Art Quilts 30: Palette Cleanser
2025-11-08 - 2026-01-10 | Vision Gallery, 10 E Chicago St, Chandler, AZ, 85225, United States
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Terre des Hommes
(published in English as Wind, Sand and Stars)
With the constant onslaught of news media around us, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and disconnected from the world around us. As a respite from these intense narratives, exploring minimalism through art offers a refreshing Palette Cleanser, inviting us to reflect on simplicity in a chaotic world.
Simplicity reveals a profound beauty, as it strips away extraneous details to reveal clarity in your artistic thought, design and execution. Maybe your best work is known for its clean lines or its geometric shapes. Do you use a limited or monotoned color palette? Does negative space play a big role in your art? Is your quilt stitching stripped down to the essential shapes needed to highlight and emphasize your design? Perhaps you’re pushing the craft forward by making modern interpretations of traditional quilt blocks or by creating three-dimensional sculptures from quilts that result in spare and elegant forms.
However you use minimalism in your art quilts, we want to see your submissions for the 30th Annual Art Quilt exhibition. Practicing the art of reduction requires a deep understanding of your subject, excellent technical mastery and the ability to identify the most crucial elements of the quilting craft to create dynamic emotional effects and leave a lasting impression in your viewers. Palette Cleanser celebrates the beauty of minimalism and encourages simplicity, clarity, and timelessness to create powerful, thought-provoking pieces.
About the Juror
Susan Allred manipulates textiles and other fibers to explore the ways they affect and reflect our daily lives. Her work expresses her thoughts and feelings about society’s expectations for women, their bodies and their work. Her artistic process, which is lengthy and repetitive, becomes a meditation on “women’s work” — the painstaking labor, both mental and physical — that has historically been dismissed as merely decorative or utilitarian instead of as the product of a fertile, creative minds. By transforming quilts into non-functional sculptural works that invite viewers to think about concepts that may be controversial, Allred questions the notion that crafts cannot be used to create fine art while also commenting on the invisibility of women’s labor.
Allred’s work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions, most recently in a two-person show at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum. She was an artist member at Eye Lounge contemporary art space and served as co-president for two years. Allred lives and works in Tempe, Arizona.

Opening Reception
Saturday, November 8, 4-6pm
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Rice is Mẹ: Anh-Thuy Nguyen
2025-11-15 - 2026-02-07 | The Gallery at CCA, 250 North Arizona Avenue, Chandler, AZ, 85225, United States
Rice. This humble, white grain is an essential component to most Asian cuisines. It also holds a plethora of meanings and symbolisms in various Asian cultures. For artist, Anh-Thuy Nguyen, this ubiquitous food staple has become an obsession. In her latest body of work, Nguyen utilizes rice as a metaphor for herself as she grapples with the reality that her culture and wisdom are being lost from generation to generation. Like grains for rice running through her hands, Nguyen felt her culture was lost from her mouth to her daughter’s ears. Throughout this exhibition, Nguyen is reconciling her feelings of loss, resilience and hope for the future.
Opening Reception
Friday, November 14, 6pm-8pm
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Land Valuation: Luke Watson
2026-01-24 - 2026-03-21 | Vision Gallery, 10 E Chicago St, Chandler, AZ, 85225, United States
From the luscious panoramic landscapes of the Hudson River School to Maynard Dixon’s seemingly endless cloud filled skies set behind painted mesas to Grant Wood’s overly saturated and stylized pastoral scenes of the Midwest, American painters have long shaped a romantic vision of the land. These images helped construct a narrative of the United States as expansive, untouched, and waiting to be explored. This myth has further been perpetuated by tourism imagery, National Park postcards, and idealized and sometimes altered travel photography. Yet the land has always borne evidence of habitation, use, and intervention. This tension between the idealized landscape and the lived landscape raises ongoing questions about perception versus reality, and what it means to love, occupy, or lay claim to the land.
For Land Valuation, Phoenix-based artist, Luke Watson, reframes the conversation around the American landscape by centering the human experience. Within the exhibition, Watson creates macro and micro encounters with nature from atv tire tracks set in front of looming mesas to a birdwatcher standing in a parking lot to an intimate rendering of an endangered bird. By foregrounding ordinary interactions with the outdoors, Watson challenges the expectation that nature must appear untouched to be meaningful. His work invites viewers to reconsider how land is valued—as scenery, resource, recreation site, habitat, or cultural inheritance. Rather than presenting answers, Watson opens space for reflection: Who gets to define what nature is? What constitutes a “nature lover”? And how do our everyday choices, movements, and pleasures shape the landscapes we claim to admire? These questions form a more contemporary discussion around our value system around land and expose inherent biases we all have around the use of nature.
Opening Reception
Friday, January 23, 2026 6-8 pm
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Art Social: Punch Rug Coasters
2026-01-31 10:00 - 13:00 (America/Phoenix) | Vision Gallery, 10 E Chicago St, Chandler, AZ, 85225, United States
Have fun and make art in this relaxed class for adults!
Create a set of vibrant yarn coasters with the satisfying process of punch needle. Learn the basics of the punch needle process to inspire a unique addition to your home or design a handmade gift for someone else. You can create any design you want from mushrooms and fruits to customized cats and monograms. The hardest choice will be what to make during class! Led by Megan Hennessy.
This casual 3-hour class doesn’t require any prior knowledge or skill, and all materials are included in the $35 class fee. This class is for adults 18 and older.
REGISTER NOW

Make and Take: Valentines
2026-02-07 11:00 - 13:00 | Vision Gallery, 10 E Chicago St, Chandler, AZ, 85225, United States
Stop by Vision Gallery to design a heartfelt Valentine’s Day card! Utilize a variety of materials provided, including colorful paper, markers, stickers, and more, to craft a personalized card that expresses your affection.
This is a free, self-led activity for all ages. Children are welcome to participate with assistance from an adult. Registering for a time slot helps us plan, but drop-ins are welcome!
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(Be)Longing
2026-02-14 - 2026-04-18 | Chandler Center for the Arts, 250 N. Arizona Ave., Chandler, AZ, 85225
Moving to a new country can be a daunting experience, especially as an adult. You leave behind familiar language, culture, and customs, and face the challenge of adapting to a new way of life. Yet, alongside the pressure to assimilate is the desire to preserve your identity and traditions. How do you find balance and create your own path. For the artists featured in (Be) Longing, they attempt to reconcile their two identities through art.
This exhibition features four Japanese-born artists who have immigrated to the United States and now call Arizona home. Through diverse materials from resin to clay to paint, they explore the complexities of cultural identity, nostalgia, and belonging. Their works are contemporary, yet deeply rooted in Japanese aesthetics, drawing inspiration from folklore, religious rituals, Zen philosophy, and historical art forms like Fusuma-e and Mingei craft.
Each piece offers a personal narrative: a reflection on the tension between longing for home and finding one’s place in a new land. Together, they present a multifaceted view of the Japanese immigrant experience—one that is as much about resilience and transformation as it is about memory and tradition.
Featuring artwork by: Kazuma Sambe, Kaori Takamura, Hirotsune Tashima, and Yuko Yabuki
Opening Reception
Saturday, February 21, 2026 5-7pm
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Make and Take: St. Patrick's Day Shamrock Pin
2026-03-14 11:00 - 13:00 | Vision Gallery, 10 E Chicago St, Chandler, AZ, 85225, United States
Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day at Vision Gallery by making your own lucky shamrock pin! Use felt, sequins, and ribbon to craft a sparkling accessory that’s perfect to wear for the holiday and avoid getting pinched.
This is a free, self-led activity for all ages. Children are welcome to participate with assistance from an adult. Registering for a time slot helps us plan, but drop-ins are welcome!
REGISTER

Is There Wi-Fi in Heaven? Grieving in the Digital Age
2026-03-28 - 2026-06-06 | Vision Gallery, 10 E Chicago St, Chandler, AZ, 85225, United States
Have you ever sent a text message you knew would always go unanswered? Or visited a dead loved one’s social media profile just to reflect on them? You’re not alone. Is there Wi-Fi in Heaven: Grieving in the Digital Age explores how technology reshapes the ways we mourn and maintain bonds with the dead. As social media and digital tools transform our interactions with the living, they also create new tools for how we grieve. Through works that consider online rituals, digital memorials, and the management of “digital remains,” this exhibition reflects on emerging practices of public mourning, continuing bonds, and even pseudo-spiritual attempts to connect across the divide. In the networked age, grief too, is increasingly mediated through screens, raising questions about permanence, ritual, and what it means to visit the dead when physical presence is no longer required.
Opening Reception
Friday, March 27, 6-8 pm

CUSD Annual Showcase
2026-04-22 - 2026-05-12 | Chandler Center for the Arts, 250 N. Arizona Ave., Chandler, AZ, 85225
Chandler Unified School District’s most gifted artists put their work on display for the community to experience in this annual showcase. The burgeoning artists from Basha, Hamilton, Perry, Arizona College Prep (ACP), Casteel, and Chandler high schools display their talents and viewpoints through ceramics, paintings, drawings, sculptures, jewelry, and photographs. With nearly 100 works on display, there is always something for everyone in this exhibition.
