What is the Arizona Fine Art Expo?
Drive north on Scottsdale Road past the Loop 101 in February and you will pass two enormous white tents about ten miles apart, each full of artists. The southern one, near Hayden, is the Celebration of Fine Art, which has done this since 1991. The northern one, at Scottsdale Road and Jomax on the edge of MacDonald’s Ranch, is the Arizona Fine Art Expo, which opened on January 13, 2005 and has run every winter since.
The format is the one the Celebration pioneered: instead of a weekend art fair, artists rent a studio for the full season, move their easels and kilns in, and work in front of the public for ten weeks. The Expo does it under a single 44,000-square-foot tent with 124 studios in 2026, a Sonoran Desert sculpture garden outside and a cafe in the middle. The ticket is a season pass, about $12, so regulars come back in week eight to see what week two’s blank canvas became.
The show was built by two couples, Judi and Roger Combs and Judi’s brother Dennis Long with his wife Judy, and since January 2024 has been co-owned by the Longs’ son Richard and his wife Ji. It is a family business in a tent, and it feels like one.
How to do it
Getting there. 26540 N Scottsdale Road, the southwest corner at Jomax, 25 minutes from Old Town and ten from Pinnacle Peak and Troon. Park free on the ranch’s dirt lot. Open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day; the 2027 dates are January 15 to March 28.
The pass. Roughly $12 at the door, $10 for seniors 55 and over and for military, free under 12, good for all ten weeks.
A route through the tent. The aisles are a grid; do the perimeter first, where the larger studios and the sculptors set up, then the interior rows. Painters, glassblowers, ceramicists, jewelers and metal sculptors share the space, and most are at their benches. Ask what they are working on before you ask what anything costs. The sculpture garden outside holds the big bronze and steel pieces; see it in the morning before the light flattens.
Eating. The cafe serves a full menu 11:30 to 3 with vegetarian and gluten-free options, and coffee all day. Off site, the Pinnacle Peak General Store is the closest honest lunch.
Buying. Prices run from a few hundred dollars for small works and jewelry to five figures for major canvases and sculpture. Commissions are the quiet specialty, because the artist has nine more weeks on site to finish one. For the Native American work you will also see, read our buying guide first.
Around it. The Expo pairs naturally with a February weekend in North Scottsdale, and Scottsdale Art Week in March closes the same season. (The Scottsdale Arts Festival downtown used to do that job; it has not been held since 2019.) Many of the tent’s Arizona artists open their own studios each November for Hidden in the Hills.
The two-tent question, answered honestly
Visitors assume the two tents are one show with two locations, or that one copied the other, or that there was a falling-out. The record supports only the second. The Celebration of Fine Art invented the Scottsdale version of the working-artist tent in 1991 and moved north from its first site to Scottsdale Road and Mayo in 2000. The Expo opened five years later, farther up the same road, with a nearly identical model. We found no documented business connection between the founding families, and neither show’s history mentions the other. What exists is two independent operations doing the same thing on overlapping dates, with a shared pool of artists, some of whom have shown in both.
The honest comparison: the Celebration is the original, slightly smaller in studio count, with a national roster and a stronger cafe patio. The Expo is one larger tent, leans a little more toward Arizona and Southwestern makers, sits in a prettier piece of desert, and costs about the same. Serious buyers do both in one weekend. Locals pick the one closer to their house.
Why the tent is where it is
The site is the front pasture of MacDonald’s Ranch, 1,280 acres the Richardson family has worked since 1956 and opened for horseback rides in 1970. A ranch that lives on trail rides and an October pumpkin patch has an empty winter field beside a busy road, and a ten-week art show is a good tenant for it. That arrangement, plus a 2000s housing boom that put tens of thousands of well-off retirees within a fifteen-minute drive, is why a family with no gallery background could open an art show in 2005 and still be running it 22 seasons later.