Why it matters
Scottsdale has sold art since the 1950s, and for most of that time the selling and the teaching were separate. Scottsdale Artists’ School brought them together. Founded in 1983 by a group of artists and community leaders, with money from the town’s painters’ club, the Scottsdale Artists League, it set out to bring working artists of national reputation to Scottsdale to teach anyone willing to pay for a workshop. It did that well enough that by 2008 it said it was drawing more than 2,200 students a year from all 50 states.
It is also the reason one of Old Town’s best buildings is still standing and still full of people. Since 1993 the school has occupied the 1928 Loloma School, the town’s second grammar school, which the city bought in 1992 and leases to it. The Loloma School guide tells the building’s story, including the part most accounts leave out: it was built the same year the old brick schoolhouse on Main Street became the Coronado School for Mexican-American children. “We are well-known nationally and internationally,” the school’s spokeswoman said in 2019, “but, locally, we seem to be Scottsdale’s best kept secret.” That’s about right.
Where to find it today
At 3720 N. Marshall Way, the southwest corner of Second Street and Marshall Way, at the south end of the Main Street Arts District gallery strip. The way in is a class, a workshop, a lecture or an open event; it is a working school, not a museum. The Thursday-evening ArtWalk passes the front door, and the Little Red Schoolhouse, the town’s first school, is about ten minutes’ walk east.
How it started
The school tells its own founding in one paragraph. In 1983, “a small group of central Arizona artists and community leaders met with the goal to create a place of inspiration, where artists of all skill levels could learn from the best working artists in the country.” The Scottsdale Artists League, a club of local painters founded in 1961, put up the money. “Starting with just one studio, the first workshop was held that September.” The IRS recognized Scottsdale Artists School Inc. as a tax-exempt nonprofit in November 1983.
The paragraph names no one. Later accounts, including our profile of Bob and Kax Herberger, name Kax Herberger, the Paradise Valley arts patron, as a founder and trustee. That is plausible. She served on the Scottsdale Fine Arts Commission and gave to many of the Valley’s arts institutions. But we have not seen the 1983 incorporation papers, and the school’s history doesn’t say. The League, for its part, said in 2026 that it “helped start the Scottsdale Artists’ School, now internationally known.”
The idea was a specific one. This was not a university art department or a degree program. It was an atelier of short workshops and weekly classes taught by working artists, most of them painters and sculptors in the representational tradition. By 2008 the school’s published mission was “teaching the fundamentals of representational art” to artists “from throughout the international art community.”
The decisions that locked it in
Independence, 1983. The League could have run workshops for its own members. Instead the founders set up a separate nonprofit with its own board. That freed the school to hire anyone and teach anyone. It also meant the school had to live on tuition and gifts from the first day, which it still does.
The workshop model. Building the program around visiting instructors with national names made Scottsdale a destination for serious amateur and professional painters. The school lists Harley Brown, Scott Burdick, Sherrie McGraw, David A. Leffel and the sculptor Eugene Daub among those who have taught there. The roster for its 2000 Beaux Arts Bash benefit ran to more than 200 artists, including many of the best-known Western and representational painters of the day. The cost was local visibility. A school whose students fly in for a week is invisible to the neighbors.
The building, 1992–1993. For ten years the school worked out of one studio. Then the city bought the Loloma School from the cable company that had owned it since the district closed it in 1981, the architect Douglas Sydnor refurbished the interior, and the school moved in. The school dates the move to 1993, and the historian Joan Fudala to 1994. The building didn’t have to become an art school. Fudala records that it was considered for a microbrewery first. The move gave the school a permanent home and gave the city a tenant that would use the classrooms as classrooms. In 2000 the building went on the Scottsdale Historic Register.
Widening the door. By 2014 the mission had changed from “representational art” to “the applied fundamentals of fine art,” and the school was offering more than 200 programs plus a youth academy and summer day camp. In 2019 it staged a fashion show at Taliesin West, Canvas & Couture, with the owners of Fashion by Robert Black, to reach people who would never sign up for an oil-painting workshop. Its current history says the curriculum “embraces innovative genres and methods” while staying “grounded in fundamental art theory and practice.”
The years it nearly ended
The public record has no near-death for this school. That is partly a sign of health and partly a sign of how little is written down. The first decade, 1983 to 1993, in a single studio with no building of its own, is the period most likely to have been precarious, and it is the period with the least documentation. We could not find where the studio was.
The one hard year on the record is the pandemic. In the fiscal year ending June 2020, which took in the first months of COVID-19, the school’s revenue fell to about $1.49 million against $1.74 million in expenses, its largest deficit in the IRS data available from 2011 onward. The next year revenue jumped to about $2.55 million and net assets rose from about $1.9 million to $3.4 million. The summary data doesn’t say why, and the full return would.
By fiscal 2025 the school was steady: about $2.04 million in revenue and $1.99 million in expenses, net assets of about $3.67 million, and an executive director, Trudy Hays, who had led it since at least 2017.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The earliest mission statement we found, from 2008, is narrow and proud: to develop artists “from throughout the international art community by teaching the fundamentals of representational art.” The current one is broader: to develop “artists and aspiring artists of all ages by teaching the applied fundamentals of fine art,” with the stress on “artistic enrichment of the community.”
The change follows the students, not the donors. The school added children and teenagers, short local classes, open studios and events aimed at people in Scottsdale, while keeping the visiting-instructor workshops that made its name. Tuition and fees still pay most of the bills, about 59 percent of revenue in fiscal 2025, so the school has had to go where students are. That is adaptation, and it has kept the fundamentals at the center.
Who the record leaves out
The founders. A school that credits “a small group of central Arizona artists and community leaders” has chosen not to name them, or has lost track of them. Their names are in the 1983 articles of incorporation and the League’s records.
The local faculty. The school’s history spends its names on visiting stars and thanks “a dedicated faculty of talented local artists” in one sentence. Those teachers carry the weekly classes year-round, and none of them is named in any history we found.
The building’s first students. The rooms where adults now paint were built in 1928 for a school district that ran a separate school for the town’s Mexican-American children, the Coronado School. The school’s history page tells the building’s past as a story of architects and principals. It does not mention that.
The money’s fine print. The school’s IRS returns report transactions with interested persons, and several trustees, some of them working artists, received small payments in recent years. The summary data doesn’t say what for. The full returns do.
What it didn’t have to become
It didn’t have to be a school with a building. For its first ten years it got by in one studio. When the city bought Loloma School in 1992, the building’s future was open: Fudala’s microbrewery, offices, another cable company. The decision to put an art school in it gave Scottsdale a 1928 grammar school that is still used for teaching, and gave a workshop program a front door on Marshall Way. The school became a fixture of Old Town because it got a fixture to live in. Without the lease, it might be one more name on a list of programs that moved to Phoenix or closed.