What it means
The Heard is the museum. In a Valley with a hundred attractions, it is the one that locals name without hesitation when a visitor asks what they should not miss: the Heard Museum of American Indian art and history, at 2301 North Central Avenue in midtown Phoenix, founded in 1929 and still run as a private nonprofit. It is twenty minutes from Old Town, and the Scottsdale pages on this site send you there repeatedly, for a reason that has nothing to do with civic generosity.
The reason is commerce. Scottsdale has sold Native American art since the 1950s, on Main Street, at the Fifth Avenue trading posts, in the galleries that open for ArtWalk. The Heard is where you learn what a Hopi katsina, an Acoma pot or a Navajo rug is before someone sells you one, and its museum shop is the honest benchmark for price and provenance. The site’s note on buying Native American art says it bluntly: go to the Heard first. Its museums and attractions guide places it among the Valley’s indoor days.
Where you’ll meet it
In every list of Valley museums; in the Native art galleries, where dealers cite its exhibitions; in March, when the Indian Fair and Market fills its grounds; and in north Scottsdale memory, where Heard Museum North stood at El Pedregal and then farther down Scottsdale Road until 2014.
Where the word came from
The name is a family’s. Dwight B. Heard, a Chicago businessman who came to Phoenix in 1895 for his health, became one of the territory’s great landowners, publisher of the Arizona Republican and a political figure; his wife Maie Bartlett Heard collected. Their travels built an international collection of Indigenous art, strongest in the Southwest, and by the late 1920s they were planning a building beside their Central Avenue home to hold it. Dwight died of a heart attack on March 14, 1929, before it opened. Maie finished it, and the Heard Museum opened on December 26, 1929, with eleven galleries. She served as its curator and director for the next twenty years.
The museum kept the name and changed its mission. What began as a wealthy couple’s collection of Indian artifacts became, over the second half of the century, a museum that presents Native history and contemporary Native art in collaboration with Native people, with Native staff, advisors and artists. That shift is why “the Heard” no longer sounds like a monument to its founders and why its exhibition on the Indian boarding schools is among the most-cited in the country.
Two events carry the name beyond the building. The Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market, started by the volunteer guild in 1958, fills the first weekend of March with more than 600 Native artists and about 15,000 visitors. The World Championship Hoop Dance Contest, held in early February in the Libby Amphitheater, draws dancers from across North America.
The Scottsdale chapter is short. Heard Museum North opened in 1996 at El Pedregal, the festival marketplace beside the Boulders resort at Scottsdale Road and Carefree Highway, moved in 2007 to a larger space farther south on Scottsdale Road, and closed in May 2014; a West Valley branch in Surprise had closed by 2009.
What it is not
The Heard is not the Huhugam Ki Museum, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community’s own small museum of Akimel O’odham and Piipaash history across the Loop 101, which is worth a visit for different reasons. It is not a trading post or a gallery, though its shop sells. And it is not in Scottsdale, whatever the El Pedregal signage once implied.
The fine print
The collection numbers more than 40,000 objects, with a research library of 34,000-plus volumes. The showpiece gift is Barry Goldwater’s collection of 437 historic Hopi katsina dolls, given by the senator who grew up in a Phoenix department-store family and photographed the reservations for decades; the site profiles him at Barry Goldwater. The museum is a Smithsonian Affiliate and a Phoenix Point of Pride, and it reports about 250,000 visitors a year.
Context Scottsdale readers should carry with them. The Heard’s galleries describe the Akimel O’odham and Piipaash peoples whose land Scottsdale occupies and borders, and the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community that governs across Pima Road; the older labels “Pima” and “Maricopa” are outside names, and the museum explains why. The Hohokam canals under Scottsdale’s streets are the same story told archaeologically. The Community’s Huhugam Ki Museum tells it from the inside.
Gaps in the record as this entry found it: the Heard’s own 95-year collecting history is a PDF the museum publishes but which could not be opened in full for this entry; the Hoop Dance contest’s first year at the Heard is not stated in the sources consulted, and the Heard North closing is dated to May 2014 by Wikipedia and to “the mid-2010s” by the site’s El Pedregal page. The founding dates and the 1958 fair are consistent across every source.