Scottsdale exists because of canals, and its public art program has never forgotten it. A striking share of the city’s permanent collection is about water, in a town that usually leads with horses. Most of these pieces are small and functional: a bench, a railing, a bridge, a recycling bin, a sound wall. They sit on paths that thousands of people walk, run and ride every week, and most of those people have never noticed them.
This guide follows the water in four stretches: the Arizona Canal, the Crosscut Canal, the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt, and the north Scottsdale canal corridor around the Water Campus and TPC. Facts come from Scottsdale Public Art’s collection records. The big-name canal pieces, the Soleri Bridge and Water Mark, are already in our walking tour.
The Arizona Canal
The Arizona Canal Path crosses the city for about four miles, and the densest run of art is at the Waterfront.
Copper Falls (Robert “Bob” Adams, February 2014), at the southeast corner of the canal and Scottsdale Road. Adams rebuilt the canal’s waterfall as an artwork: backlit frosted glass with metal domes of different sizes set at different heights, so the falling water strikes them and the sound carries. The best place to hear it is on the bridge. He also oversaw the downtown art screens set into the canal railings, and he added seating on the bridge facing west toward the Soleri Bridge. The metal is meant to weather. The materials were chosen to react with untreated canal water, and the patina is part of the work. The water is turned off in the hottest summer months.
Traceries (Mary Bates Neubauer, May 2020), 7124 E. Stetson Dr. Eight recycling and trash bins on the south bank between Goldwater Boulevard and Scottsdale Road, with cutwork tracery patterns in bright powder-coated steel: the Ariadne butterfly, coreopsis, a whirling impeller and the broad-billed hummingbird. The public chose the design by vote at Canal Convergence 2018, and the city’s Solid Waste Services supplied metal from decommissioned trash bins. Three more were added in 2025 on the east side of the canal path north of Camelback Road.
Pinball Wizard (Annette Coleman, June 2022), 7120 E. Stetson Dr. The splash pad at Stetson Plaza near the Marshall Way bridge: a concrete wall and bench set with 30 mosaic spheres and domes and waves of vertical glass mosaic. Coleman wanted the spheres to recall jacks, marbles and pinball.
Tributary Wall (Kevin Berry, 1995), 4341 N. 70th St., near Scottsdale Fashion Square. A 10-foot sound wall the neighbors asked for when the mall was getting ready to expand. A serpentine wave of smooth and split-faced rock carries seven weathering-steel fish, 9 to 18 feet long, with perforated scale patterns and clear glass block behind them, so daylight comes through their bodies. They swim toward the canal in the same direction as southbound traffic. At the south end one of the biggest fish waits to ambush the smaller ones. Walk it from the north so you meet them in order.
Watering the Desert (Laurie Lundquist with graphic designer Marie Jones and historian Nancy Dallett, 2013). Four cast concrete benches along the canal path west of Goldwater Boulevard, with historic photographs and short phrases sandblasted into them. The team walked this stretch and went through dozens of historic photographs of the canal and the people who built it. The texts, bench by bench:
- 60th Street: “Imagine Watering the Desert / Visions of Paradise”
- 64th Street: “Water at Work / Potential Energy / Upstream-Downstream”
- 68th Street West: “Visions of Power / Imagine Watering the Desert”
- Lafayette Park: “Lafayette Park / Volume and Void”
Industrial Pipe Wave (Christopher Fennell, February 2015), 5985 N. Cattletrack Rd. Salvaged industrial pipe surfaces three times like an underground river before rearing into a 24-foot wave that looks like a sea serpent, with three smaller related pieces. It stands in the landscaping around the North Indian Bend Wash water treatment facility, by the Arizona Canal, in the heart of the North Indian Bend Wash Superfund site, at a facility Motorola provides funds for. It is officially “temporary” because it sits on a revocable easement, but Scottsdale Public Art lists it in the permanent collection. Fennell built it on site over about two months beginning in October 2014, talking to neighbors and schoolchildren as he went.
The Crosscut Canal and Tonalea
The Crosscut Canal Path runs south from the Arizona Canal toward Papago Park. Its art is older and quieter.
Visual Puzzles (Erik Gonzales, 2001), on a Crosscut bridge at 6353 E. Rose Circle Dr. Back-lit panels of glass fresco and brushed aluminum built from old aerial photographs of the Crosscut Hydro Plant, construction blueprints and abstract painting. Smaller panels along the bridge railings repeat details. (The collection spells the artist’s name both Gonzales and Gonzalez.)
Rippling Waters Bridge (Carolyn Law, 2003), 6625 E. Oak St. The canal crossing on the west side of the Tonalea neighborhood, used by Tonalea Middle School kids. Law’s prismatic pickets, fabricated by Art in Metal of Tempe, shift color as you walk across, like light on moving water. Walk it, don’t drive past it. The effect only works at walking speed.
Tonalea Landmarks (Carolyn Law, 2003), around 6921 E. Oak St. Law’s companion project: 19 traffic-calming medians, roundabouts and bulb-outs in the Tonalea neighborhood, each a small landscape of low curving painted walls 5 to 24 inches high, desert plants and painted geometric pieces that stand in for water and sky. Drive through slowly. Slowing you down is their job.
Swimming Dream (Laurie Lundquist and Studio MA, 2008), at the canal path near 6595 E. McDowell Rd. Wider path areas, lighting, shade screens with seating and better landscaping. The same team, working as Portals and Loops, won a national competition in 1992 to design the Papago Loop Trail linking the Old Crosscut, Arizona and new Crosscut canals into Papago Park. That same year Phoenix and Scottsdale finished the Papago Park/City Boundary Project at the park’s northern entrance. It’s the natural place to end a Crosscut ride.
The Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt
The Greenbelt is a flood channel disguised as a park, and its art is mostly about the floods.
Swale (Stacy Levy, October 2014), the Thomas Road bridge over Indian Bend Wash, 7825 E. Thomas Rd. 176 powder-coated steel blades and seed pods, 10 to 14 feet high, on the guardrails on both sides of the bridge: stylized wash grasses, with blue blades for the water that runs through in a storm. It’s designed to be seen from a car, a bike or on foot. On foot is best.
The Bell, The Flower and The Wash (Ilan Averbuch, 2011), 7684 E. McDowell Rd., beside the fire station at Eldorado Park. Two big Cor-ten funnels, inspired by firefighters’ bells and trumpets, one upright and one on its side, above a line of tapered recycled granite blocks that lean on each other and double as benches. Rain falling into the upright funnel runs through a buried pipe into a trough cut along the stones, joining them into one line. Go after a storm.
Floating World (Calvin Abe and Sylvia Tidwell, 2003), Eldorado Pool, 2301 N. Miller Rd. A “river” flows through the pool house under a “sky” ceiling of pillowy clouds, based on what swimmers told the artists about feeling weightless in the water. See our public pools guide for hours.
Terraced Cascade (Lorna Jordan, 2007), Chaparral Park, behind the northern baseball fields and south of the Xeriscape Garden. A water-harvesting earthwork. Curved hillside terraces channel runoff down a central ridge into rib-like planters. The collection calls the effect a “spinal tap.”
Parallel Companion (Kristine Kollasch, 2025), McCormick-Stillman Railroad Park, 7301 E. Indian Bend Rd. A mosaic with a 9-foot saguaro and a bench made from reclaimed rail and spikes, a train in the distance, and Arizona’s state symbols: cactus wren, two-tailed swallowtail, ringtail, palo verde, saguaro blossom. Hundreds of the tiles were made by residents in Kollasch’s workshops.
Water Mark (Laura Haddad and Tom Drugan, 2010). The five aluminum horse gargoyles at Indian Bend Road that spit water when the wash floods. It’s in our walking tour. Don’t miss the south basin. Its stadia walls have red tile set at one-foot intervals to measure the water as it rises.
North Scottsdale: the canal corridor and the Water Campus
The Central Arizona Project brings the Colorado River water that makes up about two-thirds of Scottsdale’s supply, and its canal passes through north Scottsdale on federal land beside WestWorld and TPC. The art here is spread out. Drive it.
Water to Water (Christine Tanz and Paul Edwards, 1999), at the entrance to the Scottsdale Water Campus, 8787 E. Hualapai Dr. A perforated metal wall stands in for the kitchen and bathroom walls water passes through on its way to us. Walk toward it and sensors set off a row of shower heads and a chorus of faucets. Behind the wall you walk through the exposed pipes that feed them, over an open grating. “Unlike most fountains, this one lets its plumbing show.”
Cholla Reflections (Kelly O’Brien and Patrick Renner of Flying Carpet Creative Studio, Houston, with students Jessica Arnold of NAU and Rigoberto Berber-Arias and Alan Estrada Sanchez of ASU). Five earth-cast concrete monoliths at the northern intersection of Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard and the Greenway-Hayden Loop, with metal work on the bridge, sandblasted sidewalk designs and hand-cast pavers. Cholla-skeleton holes stand for drought, and blue-green waves for water. Keep Scottsdale Beautiful was a partner, along with the Bureau of Reclamation and the Central Arizona Project. Kyllan Maney’s Cholla Canal Water Resources Mural on the water facilities building goes with it. The collection gives no completion date.
Tournament Players Club Bridge Underpass (Robert Harrison, 1997), 17438 N. Hayden Rd. Harrison, an architectural ceramist from Montana, tiled the arches of a golf-cart underpass and gave the columns spiraling copper-clad capitals meant to recall saguaro blossoms at sunset. Golfers see it best. From the road above you’re driving over it.
Earth Wall – Living Wall (Joan Baron, 1999), 10050–10098 E. Caribbean Ln. Sound walls and a bridge on the Thompson Peak Parkway project, built of rammed earth (site soil with about 4 percent concrete) by Rammed Earth Solar Homes of Tucson, set with more than 1,000 ceramic tiles shaped like hands, made by residents in Baron’s workshops. There are also lavender glass blocks, a painted mandala and a bench. The colors faded, and in 2019–20 the city repainted the walls warm red-orange and the bridge screens bright blue, which Baron meant as the sky reflected in the canal below. Her own line about it: “It is for the joy of discovery that we stop and peer across the canal.” The collection doesn’t name the canal. We assume the CAP aqueduct but haven’t confirmed it on site.
One that looks at the mountains instead
Sonoran Suite (Cliff Garten, 2006), at the northwest corner of the 70-acre Scottsdale Sports Complex, 8081 E. Princess Dr., a few minutes from the TPC underpass. A curved walk climbs a mound to a 10-foot-high, 20-foot-wide round platform of red granite aggregate. On top, a palo verde grows inside a ring bench, and four 8-foot bronze viewing portals frame Pinnacle Peak, Thompson Peak, Camelback Mountain and Piestewa Peak. Bronze inlays in the floor trace each peak’s profile. Go at sunset, when the light changes on all four mountains at once. It’s the right way to finish a water tour, looking at the high ground the water comes down from.
How to do it
- By bike: the Arizona Canal from the Waterfront west to 60th Street (Watering the Desert), back to the Crosscut junction at 64th Street and Indian School Road, then south down the Crosscut past Visual Puzzles and Rippling Waters to Swimming Dream, then on to Papago Park. Our Greenbelt cycling note covers connecting to the wash.
- On foot: the Waterfront cluster (Copper Falls, Traceries, Pinball Wizard, the Soleri Bridge) takes 30 minutes and pairs with the downtown walking tour.
- By car: the north Scottsdale pieces are miles apart. Combine them with the Airpark and WestWorld stops in our public art on the road guide.
- When: cool-season mornings, and the morning after a good rain, when the funnels fill, the terraces run and the gargoyles at Water Mark might actually pour. In summer, ride at first light or not at all.