What is SMoCA?
It’s the low, plain building on Second Street next to the theater, and it’s easy to walk past on the way to a show. That’s partly the point. SMoCA, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (the lowercase o is on purpose), opened in February 1999 inside a closed movie theater that Phoenix architect Will Bruder stripped down and rebuilt as galleries. Scottsdale Arts describes the result as “minimalist.” There are five galleries for changing exhibitions and the museum’s permanent collection, which covers 2D and 3D art, architecture and design by local, national and international artists.
The thing people remember is outside the galleries. In the courtyard is Knight Rise, a skyspace by James Turrell, installed in 2001. It’s a room with a hole in the ceiling. You sit on the bench and look up, and the sky in the opening seems to change color as the light outside changes. Nothing else in Scottsdale works quite like it.
SMoCA is one of three things the nonprofit Scottsdale Arts runs on the Civic Center for the city. The others are the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts next door and the public art program, which puts on Canal Convergence every November. The city owns the building and the collection. Our lexicon entry sorts out the three names.
How to visit
Choose the day. SMoCA is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and until 7 p.m. on Thursdays. It’s closed Mondays, Tuesdays and select holidays. General admission is $16, or $13 for students, seniors and educators. Visitors 18 and under get in free, and so do members and NARM members. On Thursdays and every second Saturday you pay what you wish. Thursday is the best day: cheaper, open later, and in the cooler months the ArtWalk galleries on Marshall Way and Main Street are open that evening.
What’s on. The shows change several times a year. In fall 2026 there are three:
- Desert Perspectives (September 19, 2026 to September 5, 2027) is drawn from the collection. Scottsdale Arts calls it “a multigenerational group of artists working in—or regionally connected to the Southwest.”
- Desert ArtLAB: What the Earth Keeps (September 19, 2026 to January 31, 2027) is a site-specific installation, performance and cyanotype-mapping project about land, ecology and cultural memory.
- Alejandro T. Acierto: Model Home (September 26, 2026 to February 7, 2027) is an installation about how development and population growth are changing the desert around Phoenix.
The museum offers a free digital guide on the Bloomberg Connects app.
Save Knight Rise for the end. It’s a twenty-minute room, not a two-minute one. Go late in the afternoon if you can, when the light is moving fastest. Sit, stop talking, and look up.
Park once, see the campus. The Civic Center garage is free, and SMoCA, the Center, the sculpture lawns, the Civic Center Library and the Little Red Schoolhouse are all within a few minutes of each other. Our public art walking tour covers the sculpture on the surrounding blocks. For the city’s other big museum, Western Spirit is about ten minutes west on foot at Marshall Way.
A Western town builds a contemporary museum
The museum Scottsdale got first was not the one its planners had in mind. A citizens’ task force in the 1960s wanted a Western art museum to go with the slogan, and the Civic Center that Bennie Gonzales designed had room for the arts. When the Scottsdale Center for the Arts opened in 1975, it served as both a performance hall and a visual arts venue.
In 1987 the city chartered a nonprofit, the Scottsdale Cultural Council, to run its arts facilities, and the following year it took over the Center. Wikipedia dates the idea of a separate museum to 1988. The council’s founding president, Frank Jacobson, led a $9.6 million capital and endowment campaign in the late 1990s. The council didn’t build a Western museum. It built a contemporary one, in a closed five-screen cinema beside the Center, and hired Will Bruder to convert it. SMoCA opened in February 1999. Turrell’s Knight Rise followed in 2001. The Western museum came sixteen years later, separately, as Western Spirit.
That choice gave the Cultural Council a second building, a curatorial staff and a museum without much admission income to support it. It still shapes the relationship between the city and Scottsdale Arts, the name the council took in 2016. The city pays a management fee, the nonprofit raises the rest, and the council argues over the contract every few years. Our Scottsdale Arts guide covers the audits and the 2025 extension.
What it has shown
Wikipedia lists exhibitions over the years by artists including Olafur Eliasson, Paolo Soleri and Lydia Okumura. The museum’s brief has always been broader than painting. Architecture and design are in the mission statement, which suits a city with Taliesin West and Cosanti inside its limits. The fall 2026 shows point the same way, toward the desert and what building on it does.
Why it matters
Old Town sells the West, and most of its galleries sell Western and Native art. SMoCA is the one place in the district that shows what artists are making right now, including artists from Phoenix and the Southwest. It is small enough to see in an hour, and on Thursdays you decide what that hour costs. Then you can sit under the sky in Turrell’s room, two blocks from the bars on Scottsdale Road, and it is very quiet.