Ed Mell: In the Studio

Ed Mell: In the Studio is running at the Phoenix Art Museum through April 11, 2027. It's a look inside the studio of Ed Mell, a Phoenix-born painter and sculptor who spent more than 50 years at the center of the city's arts community. The exhibition gathers oil studies, sketches, and works on paper he made between 1974 and 2023, curated by the museum's Selig Family Chief Curator Olga Viso.

If you've come across Mell's work before, you'll recognize the hallmarks: vibrant color and angular compositions of monumental cloud formations, geologic strata, and the desert life of the Colorado Plateau and the Sonoran Desert. He was known for those big, bold landscapes, and this show focuses on the smaller-scale works he rarely sold or exhibited—the studies and sketches that sat in his studio rather than on a gallery wall. Viso has hung them alongside archival materials, so you get to see the process behind the finished paintings.

There's a local connection here that goes beyond him being born in Phoenix. Mell worked out of a studio in the Coronado neighborhood, just a few blocks from the museum itself. He studied at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles and worked as an art director in New York before returning home in 1973, and by 1978 he'd devoted himself to landscape painting. His reach extended well beyond the valley: a 2012 US postage stamp featured his painting of Cathedral Rock near Sedona, and he contributed to rocker Nils Lofgren's 2023 album Mountains. He died of cancer in February 2024 at eighty-one, leaving behind a studio full of these smaller works.

The exhibition is in the Woodyard Gallery, in the Ballinger Wing of the Phoenix Art Museum at 1625 N Central Ave. It opened September 26 and runs through April 11, 2027, so you've got plenty of time to catch it. Admission is $23, and the show is included in that general ticket.