Scottsdale’s public art program started in 1973 with a single Louise Nevelson steel sculpture on a brand-new civic lawn, bought with a National Endowment for the Arts matching grant. Fifty years and a percent-for-art ordinance later, Scottsdale Public Art looks after more than 150 permanent works, and the densest cluster is downtown. You can see the important ones in a two-mile walk that starts on Fifth Avenue, drops through the gallery district to the Civic Center, and finishes on the Arizona Canal. This is the order we walk it in.
Before you start
Scottsdale Public Art keeps an online map of the whole collection, and Experience Scottsdale prints a ten-stop walking guide; the labels on the ground are inconsistent, so carry one. Park once in the Fifth Avenue or Civic Center garages, or ride the free trolley, which passes every stop. The walk is flat, shaded in stretches, and brutal from June to September between ten and six. Our Old Town on foot note covers the streets; this one is about what stands on them.
Fifth Avenue and Marshall Way
Bronze Horse Fountain. Start at Fifth Avenue and Marshall Way, where five bronze Arabians rear out of a fountain. Gallery owner and sculptor Bob Parks donated it in 1989 to pull shoppers onto the Fifth Avenue blocks, and modeled the horses on Tom Chauncey’s champion Arabians. It is the most photographed thing in the district after LOVE and the best reminder that the city’s art tradition began with horses.
One-Eyed Jack. Walk south on Marshall Way to Indian School Road. The 26-foot painted-steel jackrabbit on the corner is John Randall Nelson’s, finished in the winter of 2018, weighs about 20,000 pounds, and was paid for after Marshall Way business owners lobbied the council for a gateway piece. It was controversial before it arrived and beloved within a year. After dark it glows under soft LEDs, the argument for walking this route in the evening.
Horseshoe Falls. Across Indian School on the southeast corner, Michael Maglich’s horseshoe fountain marks the gallery blocks. Most people walk past it on the way to the rabbit. Don’t.
Main Street
Jack Knife. Continue south on Marshall Way to Main Street. Ed Mell’s bucking bronco and rider, his first large-scale bronze, went up at this corner in 1993 and is modeled on the rider in the city seal. It is angular, fast and about eight feet on its pedestal, and it is the center of the Main Street Arts District. Turn east and walk the gallery blocks toward Brown Avenue; on Thursday nights this stretch is the ArtWalk, and the doors are open.
The Yearlings. At Main and Brown, the west entrance to the Civic Center, George-Ann Tognoni’s three bronze yearlings run at full stride. She finished the piece in 1981; a community committee raised the money to buy it and gave it to the city in 1985. It is the horse sculpture locals love.
The Civic Center
The Civic Center holds the heaviest hitters within a few hundred feet of each other.
- LOVE. Robert Indiana’s twelve-foot aluminum LOVE, about 3,800 pounds, arrived in 2002 and returned after the 2023 renovation to the lawn east of the Center for the Performing Arts. Shoot it from the northeast in the last hour of light.
- Windows to the West. Louise Nevelson’s fifteen-foot Cor-Ten steel piece, formally Atmosphere and Environments XIII, unveiled in 1973, was the first work the city commissioned and the first of her large sculptures in the Southwest. The whole collection descends from it.
- Spirit of Camelback. Inside the Center for the Performing Arts, in the Grafman atrium, Kana Tanaka’s 2009 wall of more than 130 hand-sculpted glass stems runs from white through amber to red and out through the glass to the plaza. Walk in; the lobby is public.
- Knight Rise. James Turrell’s 2001 skyspace sits in the sculpture garden at SMoCA, a concrete dome with a bench ring and an oculus that turns the sky into a color field. Go at dusk. SMoCA is pay-what-you-wish all day Thursday and on second Saturdays, and the garden is the best free art experience in the city. Our museums note has the rest of the building.
The Waterfront and the canal
From the Civic Center, walk north on Scottsdale Road to Fifth Avenue, then follow Marshall Way north to the Arizona Canal, about three-quarters of a mile.
Passing the Legacy. At the north end of the Marshall Way canal bridge, Herb Mignery’s life-size bronze shows an 1880s Pony Express rider handing the mail to a modern Hashknife rider at a gallop. Scottsdale Public Art commissioned it in 2006 and dedicated it in February 2008 as the finish line for the Hashknife Pony Express, which still rides in every winter.
Soleri Bridge and Plaza. A block west, the Soleri Bridge is the only bridge Paolo Soleri ever saw built: two 64-foot pylons set on true north, six inches apart, throwing a blade of sun down a red stripe on the deck that marks the solstices. The plaza’s earth-cast panels and 1969 bell were made at Cosanti. At noon near the winter solstice the light does what he promised.
The Doors. Finish at the southwest corner of Scottsdale and Camelback, where Donald Lipski’s cluster of tall doors opens onto a mirrored interior that turns the Waterfront into a kaleidoscope. It is lit at night and is the right last frame of the walk.
The outliers
Two pieces belong on the list and not on the route. Water Mark, by Laura Haddad and Tom Drugan, is not on the canal at all; its five 14-foot aluminum horse gargoyles stand along the Indian Bend Wash near Indian Bend Road and Scottsdale Road and pour water only when the wash floods. Ten minutes north by car, lit after dark. The Frank Lloyd Wright Spire, built in 2004 from Wright’s rejected 1957 capitol design, is the northern bookend; our desert architecture note tells the story. And the “It’s That Hot” mural, the city’s summer slogan painted on a wall at Sixth Avenue behind Scottsdale Road, is a two-minute detour from the Fifth Avenue start.
When to walk it
- Thursday evening. Start at six, hit the galleries when the ArtWalk opens at seven, and reach the canal by nine with the jackrabbit and The Doors lit. SMoCA is open until seven on Thursdays and costs what you decide.
- November. Canal Convergence hangs ten nights of light art over the canal at the Waterfront, and the last third of this walk becomes the best free night out of the year.
- Winter noon for the Soleri pylons, and the hour before sunset for everything else.
- Not a summer afternoon. In July do it after dark, or do only SMoCA and the Civic Center.
The short version
Horses on Fifth Avenue, the rabbit at Indian School, the bronco on Main, LOVE and the skyspace at the Civic Center, the bridge on the canal. Two miles, two hours, no tickets, and the whole history of a city that decided in 1973 that a lawn needed a Nevelson.