Phoenix’s Pools, Palms, and Eric Fischl’s Uneasy Desert Vision
Phoenix can look, from the air, like a city designed around contradiction. It is home to 1.67 million people, one survey counted 257,983 swimming pools, and its growth has depended on a vast infrastructure of air-conditioning and water drawn from the Colorado, Verde, and Salt Rivers. The result is a place that feels at once expansive and precarious, sunstruck and resource-hungry.
Over the course of 2025, the writer made four trips to Phoenix, each beginning with the same family ritual: a ride from the airport to a mother’s house, with yacht rock on the stereo. The city’s streets are lined with palms that first appeared in the 1870s and multiplied in the 1920s and ’30s, when their exotic silhouette became part of Phoenix’s visual identity. They are not native to the Sonoran Desert, and they offer little shade, but they remain one of the city’s most recognizable features — proof that in Phoenix, appearance often carries more weight than utility.
That tension extends to the city’s art life. On one visit, the writer attended a Phoenix College art talk with Eric Fischl, the American artist whose work has long turned suburban leisure into something uneasy and psychologically charged. Fischl’s 2016 painting “Daddy’s Gone, Girl” is a case in point: a woman in black lowers her legs into a glittering pool, a drink sits nearby, and a black dog paddles in the water. The scene is polished, almost seductive, yet it carries a faint sense of social and emotional strain.
“Daddy’s Gone, Girl” is included in “Eric Fischl: Stories Told,” the survey at Phoenix Art Museum, which opened in November and continues into June. The museum, founded in 1959, later expanded with a wing designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the architects behind the American Folk Art Museum. That building history matters in Phoenix, where architecture often has to negotiate between climate, image, and ambition.
The city has long invited this kind of double reading. It is a place of growth and glamour, but also of water anxiety, engineered comfort, and landscapes that ask to be admired even as they reveal their cost. Fischl’s work, with its mix of seduction and disquiet, seems to understand that balance instinctively. In Phoenix, the surface is never just a surface.
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