What it’s actually like
Main Street’s galleries tend to be one room deep with a back office. Bonner David Galleries, at 7040 East Main Street, is a dual gallery space — two connected galleries under one name — and one of the largest in Scottsdale, which changes what a visit feels like. There is room here to hang nearly fifty artists properly, to give a traditional realist a wall and a contemporary abstractionist a wall and let the two argue across the floor, and to stage the kind of solo shows that most Main Street rooms cannot fit.
The program is the point. Clark David Olson, a gallerist and collector, and Christi Bonner Manuelito, an artist, founded the gallery in 2002 with a roster that deliberately spans traditional and contemporary work from around the world — realism and impressionism alongside abstraction and contemporary figurative painting, plus sculpture — and the two halves of the space let the range breathe. It is not a Western gallery, though it sits in a Western district and shows work a Western collector would recognize; it is a fine-art gallery that happens to be on Main Street.
In 2020 Bonner David opened a second gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, on Museum Mile, which tells you the level the Scottsdale rooms operate at. The staff are polished and welcoming, the lighting is good, and a slow lap of both spaces is one of the more rewarding half-hours in the district whether or not you leave with anything.
What to buy
A traditional realist painting. The classical side of the roster — still life, figurative, landscape by academically trained painters — is where Bonner David’s reputation began.
A contemporary canvas. The other half of the space: abstraction and modern figurative work from an international roster, hung in conversation with the traditional side.
Sculpture. Pieces from the roster for the buyer with a pedestal and no wall left.
A show. Ask about the exhibition calendar; the dual space is built for solo shows and openings, and seeing an artist’s body of work together is worth timing a trip around.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The gallery sits toward the west end of the Main Street Arts District, a block and a half west of Scottsdale Road, with Altamira Fine Art next door and Xanadu Gallery across the street. Main Street parking is scarce; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a flat eight-minute walk east, and the Old Town on foot note maps it. The Old Town guide covers the district.
Thursday’s ArtWalk runs the length of Main Street after sunset and is the gallery’s weekly moment. January through April is high season, when the collectors are in residence and the exhibition calendar is fullest; a weekday afternoon in summer is when you get both rooms to yourself. If you are timing a trip around a specific artist, ask about the show schedule before you book, and if you split time between Arizona and New York, ask which artists hang in both galleries.
Eat while you’re there
Craft 64 is a block west at 6922 East Main for pizza and Arizona beer. Malee’s Thai Bistro at 7131 is the gallery row’s long-running dinner and Craft 64 further west is the pizza-and-Arizona-beer one. Los Olivos on Second Street has fed downtown since 1947, and the Sugar Bowl at Scottsdale Road and First Avenue is pink and has been since 1958.
How it got here
By 2002 Main Street had been a gallery row for thirty years, and it had a type: Western art, traditional in manner, sold to the collectors who wintered in the resorts. The 1970s and 1980s had built that identity and the 1990s had solidified it, with the Thursday ArtWalk drawing crowds down a street of bronzes and canvases of the West. The district was thriving, but it was narrow.
Clark David Olson and Christi Bonner Manuelito opened Bonner David Galleries that year with a different idea: a gallery on Main Street that was not a Western gallery, with a roster spanning traditional and contemporary work from around the world, run by a gallerist and collector on one side and a working artist on the other. The name comes from the founders’ own — Bonner and David. The pairing gave the gallery an eye for both sides of the market, the collector’s sense of what holds value and the artist’s sense of what is actually good, and the program reflected it from the start, hanging classical realism and contemporary abstraction in the same rooms.
The gallery grew into a dual space, two connected galleries that make it one of the largest in Scottsdale, and its roster grew to nearly fifty artists. Over the 2000s and 2010s, as Old Town redeveloped around it and the arts district competed with the Waterfront and the bar blocks for visitors’ evenings, Bonner David became one of the anchors that kept Main Street serious. Its neighbors tell the same story: Xanadu Gallery moved to the block in 2006 and Altamira Fine Art arrived from Jackson Hole in 2013, and the west end of Main Street became the district’s address for contemporary work alongside the Western.
In 2020 the gallery opened a second space on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, on Museum Mile — an unusual move for a Scottsdale gallery and a statement about the level the program had reached. The Scottsdale rooms remain the flagship, and the Main Street address, twenty-plus years on, is the gallery’s home.