Skip to content
Visiting or new to Scottsdale? Start here
Scottsdale.tips
Landmark day • Sunday, February 14, 1999

February 14, 1999: SMoCA Opens

A cowboy-branded city opens a museum of contemporary art in a converted five-screen cinema, and the arts campus Bennie Gonzales sketched in 1966 gets its last major building.

Illustrated plaque for February 14, 1999 in Scottsdale history FEBRUARY 14 1999 THE RESORT METROPOLIS

What happened

The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, SMoCA, opened on February 14, 1999, beside the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, in the shell of the UA Movies 5, a United Artists multiplex that had closed on Christmas Day 1997. Phoenix architect Will Bruder stripped it to a box of galleries, repainted it eggplant and gray and added galvanized-metal pods for the entrance and services. Conceived in 1988 and run by the Scottsdale Cultural Council, it was the city's museum of modern and contemporary art, architecture and design. James Turrell's skyspace Knight Rise followed in its courtyard in 2001.

Why it matters

SMoCA completed the Civic Center's evolution from government campus to cultural district and gave Scottsdale a serious contemporary-art institution to set against its western brand — the counterweight that later made Canal Convergence and the city's public-art program credible.

Eleven years from idea to door

The idea dated to 1988, when the Scottsdale Cultural Council — the nonprofit the city had created the year before to run its arts institutions — began arguing that a town selling itself as an arts capital needed a museum that collected something newer than bronze cowboys. The Civic Center campus that Bennie Gonzales had planned in 1966 had a city hall, a library, and, since October 1975, a performing-arts center; its galleries were an afterthought. Money, as usual, took most of a decade. The site, when it came, was unglamorous: the UA Movies 5, the five-screen United Artists theater next door to the Center for the Arts, which had opened in 1976 and closed as a discount house on Christmas Day 1997. The city bought it for about $1.2 million, and the council raised the $2.7 million to convert it and a $5 million endowment.

Will Bruder, the Phoenix architect then finishing the Burton Barr Central Library, took the cinema apart from the inside. He kept the box and turned it into galleries, replaced the theater’s earth tones with eggplant and gray, and added two galvanized-metal pods, a curving entrance on the east and a service block on the west. SMoCA opened on February 14, 1999. The James Turrell skyspace Knight Rise, where visitors sit and watch the sky change color through an opening in the ceiling, followed in the courtyard in 2001.

What it changed

The museum gave the Civic Center a second pole. For a quarter-century the campus had been where Scottsdale’s government and performing arts lived; now it was also where the city looked at the present tense. SMoCA’s exhibitions, its architecture program, and its sponsorship of public art fed directly into the city’s growing confidence in contemporary work — the Soleri Bridge on the canal in 2010, the light-art festival Canal Convergence from 2012, the public-art program that became a national model. The West’s Most Western Town now had a credible answer to the question of what else it was.

The rest of the year — Los Arcos Mall fading, the Loop 101 racing up the eastern edge — is at 1999, and the decade’s arc in the 1990s chapter.