What it’s actually like
The galleries on Main Street’s last block before Scottsdale Road mostly whisper. DeRubeis Fine Art of Metal, at 7171 East Main, does not. The front of the room belongs to Chris DeRubeis, who paints on sheets of metal, grinding, etching and chemically treating the surface before adding color, so that a piece flashes and shifts as you walk past it. He calls the style Abstract Sensualism, and the effect under gallery lights is closer to a light show than a painting.
The rest of the roster is chosen in the same spirit. Nano Lopez’s bronzes are whimsical, textured animals; Dale Mathis builds sculpture from pistons and gears; Patrick Guyton works on silver and gold leaf; Steve Barton’s impressionistic still lifes come in wavy, sculpted frames that break the rectangle. Michael Cheval’s surreal, reversed-logic painting and Michael Summers’s pop surrealism fill the walls toward the back, along with Ruby Mazur’s rock-and-roll pop art, glass by Charles Lowrie and, per the 2026 district guide, caricatures by the comedian Kevin Nealon and work by a twelve-year-old prodigy, Zoya Eshwar.
This is not the gallery for a quiet hour with a landscape. It is the gallery where families stop on a Thursday because the kids have spotted something shining, and where the staff are good-humored about it. Reviewers single out the knowledgeable, personable people behind the desk.
What to buy
A DeRubeis original. The reason for the name: a painting on metal, unlike anything else on the street, and best judged by watching it change as you move.
A Nano Lopez bronze. Small enough for a shelf and full of character, the most giftable thing in the room.
Gear sculpture. Dale Mathis’s mechanical pieces are the conversation-starter for an office or a garage.
Something with a frame that moves. Steve Barton’s wavy frames are the gallery’s most photographed objects for a reason.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The gallery is on the south side of the block of Main Street just west of Scottsdale Road, a few doors from The Signature Gallery and across from Gebert Contemporary, with The Legacy Gallery on the corner. Main Street parking turns over slowly; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a flat five-minute walk east. The Old Town on foot note maps the grid and the Main Street Arts District guide covers the rest of the row.
The hours are unusual for the street: open every day, but only from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with Thursday stretched from noon to 9 p.m. for the ArtWalk. That makes DeRubeis a good Sunday or Monday stop when some neighbors are dark, and a bad last stop on a weekday. Thursday night is the gallery at its best: the metal pieces under evening light, the street full, artists sometimes in the room.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro is a few doors west at 7131 East Main. The Rusty Spur Saloon across Scottsdale Road is the live country band and cold beer after ArtWalk, in a building that was a bank in 1921. The Sugar Bowl on Scottsdale Road is the ice cream stop for the kids who found the shiny paintings, and Los Olivos on Second Street has served Mexican food here since 1947.
How it got here
Main Street’s gallery history begins with Western art. Troy’s Cowboy Art Gallery opened in 1968 as the first gallery on the street, and through the 1970s and 1980s dealers in bronze, landscape and cowboy painting filled the storefronts west of Scottsdale Road. The ArtWalk, begun in 1975, turned the district into a weekly event and, over time, into a tourist one, and by the 2010s the street held a wider and more commercial mix than its founders would have recognized.
DeRubeis is part of that newer Main Street. Chris DeRubeis built his career on a technique of his own — painting on metal by working its surface with tools and chemicals — and a business model of his own, opening galleries in resort towns where visitors walk and browse. By March 2014 the Scottsdale gallery was on Main near Scottsdale Road, and an ArtWalk crowd had gathered to meet the artist, who wore a punk-rock look and by then had showrooms in Las Vegas, Florida and Hawaii. The Explore Art Phoenix blogger who reported it was unimpressed and said so; the crowd evidently was not, and the gallery has outlasted many of the rooms around it.
It has since broadened from a single-artist showroom into a gallery of more than a dozen artists who share DeRubeis’s taste for spectacle, from Nano Lopez’s bronzes to Dale Mathis’s machinery, while DeRubeis’s own work continues to hang in resort-town galleries from Key West to Hawaii.
Its neighbors on the block are some of the district’s most traditional rooms — Legacy, the Scottsdale Art Auction, T.H. Brennen — and the contrast is the point of Main Street in the 2020s: a street that still sells the West, with something shining in the window between the bronze horses.