What is Western Spirit?
It’s the museum at the top of Marshall Way, where the galleries thin out and a two-story building with a facade of vertical steel ribs takes up the block. On the building and the website it’s Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West. In town, people call it the Museum of the West. It opened on January 15, 2015, and in March 2026 it got bigger.
The city owns the building and a nonprofit, Scottsdale Museum of the West, runs it. The idea goes back to Herb Drinkwater, the mayor from 1980 to 1996, who thought the West’s Most Western Town ought to have a Western museum. He died in 1997 without one. The nonprofit incorporated in 2007, the city committed the site, and ground broke on the former Loloma Transit Station (named for the Hopi jeweler Charles Loloma) on January 20, 2014. The Phoenix firm Studio Ma designed a 43,000-square-foot, LEED Gold building with eight exhibition spaces, a 135-seat theater and a sculpture courtyard. The Smithsonian made it an affiliate in its first year, and True West magazine named it the country’s top Western museum every year from 2016 through 2025.
The big change is the Louis Sands IV Center, a two-story, 12,000-square-foot wing that cost $12 million. The museum unveiled it on March 24, 2026 and opened it to the public, free, on March 28. Studio Ma designed this one too, and Core Construction built it. The museum is now 55,000 square feet. The wing is named for Louis “Buzz” Sands IV, a philanthropist and businessman who died in 2012, and it was paid for with a charitable gift. Chief curator Andrew Patrick Nelson says it lets the museum put “painting, sculpture, jewelry, and ceramics into conversation across two floors.” For how the museum compares with the rest of the city’s collections, see our museums and attractions guide.
How to see it
Park under it. The free City of Scottsdale garage sits beneath the museum. The entrance is the driveway just south of Main Street, on the north side of the building. The museum also lists accessible parking at Marshall Way and First Street. Don’t fight for a meter on Marshall Way. The garage is the easiest parking in this part of Old Town.
Start in the new wing. The Sands Center opened with four shows. On the main gallery level, three connected exhibitions cover the West in three dimensions. Visions in Bronze looks at how sculptors turned cowboys, mountain men and American Indian figures into icons. From Earth to the Stars traces American Indian jewelry in silver, turquoise and stone. Fire of Ages covers more than six centuries of American Indian ceramics, with Hopi and other Southwestern potters at the center. Upstairs, Working Pardners: Masterworks from the Eddie Basha Collection is the first public presentation of Eddie Basha’s collection of Western American and American Indian art, which the Republic called one of the most significant ever assembled. It includes paintings, sculpture and works on paper, among them pieces by Joe Beeler and other Cowboy Artists of America painters.
Then the old building. The anchor of the permanent collection is the Abe Hays Family Spirit of the West Collection, about 1,400 saddles, spurs, firearms, badges and other Old West objects. It is the room the regulars come back to. The rotating art shows on the original floors change through the year, so check the exhibitions page before you go.
Pick your day. The museum is open Monday through Saturday from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. From November through April it stays open until 8 p.m. on Thursdays, which lines up with the ArtWalk evenings in the Main Street arts district. From Memorial Day to Labor Day it’s closed Mondays. Admission is $28 for adults, $25 for seniors and military, $12 for students and ages 6 to 17, and free for 5 and under. The museum’s site also lists offers for Scottsdale residents and library cardholders, so read it before buying.
Make it a walk. The Old Town on foot route uses the museum as its northern turnaround. From here, the Little Red Schoolhouse and the Civic Center are about ten minutes east, and SMoCA and the Center for the Performing Arts sit on its Second Street edge. In February the museum programs Western Week around the Parada del Sol.
A slogan finally gets its museum
Scottsdale adopted “The West’s Most Western Town” in 1947 and spent the next sixty years without a museum to match. The Civic Center planners of the 1960s talked about a Western art museum. What the arts council actually built on the Civic Center, in 1999, was a contemporary one, SMoCA. The Western museum stayed an idea, and Drinkwater was its loudest backer. The Scottsdale Arts guide covers that fork in the road.
The nonprofit that finally built it incorporated in 2007. The site the city chose was the Loloma Transit Station, a bus stop at Marshall Way and First Street, which put the museum at the hinge between the Marshall Way galleries and the Civic Center. The building went up through 2014. The Scottsdale Charros gave $250,000 toward it that year, and it opened in January 2015. Our lexicon entry has the story of the name. In short, the nonprofit’s legal name is Scottsdale Museum of the West, and Western Spirit was added as the brand.
Ten years, then a second building
Square footage for the museum used to appear two ways in print, 43,000 and 55,000. The 2026 coverage clears this up. A construction trade report on the expansion described the existing museum as 43,000 square feet and the addition as about 11,400 square feet of new exhibition space on two floors, approved by a city council vote and estimated at about $12 million. The Phoenix Business Journal and The Arizona Republic reported at the opening that the wing added 12,000 square feet and brought the whole museum to 55,000. The city’s share, according to the trade report, was about $40,000 a year in added maintenance costs. The construction was funded through a charitable gift.
The museum held a week of events for the opening, called “Unmistakably West.” It started with a press unveiling on Tuesday, March 24, 2026, followed by a members’ preview on Friday and free public days on Saturday, March 28 and Sunday, March 29. Saturday had live Western music, food and whiskey tastings, Old West reenactors and demonstrations of metal stamping, stone setting and leather embossing. CEO and executive director Todd Bankofier called it “a defining moment for Scottsdale as the ‘The West’s Most Western Town.’”
Why it matters
Old Town is full of Western style: hitching posts, covered sidewalks, boot shops, the Parada every winter. Most of it is decoration, and some of it is costume. This museum is where the city keeps the actual objects and the art, and with the Sands Center it now gives American Indian jewelry and pottery the same floor space as the bronze cowboys. It’s also a reminder that the slogan took almost seventy years and a mayor’s posthumous campaign to get a building. For the other side of the city’s arts campus, walk ten minutes east to the Civic Center. For Native art collected and shown by Native institutions, the Heard Museum in Phoenix and the Huhugam Ki Museum on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community are the next stops.