What it is
The Shemer Art Center is a house. That is the first thing to understand about it, and the reason it works. It sits on the south side of Camelback Road at Arcadia Drive, a Santa Fe mission-style house on three acres of lawn and old trees with the red face of Camelback Mountain filling the sky behind it, and from the street it looks like one more Arcadia estate. Inside, the four bedrooms are galleries, the garage is a ceramics and painting studio, the porch is enclosed and hung with work, and the grounds are a sculpture garden with the pieces for sale.
The east end of the building went up in 1919 as a cottage for the man running the Arcadia Water Company’s irrigation project, which makes it as old as Arcadia itself. Two sets of winter residents enlarged it over the 1920s. In 1984 Martha Shemer bought it and gave it to the City of Phoenix on the condition that it stay in arts use, and the nonprofit that runs it has shown Arizona artists there ever since: monthly exhibitions, year-round classes, summer camps for kids and a pair of outdoor festivals a year.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Scottsdale has galleries by the hundred and they are all selling you something. The Shemer is selling almost nothing. The exhibitions are juried shows of Arizona painters, printmakers and ceramicists, many of them teachers at the center, and the work is priced for people who live here rather than for the resort trade. Our museums and attractions note has the city’s institutions; this is the small, free, unhurried one across the line that none of them resembles.
The practical version
Twelve minutes west of Old Town on Camelback Road. Free, with a suggested donation. Galleries open Tuesday through Saturday during the day and closed Sunday and Monday, with festival weekends on their own calendar. Parking in the lot off Camelback. Thirty to forty-five minutes. The sculpture garden is the part to linger in, and the view of the mountain from the back lawn is worth the trip on its own in the hour after the galleries open, when the house is still in shadow.
When to go
Weekday mornings, October to April. The galleries open at ten, the garden is cool and the rooms are empty. It is the right stop after the Camelback summit, which you will have started before dawn; the Echo Canyon trailhead is a mile north.
Festival weekends. The center puts on two outdoor art fairs a year on the grounds, Art in the Garden and the Furry Friends fine arts festival, with local artists’ booths across the lawn, and a New Horizons award ceremony for emerging Arizona artists. Dates move; check the site. These are the only times the place is crowded.
Summer. It stays open through the heat, and the house, built thick in 1919 and stuccoed in 1927, is cooler than it has any right to be. Summer camps fill the studio with children in June and July, so expect noise from the garage and quiet in the galleries.
What to do
Walk the galleries first: four rooms, one show, usually themed, usually a month or two long. Then the enclosed porch, then the garden. Everything in the garden has a price on it, and the shop by the entrance carries small pieces by the teaching artists. If you want to make something rather than look at it, the center’s one-day workshops in printmaking, fused glass or ceramics are the only hands-on art instruction within a short drive of the resorts that does not require a six-week commitment.
With kids
Good for an hour. The sculpture garden is a lawn with art on it, which is to say it is a lawn, and the summer camps are the real children’s program: week-long sessions with names like Depicting the Desert and Crazy About Color, booked by Phoenix families in the spring. Visitors in town for a week can sometimes get a single workshop day.
The neighborhood
Camelback Road at 50th Street is the hinge between the Camelback corridor resorts to the east and Arcadia’s restaurant row to the south and west. Lunch is ten minutes away in any direction. The Biltmore is a further mile west.
The story
In 1919 a group of investors formed the Arcadia Water Company to bring Arizona Canal water up to the gravelly slope under Camelback Mountain and sell it as citrus homesites. They built a small house on Camelback Road for the workman in charge, and that cottage, at the east end of today’s building, is the oldest part of the Shemer and one of the oldest structures in the neighborhood. A Kansas City banker bought the acreage in 1925 and added rooms. In 1927 the Suhr family of Oil City, Pennsylvania took it as a winter home and did the remodel that made the house: they enlarged the garage, added two bedrooms and a bathroom, enclosed the porch, expanded the kitchen and stuccoed the whole thing to hide the seams, leaving the Santa Fe mission-style house that stands now.
By the early 1980s the land was worth more than the house and Arcadia was losing its old places to subdivision. Martha Shemer, a longtime Phoenix resident, bought the property and its three-plus acres in July 1984 and, working with Mayor Terry Goddard, donated it to the City of Phoenix so it could not be split and sold. The condition was that it serve the arts. A nonprofit took over the programming, the bedrooms became galleries, the garage a studio, and the grounds a sculpture garden; the city still owns the land.
The Scottsdale connection
Arcadia’s eastern sliver is inside Scottsdale, and the house is a reminder that the two cities’ border runs through one neighborhood built by one water company on one canal. The Scottsdale side of the arts story is downtown’s galleries and the Civic Center’s sculpture; the public art walking tour is the municipal version. The Shemer is the domestic one: a house that became a gallery because one person decided it should.
Getting there
Camelback Road west from Scottsdale Road, past 64th Street into Phoenix, about three and a half miles; the center is on the left at Arcadia Drive, just east of 50th Street, with its lot off Camelback. From Echo Canyon, take McDonald Drive west to 44th Street and south to Camelback, or simply come down Invergordon to Camelback and turn right. The Valley Metro bus on Camelback stops within a block.