In a nondescript outdoor mall at the corner of Mill and Southern, there's a shop window filled with a giant painting of blue mountains.
“So this artist is JJ Horner. So he actually lost his brother before he did this installation, and you can see the damage here,” Rob Moore said.
That's Rob Moore. He's pointing to a spot behind the mountains in the lower left hand corner of the canvas, where there's a gaping hole.
“And that actually reflects the trauma of losing his brother. If you look through the hole, you might catch a glimpse of something in the background,” Moore said.
“All right, so I'm looking closer to — oh my god, OK. Wow,” I said.
Through the hole in the canvas way toward the back of the empty room behind the painting, a hooded figure sits slumped on the floor, staring at the wall. The figure isn't real. It's a sculpture meant to represent JJ Horner, the artist who painted the mountains. According to Rob, this entire installation is a reflection on the grief that JJ Horner felt after the loss of his brother.
This piece is just one of many on display here at Danelle Plaza, a series of empty retail stores that Rob has helped transform into a kind of alternative art gallery.
Danelle Plaza was built in the early 1960s. For decades, the shop windows were filled with things like vacuum cleaners, shoes and televisions. They were just regular stores. But that doesn't mean Danelle was a typical shopping center.
For one thing, it didn't have a big anchor business, like a grocery store. And on top of that, unlike most shopping centers where businesses rent space from the owner of the full plaza, each store at Danelle was owned individually, which meant that the range of offerings at Danelle Plaza was pretty eclectic.
“At one point, it had a skate park on site; it's had live music since its inception in the 1960s. It hosted "Star System" and "Merlins" that were one of the valley's first punk and new wave venues in the late-70s and early-80s,” Moore said.
For Rob, it's the music scene in particular that made him want to get involved in preserving Danelle's unique culture.
Across the plaza from the window with the blue mountains is a rock club called Yucca Tap Room. Back in 2016, when many of the traditional retail businesses at Dannell had faded away, Rob came to a show at Yucca, and he noticed that there was a lot of action at Danelle that happened outside in the parking lot.
“Seeing different bands talk between sets and, exchange notes and explore ideas and I overheard some conversations, where you could tell they were, they were basically, experimenting, discussing what they were working on. And I realized what an important community space it was and I recognized, you know, in these humble spaces were really important to the creative engine of the community,” Moore said.
Rob was on the Municipal Arts Commission at the time and he decided he wanted to do something to support Danelle's creative spirit. So, he and some fellow artistically minded Tempeans started a group called “The Danelle Project.” And for years now, they have invited artists to make large scale installations in the empty retail spaces.
In one of the smaller shops, there's a cluster of neon cacti with reflective surfaces.
“It kind of is a glimpse into a dystopian desert world, if you will, and at night it illuminates, with black lights and LEDs,” Moore said.
There's also a big empty storefront with a long wall painted black and a very small painting of Danelle in the center. Another one features huge sculptures of animal feet plunging through the ceiling.
And if you visit Danelle at night, it's just like Rob said, music thumps behind the doors of Yucca Tap Room, and in the parking lot, bands and their fans laugh and joke next to the cars. Between sets, people wander over to the far side of the plaza to check out the art.
But this version of Danelle Plaza isn't long for this world. The day I met Rob, he had just received an eviction notice.
For the last few years, the city of Tempe has been leasing him the space at Danelle for free, but now the city has a development agreement in place for the plaza. Rob says that means a lot of the art will have to be taken down and relocated.
“This was always intended to be a short term experiment. This was a temporary concept that explored the ideas of what arts and culture might look like if they were incorporating in the long term vision in the development agreement that city council approved it emphasizes art, it emphasizes live music, it emphasizes recognizing the history of the plaza and that's general guidance for what happens next within the redevelopment efforts,” Moore said. “So in that sense, we've made a lot of progress and we'll just have to see how that comes together.”
In a statement emailed to KJZZ, the city says the Danelle Plaza development team has signed a new lease with a nonprofit called the Tempe Arts & Music Coalition, which will, “support, create and expand art incubation spaces throughout the city to create a robust, self-sustaining visual and performance art economy, fed by a community that loves art for art's sake.” The statement also says, “no art is being moved.”
As of this report, the specifics of the development plan for Danelle Plaza are unknown.
Toward the end of my first visit to Danelle, Rob and I walked past a mural by Isaac Caruso. It's a painting of a woman's face, accompanied by the text of a poem. I asked Rob to read it.
“The text reads, as she grew older, her dreams never fading, she clung to her wonder and her mind for creating. People would sigh, she can't pay attention, but really her thoughts just had more dimension,” Moore said.
