What it’s actually like
The Main Street Arts District has sold the West as bronzes of cowboys and oils of Canyon de Chelly for more than half a century, and Altamira Fine Art exists to argue that the West can also be a bison rendered in flat electric color, a mesa dissolved into geometry, a horse made of glass. It is the Scottsdale gallery of a Jackson Hole house that opened its flagship in Wyoming in 2008 and came to Main Street in 2013, and it brought with it a specific idea: contemporary Western art, the icons of the region handled by artists who have absorbed a century of modernism.
The room reads that way. Big canvases, clean walls, sculpture in bronze and glass, and light and mixed-media pieces that would be unthinkable in the traditional rooms a few doors down. It is expensive, in the way a gallery with a Jackson Hole clientele is expensive, and it is unapologetically a collector’s room rather than a browser’s. Across the street, Xanadu is the contemporary gallery without the Western brief; a few doors along, Bonner David runs one of the largest spaces in the district. Together they make this block the modern end of the Main Street Arts District.
The Wyoming connection is not incidental. Main Street’s traditional houses, Legacy Gallery and Trailside Galleries, have their own Jackson roots, and the two towns have traded Western art and Western collectors for decades. Altamira is the latest and the most modern strand of that exchange.
What to buy
A contemporary landscape of the country you drove through. The mountain and desert canvases are the core of the program, and the ones that abstract a familiar view are the pieces people come back for.
Wildlife with attitude. Bison, elk and horses in color that owes nothing to the field guide. This is what separates the gallery from the district’s realists.
Sculpture in glass or bronze, or a light work. The three-dimensional and lit pieces are the gallery’s furthest departure from tradition and the hardest to find anywhere else on the street.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Altamira is on the north side of Main Street west of Scottsdale Road, in the dense stretch of galleries between the Civic Center and the Western storefronts. Street spaces on Main are scarce and turn over fast; the reliable move is the free public garage at the Civic Center off Drinkwater Boulevard, a few minutes’ walk, or the garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal. The Old Town on foot note maps the district and the Old Town guide has the wider picture.
The Thursday ArtWalk is when Main Street is at its most alive and least suited to a serious purchase; visit then for the crowd, and on a weekday afternoon between January and April if you mean to buy. Summer is a morning-and-evening town, and the galleries keep daytime hours, so a July visit means a cool, quiet room and a hot walk to the car; the snowbird months are when the exhibitions turn over fastest and the best new work arrives.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro is the district’s long-running lunch, a block east on Main. Craft 64 further west handles the pizza-and-beer dinner. The Rusty Spur Saloon, in a 1921 bank on Main, is the traditional-West chaser to a contemporary-West afternoon, and AZ88 on the Civic Center mall is the sleek option if the gallery has put you in a modern mood.
How it got here
Main Street became a gallery row in the late 1960s, when Troy’s Cowboy Art Gallery opened in 1968 as the first gallery on the street and set the district’s terms: Western subjects, realist handling, collectors who wanted the frontier on their walls. Through the 1970s and 1980s the row filled in along those lines, and Scottsdale joined Jackson Hole and Santa Fe as one of the three towns where serious Western art was bought and sold.
Jackson Hole is where Altamira begins. The gallery’s flagship opened there in 2008, in a resort town whose art trade was as traditional as Scottsdale’s, and it staked out the contemporary end of the Western market: artists who painted the region’s landscapes and animals with the color, scale and abstraction of modern painting, and sculptors working in glass and light as readily as bronze. By the early 2010s that market had matured enough to support a second room, and the obvious place for it was the other Western art capital with a winter season.
The Scottsdale gallery opened on Main Street in 2013. The timing suited the district. The Arts District had spent the previous decade absorbing contemporary galleries alongside its Western houses, and the block west of Scottsdale Road, with Xanadu in the Main Street Plaza and Bonner David’s dual space nearby, had become the natural address for a room that wanted to be modern without leaving the Western conversation. Altamira fit between those poles precisely: Western enough for the traditional collector curious about where the genre was going, contemporary enough for the collector who would never buy a cowboy.
That is the gallery’s place on the street today. The Jackson Hole flagship and the Scottsdale room share a program and a clientele that migrates between mountain summers and desert winters, and Main Street, which once sold the West only as it had been, now sells it also as it is being seen. Altamira did not start that change, but on this block it is the clearest statement of it.