What it’s actually like
Most galleries on the arts district’s front blocks want you to look at the wall and keep your voice down. Anticus wants you to sit. It describes itself as a fine-art gallery, a boutique bookstore and an artful-living space at once, and the room on Scottsdale Road at Main Street is arranged that way: paintings on the walls, sculpture on plinths, tables of books between them, cases of handmade jewelry, a few pieces of furniture set up as if someone lives there. It feels less like a showroom than like the house of a collector who reads.
The art leans contemporary and tactile. The gallery’s own description runs to contemporary oils, heavy-impasto palette-knife paintings, bold abstract canvases and bronze figurative sculpture from national and regional artists, and it also carries an authorized collection of Dr. Seuss graphic art, which is the surprise most first-time visitors remember. The book side is curated by a dedicated book buyer across more than two dozen categories, with rare titles and luxury coffee-table books alongside new releases, and the staff will special-order what is not on the shelf.
The owner is Phillip Payne, an artist who came from a family of artists and made his first fine-art piece at fifteen. The name is his find: researching a sculpture, he came across the Latin motto Semper Anticus, always forward, used by soldiers who held the front line. That is the tone of the place: earnest, a little unexpected, and built around the idea that a gallery can be a gathering spot rather than a vault.
What to buy
A palette-knife painting. The thick, sculpted surfaces are the house style, and they read better in person than in any photograph. This is the piece to stand in front of.
A rare or oversized book. The bookstore is not an afterthought. The coffee-table and rare-book tables are the most giftable thing in the room and the easiest to carry home.
Artisan jewelry. The cases hold handmade pieces from working jewelers, the entry point to buying something original here.
A Dr. Seuss print. Odd in a contemporary gallery, and for that reason a popular buy, especially for collectors buying for children or grandchildren.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Anticus sits on the west side of Scottsdale Road where Main Street turns west into the gallery blocks, steps from American Fine Art and The Legacy Gallery. Scottsdale Road frontage parking is scarce and the private lots along it enforce; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a short flat walk east, and the shop-lined route from there is covered in the Old Town on foot note.
Hours are seven days, generally ten to five, with late hours on Thursday for the Scottsdale ArtWalk; the gallery says it will also open at other times by appointment. Thursday nights bring demonstrations and events. Weekday mornings are when you get the floor and the staff to yourself. For a large piece, ask about the layaway program and the in-home preview, which the gallery offers for collectors in the Valley; art consulting and installation are offered as paid services.
The book clubs are the regulars’ way in. There are three, each with a monthly pick, and the gallery says no RSVP is needed, which makes a meeting the easiest low-pressure way to spend an evening in the district if you are not a buyer. The Main Street Arts District guide covers the rest of the walk west.
Eat while you’re there
Daily Dose a block north on Scottsdale Road is breakfast before a morning visit. The pink Sugar Bowl, at Scottsdale Road and First Avenue since 1958, is the ice-cream stop. West along Main, Malee’s Thai Bistro has fed gallery-goers since 1987, and Sel is the prix-fixe dinner after a Thursday ArtWalk. East across Scottsdale Road, the Rusty Spur Saloon pours in the 1921 bank building.
How it got here
The corner Anticus sits on has been the hinge of downtown Scottsdale for seventy years. East of Scottsdale Road are the Western blocks of the old townsite, the saloons and false fronts of the 1950s “West’s Most Western Town” campaign. West of it, Main Street became the gallery street in the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1975 its galleries began opening together on Thursday nights in the ritual that became the ArtWalk. The big building on the northwest corner went up as an F.W. Woolworth in 1959 and has housed The Legacy Gallery since the early 1990s; the southwest corner holds American Fine Art’s showroom. Anticus is part of that front row, the first thing a visitor walking west from the saloons reaches.
The gallery’s model belongs to the 2020s more than to the district’s past. Main Street’s classic galleries were built on Western bronze and landscape painting sold by dealers in a hushed room; Anticus mixes contemporary painting with books, jewelry, furniture and community events, and treats the book clubs as seriously as the openings. Owner Phillip Payne grew up in an artist’s household; the gallery’s own history describes his father as a pioneering Arizona studio artist and public sculptor, and Payne built Anticus around the idea that art, books and conversation belong in the same room.
That makes it an outlier on a street whose galleries are mostly specialists, and a useful one. Visitors who find the traditional rooms intimidating tend to relax here, and readers who would never walk into a gallery come for a book club and leave looking at the walls. For the traditional side of the district, The Legacy Gallery on the corner is the counterpoint; for a dedicated bookstore, The Poisoned Pen on Goldwater has been downtown’s mystery specialist since 1989.