What was Heard Museum North?
The Heard Museum, Phoenix’s museum of Native American art and culture since 1929, spent eighteen years with a branch in north Scottsdale. Heard Museum North opened in January 1996 in a single gallery at El Pedregal, the courtyard marketplace at the entrance to the Boulders, where Scottsdale Road meets Carefree Highway. It was the Heard’s response, the East Valley Tribune wrote, to the Valley’s growth north.
It showed two exhibitions a year from the Heard’s collections and beyond: Hopi katsina dolls, Navajo blankets, the sculptor Allan Houser, the painter T.C. Cannon. In June 2007 it moved a mile south into a $2.9 million building of its own at the Summit shopping center, with two galleries, a larger shop and a café.
The visitors didn’t follow. The Heard closed the galleries on April 1, 2014, and left when the lease ran out at the end of May. There hasn’t been a Heard in Scottsdale since.
Two buildings
El Pedregal, 1996–2007. The branch lived in the Roy Lyon Center at El Pedregal, with what the Tribune called “only one modest gallery space.” The Heard’s library records the second anniversary on January 23, 1998, which puts the opening in January 1996. Shows ran from From Cairo to Carefree and Rain in its first season through Cloud Messengers: Hopi Katsina Dolls, Ramona Sakiestewa’s weavings, Navajo “fancy” blankets of the 1800s, T.C. Cannon, California and Great Basin baskets, Allan Houser, and a show on mid-century Native art in Scottsdale itself.
The Summit, 2007–2014. By around 2004 the Heard wanted more room. Private donations paid for the $2.9 million move, director Frank Goodyear Jr. told the Tribune, into a stand-alone building at 32633 N. Scottsdale Rd: 4,000 square feet with a long-term gallery and a rotating one, a bigger shop, and a café run by Arcadia Farms. Members saw it on June 28, 2007; the public on June 30. Curator Tricia Loscher opened with Choices and Change, which included katsina dolls Barry Goldwater had given the Heard. Later shows took in Cape Dorset prints, Hopi artists, gold jewelry, dolls, ledger art, Diné photographers and American Indian fashion, with a yearly Be Dazzled gala and evening events.
Why it closed
In January 2014 the Heard announced it would not renew the lease. Its statement said the building had been “designed and constructed to be operated during a period of greater economic prosperity” and wasn’t sustainable. Reporting at the time added two reasons: the development expected around the Summit never arrived, and the area’s homes were largely winter residences, so the summers were empty. The galleries closed April 1, the café and shop May 1, and the lease ended May 31, 2014. CEO James Pepper Henry thanked the city and the Summit’s owner, Donohue Schriber.
The sources, and the gaps
Main sources: the Heard Museum’s own pamphlet-collection index, which dates the anniversaries, the 2007 openings and the exhibitions; the East Valley Tribune’s June 2007 story on the move; Phoenix New Times’s January 2014 report of the closing announcement; and an azcentral story on the reasons, read in a reprint.
What’s unsettled:
- “Fifteen years.” New Times and azcentral both wrote in 2014 that the branch had been open fifteen years, which would mean 1999. The Heard’s own records show it open by January 1996.
- The Summit address. 32633 N. Scottsdale Rd is shared by more than one building in the shopping center; our map point is approximate.
- What’s there now. We haven’t found who took the 2007 building at the Summit. El Pedregal, Roy Lyon Center and all, was demolished in the late 2010s, as our El Pedregal page records.
A correction elsewhere on this site. Our El Pedregal page said the branch closed “in the mid-2010s.” It closed in May 2014; that page has been updated.
Why it matters
Heard Museum North was a bet that north Scottsdale, the resort and second-home country around Carefree, would support a real museum. It worked in a borrowed gallery and didn’t in a building of its own, and its eighteen years cover the area’s growth and its limits: plenty of winter visitors, and too few people in the summer. It’s also part of Scottsdale’s long tie to Native art, from the Kiva Craft Center of the 1950s to the galleries on Main Street.