Why he matters
Every artists’ colony needs a first serious artist, and at Cattle Track it was Philip C. Curtis. He had come to Arizona on a New Deal assignment to build the state’s first art center, the institution that became the Phoenix Art Museum. In 1948 he moved into a barn on George and Rachael Ellis’s homestead beside the Arizona Canal and stayed for the rest of a very long career.
The paintings he made there are unmistakable: Victorian figures stranded in empty desert light, formal and lonely. By the site’s account he is the most distinctive painter Arizona has produced.
Where to find his mark today
Cattle Track Arts Compound. The Ellises moved a barn onto the property for Curtis and his wife Marge in 1948; the compound around it still houses some twenty to thirty working artists.
Andaz Scottsdale. The resort next door built its identity around Cattle Track and name-checks “Philip Curtis of Arizona Highways fame.”
The town he walked into
In 1948 Scottsdale was a postwar farm town turning itself into an arts colony. The 1940s had brought the Arizona Craft Center co-op, and newcomers such as Lloyd Kiva New were setting up studios downtown. Curtis chose the canal bank instead, a couple of miles north of the townsite, where the land was cheap and the Ellises had spare buildings. His arrival turned a homestead into an artists’ colony, and painters, sculptors and photographers followed, with Fritz Scholder settling across the street.
The full story
Philip C. Curtis was born in Michigan in 1907 and came to Arizona in the 1930s under the Federal Art Project, the New Deal program that paid artists to paint and teach. His assignment was to establish Arizona’s first art center, and that institution grew into the Phoenix Art Museum.
He stayed after the project ended. In 1948 he met George Ellis, and the Ellis family moved a barn from a neighboring ranch onto their ten acres by the canal as a house and studio for Curtis and his wife Marge. That barn was his studio for decades. He painted Victorian-looking figures placed in bare desert space under a flat, strange light. Critics called it surrealism. It also looks a lot like the desert.
Cattle Track grew up around him: Fritz Scholder across the street, sculptor Ron Hagerty wintering on the grounds, photographers Pedro Guerrero and Jay Dusard. Curtis died in 2000, a year after the compound was listed on the National Register. It is still the one place in Scottsdale where the arts colony of the 1940s is still at work.