Why it matters
Scottsdale Arts is the private nonprofit the city has paid since 1988 to run its theater, its contemporary museum, its public art and, since 2012, Canal Convergence. Walk the Civic Center and nearly everything you see belongs to the city but is programmed by this organization: a board of trustees, a president and about ninety staff, working under a contract worth roughly $6 million a year.
The arrangement is unusual. Phoenix, Mesa and Chandler run their city-owned centers as departments or through a separate nonprofit per building. Scottsdale in 1987 handed its whole cultural apparatus to one organization and kept only the deed, the checkbook and the auditor, betting that a nonprofit could raise private money, hire talent and program boldly without a council vote on every season. The bet has mostly paid, and the city has spent the last decade trying to write a contract that says exactly what it bought.
Where to find it today
The Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts, 7380 E. Second St., the 1975 Bennie Gonzales building and the organization’s headquarters. SMoCA, next door, in the cinema Will Bruder remade in 1999. Scottsdale Public Art is everywhere; the walking tour covers downtown, and the collection runs to bus shelters and bridges in the far north. Canal Convergence takes the waterfront for ten nights each November, and the renovated Civic Center lawns host its concerts and fall festivals. The Scottsdale Arts Festival filled them every March until 2019; the pandemic canceled the 2020 and 2021 editions, and it has not returned. The museums guide sets SMoCA beside the city’s other collections.
How it started
The void came first. In the 1960s a citizens’ task force told Scottsdale it needed a performing arts center and museums, and a 1966 bond paid for the Civic Center that Gonzales planned. City Hall and the library opened in 1968; the arts half waited for the money of the early 1970s. The Scottsdale Center for the Arts opened on October 23, 1975, with an 853-seat theater, a small cinema, gallery space and a Roger Miller concert. The city ran it. A volunteer group, the Scottsdale Arts Center Association, raised money alongside and booked the touring acts.
Ten years in, the city had more art than organization. In 1985 the council adopted a one-percent-for-art ordinance, dedicating a share of every eligible capital project to public art, and created Scottsdale Public Art to spend it. The same year a task force under councilman Jim Bruner recommended spinning the Center’s management out to a private nonprofit, for the reasons every city arts department hears: donors give to nonprofits, not city hall; a nonprofit can pay a professional director; a board can take an artistic risk the council would rather not vote on.
In June 1987 the Scottsdale Cultural Council was chartered, in the city auditor’s words, “to provide advisory and management services for the City’s arts and cultural programs and facilities.” The city went to Denver for its first leader. Frank Jacobson, a theater director who had run the Arvada Center and Denver’s theaters and arenas division, arrived on Labor Day weekend 1987. Two weeks later, by his own account, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community closed its half of Pima Road in a freeway dispute with the state, and the new arts chief found himself designing programs to reach Native kids across a barricade. The 1988 management services agreement made the council “the principal organization managing arts and cultural activities for the City,” put the Center, the Civic Center Mall and Public Art under it, and absorbed SACA, donors and all. The IRS granted exemption in May 1988.
The decisions that locked it in
Contract, not department. Once the city signed the 1988 agreement, the shape was set: public buildings, private programming, an annual fee negotiated in a “financial participation agreement,” and a relationship that has to be renewed. The city’s Tourism and Events director administers it, which tells you how the city came to think of the arts: as a draw.
Public art under the nonprofit. The council could have kept Public Art inside city hall, where the percent-for-art money is generated. Instead it went to the Cultural Council, which is why a private curatorial staff and advisory board choose what goes on city bridges and in city parks, and why the Public Art division could invent Canal Convergence in 2012 and grow it into the city’s largest art audience. The city reimburses the direct costs of commissioning, about $2 million in pass-through in fiscal 2022-23, but the taste is the nonprofit’s.
SMoCA. The 1965 task force had wanted a Western art museum. What the Cultural Council built between 1996 and February 1999 was a contemporary one. Jacobson led a $9.6 million capital and endowment campaign, and Bruder turned a closed five-screen cinema beside the Center into galleries with a James Turrell skyspace in the courtyard. The city built its Western museum separately in 2015. The council got a second building, a curatorial staff and a permanent obligation to raise money for an institution with little admission base. Jacobson, so influential he was called the “8th councilman,” stepped down in 2006 after nineteen years; by a 2025 Hall of Fame profile’s account the budget had grown from $3.2 million to more than $12 million on his watch.
The brand. The Cultural Council name meant little to the public, and the three divisions marketed themselves separately. A 2015 strategic plan under president Neale Perl called for an umbrella brand, and on August 17, 2016, the organization became Scottsdale Arts, with the old name kept on the charter. Perl left in October 2017; Gerd Wuestemann, a musician with a doctorate from the University of Arizona, became president and CEO in March 2018 and grew three divisions into six, adding Canal Convergence, Learning and Innovation and the renovated Civic Center as programmed space.
The ratio. The 2008 agreement ran ten years, and the city auditor’s January 2018 review found that city money had grown about ten percent in a decade while the organization’s own fundraising had barely moved. The 2020 agreement (contract 2020-046-COS) wrote a rule into the deal: two dollars of earned and contributed revenue for every unrestricted city dollar. That is the measuring stick the November 2024 audit used.
The years it nearly ended
Scottsdale Arts has never been near dissolution, because the city has never been willing to let its theater go dark, but it has twice been reduced to the city’s support alone. The recession years under Bill Banchs, president from 2008 to 2013, brought budget cuts and turnover while the city’s fee stayed flat. Then came 2020: in fiscal 2020-21 earned revenue fell to about $490,000 against a city fee of $6.5 million, and the organization lived on the contract, a Shuttered Venue Operators grant, a Paycheck Protection loan and $1.5 million in federal relief the city routed through it as community arts grants. Both episodes taught the lesson the auditors keep writing down: the structure makes the organization dependent on a council vote every June, and its own revenue has never been large enough to change that.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The 1987 charter was administrative: manage the city’s facilities, advise the council. What the organization became is larger in every direction. It curates a museum, commissions public art across 184 square miles, stages a free festival that draws hundreds of thousands to the canal, runs an education division in the Scottsdale and Paradise Valley schools and makes grants to the city’s other arts groups. Each step was taken by its own leaders, with the city’s money and consent, and each added a mission the founders had not written down.
The city did not redirect the organization; the organization grew ahead of the city’s ability to describe what it was paying for. The 2024 audit says so almost in those words, finding ambiguities in “how the city administers the contract” and recommending that the next agreement define scope, responsibilities and performance across five tracts of work. The June 2025 council vote extended the deal a year to finish that rewrite. The organization’s answer, in Wuestemann’s columns and the 50th-anniversary coverage, is that growth is the point: a $15 million modernization campaign, $11.5 million of it from the Michael and Ellen Ziegler trust, is exactly the private money the 1985 task force hoped a nonprofit could attract. The budget guide shows where the $6 million sits in the General Fund.
Who the record leaves out
The official story is told from the Civic Center outward, and three groups are thin in it. The Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community appears mainly as the people on the far side of the Pima Road barricade when Jacobson arrived; the programs he says he built for Native students exist in his recollection, not in any annual report we found. The city’s working artists are the subjects of the public art program and the festival but rarely its authors, and the record of who sat on selection panels, and who was passed over, is not public. And the staff: about ninety people work there, the Banchs years are remembered in the press for turnover, and no one has written down what it was like inside.
What it didn’t have to become
In 1987 Scottsdale could have kept the Center as a department, let SACA raise the money and watched its arts program grow at the pace of the city budget. That is what most of the Valley did, and their centers are fine. Scottsdale chose a nonprofit and, crucially, gave it the public art program as well as the theater. Without that second gift there is no Canal Convergence, no Public Art staff with the standing to commission a bridge, and probably no SMoCA, because the organization that built the museum had already learned to think of the whole city as its gallery. The cost is the one the auditors keep tallying: a private board curates the public realm, and every few years the council has to decide, in public, how much that is worth.