Why they matter
Scottsdale’s art reputation is mostly built on things that arrived: Wright, the galleries, the festivals, the public-art budget. Cattle Track is the exception, the art scene that simply grew, and it grew because George and Rachael Ellis had land, spare buildings and a tolerance for interesting people. They homesteaded ten acres beside the Arizona Canal in 1937, and nearly ninety years later the place is still full of working artists and still in the family.
It should not have survived. By the 1990s this was infill land in the middle of a city that scrapes infill land. The Ellises and their daughter kept saying no.
Where to find their mark today
Cattle Track Arts Compound. About eleven buildings on Cattletrack Road off McDonald Drive, with ceramics, fiber, photography, a printing press and a blacksmith shop. Free to visit, and the gallery is the place to start.
Andaz Scottsdale. The resort next door built its identity on a partnership with the compound, and Cattle Track artists’ work fills its rooms.
Seeing it for yourself
The compound sits in a residential block of central Scottsdale, behind hedges, with almost no signage. Park on the gravel like a neighbor and treat it as a visit, not an attraction: people work and live here. The same year the Ellises homesteaded, Frank Lloyd Wright bought his mesa fifteen miles northeast, and a double bill with Taliesin West shows two versions of the same idea about building from what the desert has lying around.
The full story
George Ellis came to Arizona in the 1920s doing survey work for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. At a company picnic he met Rachael Murdock, a schoolteacher. In 1937, when Scottsdale was a farm village of a couple of thousand people, they homesteaded ten acres of desert along the Arizona Canal, and George built their first house, one room, from redwood staves pulled out of an abandoned water pipeline. Cowboys drove cattle along the canal bank past the spot, which is how the lane got its name.
George turned into one of the Valley’s more interesting builders: adobe made on site, salvage everywhere, houses that fit their ground. He worked on Wright-related projects, built the stairway at Paolo Soleri’s Dome House, and in 1959 built a house for a young lawyer named Sandra Day O’Connor.
The artists came because the Ellises let them. In 1948 the painter Philip C. Curtis met George, and the family moved a barn from a nearby ranch onto the property as a house and studio for Curtis and his wife Marge. Fritz Scholder lived across the street. Photographers and sculptors followed. None of it was a program. There was no foundation and no grant cycle, just a family with acreage beside a canal.
The recognition came late: an arts-complex designation from the city in 1996, the National Register in 1999, and an official street name, Cattletrack Road, in 2010. Their daughter Janie Ellis still runs the compound from the house she grew up in.