Why they matter
Scottsdale’s postwar reputation as an arts town was built by artists — the Craft Center, Lloyd Kiva New, the galleries of Fifth Avenue. Its institutions were built by patrons, and the largest of them lived a mile west of the city line. Bob Herberger, who had founded a department-store chain in Minnesota, and Kax Herberger, a doctor’s daughter with a university degree and an eye for the arts, moved to Paradise Valley in 1949 and spent the next fifty years writing checks: the Scottsdale Artists’ School she founded in 1983 in the old Loloma schoolhouse, the Herberger Theater Center in Phoenix, more than a hundred gifts to Arizona State that ended in a $12 million bequest and a college with her name on it. Kierland, on the city’s western edge, is her maiden name.
Where to find their mark today
The Scottsdale Artists’ School. In the 1928 Loloma School on Marshall Way, still teaching drawing and painting.
Kierland. Kierland Commons and the Westin Kierland on the Scottsdale–Phoenix line.
The Herberger Theater and the Herberger Institute. Downtown Phoenix and Tempe, the two biggest buildings with the name.
Seeing it for yourself
Most of what the Herbergers built is outside Scottsdale, and this profile does not pretend otherwise: the theater is in Phoenix, the institute in Tempe, and the couple’s home was in Paradise Valley, on the Camelback corridor that belongs to three jurisdictions. The Scottsdale pieces are the Artists’ School, a block off Main Street, and the Kierland district. The 1980s chapter covers the decade the school and the theater opened; the resort metropolis era is the Scottsdale their money helped furnish.
The full story
G. Robert Herberger was born in Osakis, Minnesota in 1904 and in 1927 founded the store that became G.R. Herberger’s, a department-store chain that grew to forty stores in ten states before he sold his stock to his employees and stayed on as chairman; he later ran Butler Brothers and, in 1964, managed the finances of his friend Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign. Katherine Kierland was born in Mahnomen, Minnesota in 1912, the daughter of Dr. Peter Kierland, and went to the University of Minnesota; everyone called her Kax. They married in 1934 and in 1949 moved their family to the Valley, where they bought a house in Paradise Valley below Camelback and kept a summer place back in Alexandria, Minnesota.
Their giving began with ASU’s College of Fine Arts in 1962 and never stopped — “more than 100 gifts,” dean Bob Wills counted in 2003, before the big one. Kax volunteered on the Scottsdale Fine Arts Commission, and in 1983 she was among the founders of the Scottsdale Artists’ School, a working atelier that started in a single studio and in 1993 moved into the 1928 Loloma School on Marshall Way, which the district had closed at the start of the 1980s — a school for artists in a school for children, and the couple’s most Scottsdale institution. In 1989 the Herberger Theater Center opened in downtown Phoenix, after attorney Richard Mallery had pitched the idea to the couple over lunch on a rooftop overlooking the site; it was named for Bob, and Kax was “key in seeing the project through.” The list went on: the Salvation Army’s Herberger Center, Valley Presbyterian Church, land for thirty-one Valley parks and McDowell Mountain Regional Park, Ballet Arizona rescued twice, the adoption charity AASK co-founded.
Bob died in 1999 at 94, the year the couple were named Arizona Historymakers. In April 2000 Kax gave ASU $12 million, the largest gift the college had received, and it became the Katherine K. Herberger College of Fine Arts; she was the first woman to chair the ASU Foundation. She died on April 19, 2003, a week after a stroke, at Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, aged 91. “We’ve lived a good life here,” her son Gary said, “and my parents felt it was worthwhile to make a better community.” In 2009 the college became the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, with more than 8,000 students, and the family name stayed on the Kierland district — Kax’s maiden name — where a Westin and a lifestyle center stand on the line between the two cities the couple spent their lives on either side of.