What it means
Scottsdale’s arts life is concentrated on one campus at the Civic Center, and the vocabulary for it comes in three layers.
The Center is the theater building, the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, on Second Street. “We have tickets at the Center” means the 853-seat Virginia G. Piper Theater or the 137-seat Stage 2, for touring musicians, dance and comedy.
SMoCA is the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, next door, in a low, minimalist building that used to be a movie theater. It shows contemporary art, architecture and design, and it owns the city’s most quietly famous room: James Turrell’s Knight Rise, a skyspace whose open oculus frames the desert sky.
Scottsdale Arts is the nonprofit that runs both, along with the city’s public art program and Canal Convergence. Residents meet the name on tickets and membership mail; the Scottsdale Arts guide explains how the arrangement works and who pays for it.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Civic Center Mall, on the public art walking tour, at Canal Convergence each November, and a few blocks west on the Thursday-night ArtWalk.
Where the names came from
The Center came first and has had two names. It opened on October 23, 1975 as the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, the arts half of the Civic Center that architect Bennie Gonzales designed, and it served at first as both a performance hall and a visual arts venue. It now goes by Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts; we found no source that dates the change. The city has never stopped calling it “the Center.”
SMoCA’s name is an acronym, written with a lowercase o. The museum opened in February 1999 after a capital campaign led by the organization that ran the Center, and architect Will Bruder turned a closed cinema beside it into galleries. Turrell’s Knight Rise followed in 2001.
The umbrella name is the newest. In June 1987 the city chartered a private nonprofit, the Scottsdale Cultural Council, to run its arts facilities, and in 1988 handed it the Center, the Civic Center Mall and the public art program. The Cultural Council name meant little to the public, and in 2016 the organization became Scottsdale Arts, while keeping the old name on its legal charter.
What it is not
SMoCA is not Western Spirit, the city’s museum of the West a few blocks away, and Scottsdale Arts is not a city department: the city owns the buildings and the collection, and a nonprofit board runs them under contract.
The fine print
The contract is where the vocabulary turns political. The city pays Scottsdale Arts a management fee, about $6 million a year in the mid-2020s by this site’s count, and audits the results; a 2024 city audit questioned the contract’s terms and the organization’s earned revenue, and in 2025 the council extended the deal for one year while a longer agreement was drafted. Residents who follow the Kiva hear “Scottsdale Arts” mostly in that context. The organization guide has the history of each agreement.
Visiting is simple. SMoCA is at 7374 East Second Street and the Center at 7380, side by side. General admission to SMoCA is $16, with discounts for students, seniors, veterans and educators, free entry for visitors 18 and younger, and pay-what-you-wish admission on Thursdays and every second Saturday. The Center lists daytime hours Tuesday through Sunday, closed Mondays, and parking in the Civic Center garage is free.
The 2025-26 season marked the Center’s 50th anniversary, with an exhibition on art in 1970s Scottsdale and a lineup that opened with Alison Krauss and Union Station. Fifty years on, the building Gonzales designed for a young suburb is the anchor of the city’s whole arts vocabulary.