What it is
The Heard is the museum of Native American art that the rest of the country compares its own to. It occupies a Spanish Colonial compound on Central Avenue in midtown Phoenix, with twelve galleries around a pair of courtyards, an outdoor sculpture court, a café and the best museum shop in Arizona. Dwight and Maie Bartlett Heard, who had made their money in Phoenix land and newspapers, built it in 1929 to hold the pottery, baskets and textiles they had been collecting since the 1890s, and opened it to the public in December of that year, nine months after Dwight died. It is still private, still run by a nonprofit, and still, a century on, the place where the standards are set.
The collection is more than 40,000 objects, and the strength of it is the Southwest: Hopi katsina carvings, including the 437 historic dolls that Barry Goldwater gave, Navajo and Zuni silver, Pueblo pottery from Maria Martinez forward, Navajo and Pueblo weaving, O’odham and Apache basketry. Alongside the historic material the museum has, since the 1980s, made a point of showing living Native artists in rotating exhibitions, so that the katsina gallery and a show of contemporary painting or video sit a courtyard apart.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale sells this art and does not, anywhere, explain it. Old Town’s Main Street and Marshall Way have a dozen galleries and trading posts of Native jewelry, pottery and weaving, some of them excellent and some of them not, and our guide to buying Native American art is a long attempt to help you tell which is which. The Heard does the same job in an hour, with the originals in the case in front of you. Nothing in Scottsdale, including the Western Spirit museum, which is about the cowboy side of the story, covers the ground.
The practical version
Twenty-two minutes from Old Town, down Central Avenue four blocks north of McDowell, with free parking on site and the Encanto/Central light-rail stop at the curb. Open daily 10 to 4 from September through May; in summer it closes Mondays. Buy the ticket online for a small discount. Free guided tours run four times a day and are worth joining. Allow two hours, three with lunch at the Courtyard Café, whose posole has been written up in national food magazines and deserves it.
When to go
The Heard is an indoor museum and works in any month, which makes it the answer on a July afternoon when the Preserve is closed and the pool has lost its charm. In high season it is busiest on weekend afternoons; a weekday at opening gives you the katsina gallery alone.
Two dates on the calendar matter. The Indian Fair and Market, held every March since 1958, fills the grounds with several hundred Native artists selling their own work from booths, with dancers and musicians on the outdoor stage. It is the best place in the state to buy directly from a maker, and it is also the most crowded the museum ever gets. The World Championship Hoop Dance Contest, in early February in the outdoor amphitheater, is a competition, not a show, and the better for it.
What to see, in order
- The boarding school exhibition. The museum’s long-term exhibit on the federal Indian boarding schools, which for a century took Native children from their families to be remade, is the most important room in the building and the one that visitors with a lunch reservation skip. Give it half an hour.
- The katsina galleries. The Goldwater and Heard collections of Hopi katsina dolls, hundreds of them, arranged so you can see the carving change over a century.
- The jewelry. Navajo, Zuni and Hopi silver, historic and contemporary, in cases that teach you the difference between a stamped bracelet, a cluster, a channel inlay and an overlay. This is the room that pays for itself on Main Street.
- The contemporary shows. The Heard has shown living Native artists seriously for forty years, and the temporary exhibitions are often the best thing in the building.
The shop
The museum shop is a gallery that happens to sell: jewelry, pottery, baskets, textiles and katsina carvings, all handmade by Native artists and all labeled with the maker and the tribe. Prices are fair rather than cheap. Books & More, beside the lobby, has the deepest shelf of books on Native art and history in the Valley. Scottsdale’s own Native Art Market is the Old Town counterpart, run by Native owners.
With kids
The katsina galleries, the courtyards and the café make this an easier museum for children than most; the Scottsdale with kids note pairs it with the Phoenix Art Museum two blocks south for a long museum day.
The story
Dwight Heard came to Phoenix from Chicago in 1895 for his health, bought land, bought the Arizona Republican newspaper and ran for governor. He and his wife Maie began collecting the pottery, baskets and textiles of the Southwest almost as soon as they arrived, at a time when the material was being sold by the trainload to tourists and the people who made it were being pushed onto reservations. By the 1920s the collection had outgrown the house, and the Heards built the museum next door, a Spanish Colonial compound of thick walls and courtyards. Dwight died in March 1929, months before it opened that December; Maie ran it for the rest of her life.
For its first decades the Heard was a founder’s museum: the collection as the Heards had assembled it, shown as ethnography. What changed it was a run of directors from the 1950s on who decided that the art of living peoples should be shown as art, and bought and commissioned accordingly. The Indian Fair and Market started in 1958. Barry Goldwater’s katsina dolls came in the 1960s. The contemporary galleries and the artist-in-residence programs came after, and so did the boarding school exhibition, which asked a Phoenix museum built on the proceeds of territorial land to tell the hardest part of the story. The museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate and draws a quarter of a million visitors a year.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale’s Native art trade and the Heard grew up together. The traders who stocked the first Old Town shops in the 1940s and 1950s were buying from the same Navajo and Hopi families the Heard was collecting, and the two have shared artists, collectors and arguments about authenticity ever since. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community on Scottsdale’s eastern line has its own small museum, Huhugam Ki, which tells the O’odham and Piipaash story from the inside; the two are worth seeing in the same week. Our lexicon entry has the shorthand locals use.
Getting there
From Old Town, Indian School Road or Camelback Road west to Central Avenue, then south; the museum is on the east side of Central between Encanto and Monte Vista, four blocks north of McDowell. Twenty-two minutes with no traffic, longer at rush hour on either road. Free parking on site. The Valley Metro light rail stops at Encanto/Central at the museum’s door, which makes the Heard, the Phoenix Art Museum two stops south and downtown’s ballpark and arena one car-free day; our getting around note explains how to reach the line from Scottsdale, which does not have it.