donors. Cruz left one headachy place for another, which is the Seattle Art Museum.

Jim Rodgers followed, having been director of the Wolfsonian in Miami, and left after a year. Jeremy Mikolajczak is the new director. He came from the Tucson Museum of Art. He seems energetic and cheery though an ideologue.

I hate agenda directors and curators. Among other defects, they’re narrowly focused on their personal tastes and on sending a message. They’re less focused on quality and on the power of a work of art to commune with different people in different ways. His first major purchase — Cannupa Hanska Luger’s Incendiary — “explores the adaptability and versatility,” a press release reads, “of the nomadic structure as a metaphor for the resilience of Indigenous peoples in the face of settler-colonial violence.” Yawn. I looked at the painting, which is big and handsome, and didn’t see anything about “settler-colonial violence.”

Next month, PAM is opening Barbie: A Cultural Icon. Organized by Mattel, it’ll show 250 dolls from 60 years and examine Barbie’s origin story and look as tastes changed. And, yes, there’s a visitor photo op with a Barbie pink Corvette.

Barbie: A Cultural Icon could be a great American Studies–type exhibition. It’ll attract visitors. Who’s writing the labels, who’s picking the objects, and who’s doing the catalogue? PAM has a first-rate fashion collection, and fashion is art, but I wonder how involved Mattel is. PAM’s an educational institution, not a corporate flack.

I watched the new Barbie movie on a plane last month. The needle got stuck in the goofy groove very fast. Still, as a creature of the ’50s and ’60s, I’d like to see the exhibition.