What it means
The museum has two names and locals use the second one. On the building, the banners and the website it is Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West. In conversation it is the Museum of the West, as in “the Museum of the West has a new Remington show” or “park at the Museum of the West and walk to ArtWalk.” Say “Western Spirit” alone and you will get a polite pause.
Either way it means the two-story museum of Western art and history at 3830 North Marshall Way, at the north end of Old Town’s gallery district, which opened in January 2015 and has been named the country’s best Western museum by True West magazine every year since 2016. The city owns the building. A nonprofit, Scottsdale Museum of the West, runs it. The Smithsonian Institution lists it as an affiliate. For the rest of the city’s museums and how this one ranks, see the museums and attractions guide.
Where you’ll meet it
At the top of Marshall Way, where the galleries thin out and the museum’s ribbed steel facade starts; on Old Town walking routes that use it as the northern turnaround; in Western Week programming each February; and in the Main Street arts district crowd on Thursday ArtWalk nights, when the museum’s late hours line up with the galleries.
Where the word came from
The idea belongs to Herb Drinkwater, Scottsdale’s mayor from 1980 to 1996, who wanted the West’s Most Western Town to have a museum that lived up to the slogan. He died in 1997 without one. The project outlasted him: a nonprofit, Scottsdale Museum of the West, incorporated in 2007 to raise money and build collections, and the city committed the site and the building. The place chosen was the former Loloma Transit Station on Marshall Way, a transit stop named for the Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma. Ground broke on January 20, 2014 and the museum opened on January 15, 2015. The Scottsdale Charros gave $250,000 toward it in 2014. Drinkwater’s guide puts the museum among his posthumous monuments, alongside the Preserve.
Western Spirit was the brand attached to the institutional name around the opening, which is why the full title reads like a tagline with a colon. The nonprofit’s legal name stayed Scottsdale Museum of the West, and that is the phrase the public kept. The colon-and-subtitle construction confuses visitors who see “Western Spirit” on a sign and “Museum of the West” on a map and assume two places; there is one.
The building, by the Phoenix firm Studio MA, is 43,000 square feet over two stories, LEED Gold, with a facade of vertical steel ribs meant to echo saguaro pleats and a “weeping wall” that recycles water. Inside are eight exhibition spaces, the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust Theater with 135 seats, a sculpture courtyard and a store named for Sue and Robert Karatz. The collecting brief is the whole West: 19 states, Western Canada and Mexico. The anchor is the Abe Hays Family Spirit of the West Collection, about 1,400 saddles, spurs, firearms, badges and Old West objects; the art ranges from Cowboy Artists of America to Navajo textiles and Hollywood Westerns. The Smithsonian affiliation, which brings traveling exhibitions and loans, came in 2015, the museum’s first year.
What it is not
Western Spirit is not the Heard Museum, Phoenix’s museum of Native American art, which it borrows from and refers visitors to. It is not SMoCA, the contemporary museum on the Civic Center run by Scottsdale Arts. And it is not a cowboy theme park; Rawhide was that, and it left town.
The fine print
The square footage is given two ways in the record, 43,000 and 55,000, and the difference seems to be whether courtyards and service space are counted; this site uses 43,000, the figure most sources attach to the building itself. The construction cost is not stated on the museum’s site, and the split between city funds and private gifts is not published in one place; the city owns the building and the nonprofit operates it under agreement, which is the arrangement the museum describes and the one that matters for understanding why the city council occasionally debates the place.
The hours are specific and seasonal: Monday through Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Thursdays to 8 p.m. from November through April, and closed Mondays from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the Old Town pattern. Admission is charged but not posted on the home page, so check before going.
The True West streak, number one Western museum every year from 2016 through 2025, is the museum’s favorite line and the one visitors repeat. The magazine’s ranking is a popular-vote award, which the museum notes less often. For the slogan the museum was built to justify, see the West’s Most Western Town; for the gallery strip it anchors and the Thursday nights that fill it, see Marshall Way and the Old Town guide.