Why they matter
Scottsdale’s arts colony did not start with the galleries of the 1950s. It started in the Depression, with artists who came to Arizona because the New Deal paid them to teach and the desert was cheap to live in. Lew Davis, a painter born in Jerome in 1910, came home from New York in 1935 and taught at the WPA’s Phoenix Federal Art Center. Mathilde Schaefer, a sculptor and potter from Chicago, built a studio in an adobe at Scottsdale. In 1937, by the city’s account, they married and helped found Arizona Painters and Sculptors, an organization of professional artists formed “to advance economic and cultural interests of state artists and art,” the closest thing the state’s artists had to a trade association.
Ten years later both were among the craftsmen who opened the Arizona Craftsmen’s shops at Main Street and Brown Avenue, where tourists could watch artists work. That building, and the craft village that grew from it after the 1950 fire, became the arts district. The 1930–1951 politics chapter puts them in the town’s Depression story.
Where to find their mark today
The Arabian Library. Kenji Umeda’s pink marble memorial to Davis, Allurement of a Journey (1980), moved here from the Civic Center in 2021.
The Pink Pony. By the city’s history, Davis named it and drew its ponies.
The New Deal artists
The Phoenix Art Museum’s biography of Davis gives the start: “Born in the copper mining town of Jerome, Lew Davis left Arizona for New York for art study. He returned to the state in 1935 in the depths of the Depression, and became involved in local New Deal programs which included teaching art at the Phoenix Federal Art Center, head by Philip C. Curtis.” The art center, which opened in 1937, was the WPA Federal Art Project’s outpost in Arizona and the ancestor of the Phoenix Art Museum; Philip Curtis ran it.
Schaefer’s arrival is dated two ways. A 1939 Arizona Highways profile calls her “a resident of Arizona since May, 1935,” and says “She lives in Scottsdale, where a sprawling adobe house is her home and studio.” The city’s arts-colony history says she moved to Scottsdale from Chicago in 1936 and “set up the first kiln in Arizona where she produced ‘Arizona Artware’ pottery.” The same history says that “a year later she married artist Lew Davis,” though the 1939 magazine still calls her “Miss Schaefer,” perhaps as her professional name.
The city’s history also names the cause they organized for. In 1937 they “were founding members and officers in Arizona Painters and Sculptors, an organization of professional Arizona artists formed in 1937 ‘to advance economic and cultural interests of state artists and art.’” No other record of the organization from those years has been found.
The Craftsmen and after
In 1947, with backing from Tom Darlington and K. T. Palmer, a group of artisans opened a craft center in the E. O. Brown building at the southwest corner of Main Street and Brown Avenue: by the Historical Society’s list, Schaefer, Davis, Philip Sanderson, Lloyd Kiva New, Wes Segner and Leonard Yuschik. The city’s history calls the arrangement demonstration studios, workshops and sales rooms combined, where winter visitors could watch the work being made. The same year the new Chamber of Commerce proclaimed Scottsdale “The West’s Most Western Town,” and the artists and the merchants built the Western-and-crafts downtown together. When fire destroyed the building in 1950, the craftsmen rebuilt to the north and west, along what became Craftsman Court and Fifth Avenue.
Davis also left a mark on the town’s look. The city’s history says the name of the Pink Pony, the steakhouse on Scottsdale Road, was “conceived by Lew Davis,” and that he “designed the restaurant’s westernized pony logos.” He was widely called the dean of Arizona artists. He died in 1979, and patrons and friends commissioned the Japanese sculptor Kenji Umeda’s marble memorial, which stood at the Civic Center until it moved to the Arabian Library in 2021.
What the record doesn’t show. Schaefer’s life dates and later career, the exact date of the marriage, and any surviving record of Arizona Painters and Sculptors, its members, dues or campaigns. The Archives of American Art and the Phoenix Art Museum’s archives are the places to look.