What was the Scottsdale National Indian Arts Exhibition?
In the early 1960s Scottsdale was a resort town of a few tens of thousands that had just discovered it could sell art. Lloyd Kiva New’s Kiva Craft Center had put a Native design studio on Fifth Avenue, and Charles Loloma was making jewelry there that nobody had seen from a Hopi bench before. In 1962, during Bill Schrader’s term as mayor, the town added a juried competition: the Scottsdale National Indian Arts Exhibition, held every late winter, mostly at the brand-new Executive House Arizonian hotel on Scottsdale Road, now The Scott Resort.
It was national in fact as well as name. Prizes went to an Acoma Pueblo potter from New Mexico, to Choctaw and Muscogee artists from Oklahoma, and to a Navajo realist painter from Crownpoint, New Mexico. Loloma took first prize seven years in a row. By its tenth show in 1971 the Arizona Republic was calling it the “largest and finest in the world.”
Then it disappeared. Scottsdale’s city historian dates its last show to 1976, and nobody has written its history since. What survives is scattered: award lines in artists’ biographies, a few programs on auction sites, a newspaper headline. This page gathers them.
What the record shows
When. Late February into early March. The fourth exhibition ran February 27 to March 7, 1965; the seventh was in March 1968; a ninth-show award is dated February 28, 1970; and the Republic’s anniversary story ran February 28, 1971. Winter timing put it squarely in Scottsdale’s tourist season, alongside the Arabian horse show and spring training.
Where. The Executive House Arizonian, which opened November 12, 1961, hosted the 1964, 1965, 1968 and 1970 shows. On February 29, 1964, the Republic’s front page carried a photograph of an Alaskan totem pole being raised in front of the hotel for the third annual exhibition. The city historian has written that the show was held at “either the SunBurst or Safari Hotels”; the SunBurst was a later name for the Executive House, and the Safari, down the road, was demolished in 1999.
How it was judged. Award listings from the period show a detailed structure: entries sorted by section (crafts among them), then by class (pottery, for example), then by traditional or contemporary division, then by region. One 1970 first place is listed under Section B (Crafts), Class VIII (Pottery), Division A (Traditional), Section 2 (New Mexico). Painting, watercolor and contemporary textiles appear as categories in other years, and there was a Grand Award.
The artists
These are the award winners and exhibitors we could document. It is surely a fraction of the whole.
- Charles Loloma (Hopi), jeweler: first prize seven years in a row in the 1960s.
- Valjean McCarty Hessing (Choctaw), painter: entered the 1962 show; first prize for painting at the tenth annual, 1971.
- Marie Z. Chino (Acoma Pueblo), potter: honorable mention in 1968 and first place in 1970, traditional pottery, New Mexico section.
- Sandy Fife Wilson (Muscogee), designer and textile artist: first place in contemporary textiles, 1972.
- Jim Abeita (Navajo), painter: two firsts, two seconds and two thirds around 1973; the Grand Award in 1974.
- Jane McCarty Mauldin (Choctaw), painter: the watercolor prize, 1976.
- Helen Hardin (Tewa), painter: honors at the exhibition, year not given.
- Jimmie Carole Fife Stewart (Muscogee), artist: exhibited, year not given.
The list says something on its own. Traditional Pueblo pottery, Loloma’s radically modern jewelry, Oklahoma flat-style painting and contemporary fashion textiles all won in the same show.
Seeing its legacy now
The exhibition is gone, but its market is not. The Native jewelry and pottery trade on Fifth Avenue and Main Street descends from the same 1950s and 1960s moment, and our guide to buying Native American art explains how to buy well from it. Each February the Arizona Indian Festival on the Civic Center brings the state’s tribal nations back to Scottsdale in their own words.
The founder, the town and the timing
Sources cited on Wikipedia credit Paul Huldermann as the exhibition’s founder. A 1970 Arizona Republic story, as cited there, names him among the experts, with Heard Museum curator Tom Cain, who ranked the Maricopa potter Ida Redbird among the very best Southwestern potters. We know nothing else about him, including who backed the show. Whether the Chamber of Commerce, the hotel, the Fifth Avenue merchants or the Kiva Craft Center circle had a hand in it is unconfirmed.
The timing fits the town. Mayor Schrader’s term, 1962 to 1964, brought the sign ordinance, the first hospital and the library’s move into the Little Red Schoolhouse, and his 2023 obituary lists the first annual Indian arts exhibition among its achievements. The same year, Lloyd Kiva New left Fifth Avenue to co-found the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, which would train a generation of the contemporary Native artists, Sandy Fife Wilson among them, who later competed in Scottsdale.
The start-date problem
Scottsdale’s city historian, Joan Fudala, wrote in 2025 that the exhibition ran from 1961 to 1976. Everything else points to 1962: the shows’ own ordinal numbers count back to that year, Hessing’s biography records the 1962 show, and Schrader, who took office in April 1962, is credited with the first annual exhibition. We use 1962 and flag the conflict. The 1976 end date rests on Fudala alone, supported by a 1976 award; we have found no later show.
What needs archival work
- The founding: who organized the first show, who paid for it, and who judged.
- Prize lists and catalogs for every year, and the categories as they changed.
- Venues by year, including whether the Safari ever hosted it.
- Attendance and sales, if the show sold work.
- The ending: whether it stopped, merged into something else, or moved.
The places to look are the Heard Museum’s Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives in Phoenix, for catalogs and programs; the Scottsdale Public Library, for the Scottsdale Progress and Arizonian on microfilm, every February and March from 1962 to 1980; the Scottsdale Historical Society; the Institute of American Indian Arts archives in Santa Fe; and Arizona Highways from the 1960s. The 1965 program that surfaced on eBay shows the printed record exists. If you have one, the Historical Society should see it.