What it’s actually like
Walk far enough west on Main Street and the turquoise stops being sold by the tray. Faust Gallery, in Suite 4 of the 7100 East Main building, is the room where contemporary Native American work is shown the way a fine-art gallery shows anything: a few pieces to a wall, a sculptor’s name on the label, a price that assumes you know who the artist is. Jewelry, sculpture, pottery and painting by top living Native artists, and nothing that could be mistaken for a souvenir.
Bill Faust opened it in 1996 with a pedigree the district respects. His great-aunt Lovena Ohl was a buyer for the Heard Museum gift shop in Phoenix, and she helped make that shop a respected showcase of Indigenous fine art at a time when most of the market was still trading-post pawn and tourist silver. The gallery inherits her standard: the artist first, the material second, the tourist market not at all.
The room is quiet and serious without being cold, and it is at its best on a Thursday evening, when it opens for the ArtWalk and the gallery row fills. There is a sister gallery in Santa Fe, which matters: the two cities are the twin capitals of the Native fine-art market, and Faust moves artists and collectors between them. Next door in Suite 3 is Territorial Indian Arts, the oldest Native art gallery on the street, which makes this building the most concentrated address for the serious end of the trade in Old Town.
What to buy
Contemporary jewelry by a named artist. The gallery’s core. Modern forms and stones set as sculpture — the tradition the Kiva Craft Center’s Charles Loloma started on Fifth Avenue in the 1950s, carried forward by the artists working now.
Sculpture. Work by living Native sculptors, and the category that most clearly separates this room from the jewelry stores.
Pottery and painting. Potters and painters working in contemporary idioms, chosen by a gallery whose family once bought for the Heard.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The 7100 East Main building is toward the west end of the Main Street Arts District, the gallery row west of Scottsdale Road. Street parking on Main is scarce; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is about seven minutes on foot, and the Old Town on foot note maps the walk through the Old Town core. Ride-share drop-off at Main and Marshall Way puts you a block away.
Thursday night is the night. The ArtWalk has run on Main Street and Marshall Way every week since 1975, and Faust keeps evening hours for it; the crowd is a mix of collectors and browsers and the gallery staff are generous with both. In high season, January through April, the winter residents who buy at this level are in town and new work arrives regularly. In summer the district keeps daytime hours, so go before the heat and expect a quieter, longer conversation.
Treat it as a gallery visit, not a shop stop. Look at everything, ask about the artists, and if a piece is for you, ask about the maker’s other work in Santa Fe before you decide.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro is a few doors along Main and has fed gallery-goers since 1987. Craft 64 at the west end of the street does wood-fired pizza and Arizona beer. A block north on First Avenue, Arcadia Farms Cafe is the farm-fresh lunch that has run since 1990, and across Scottsdale Road, the Rusty Spur Saloon in its 1921 bank is the honky-tonk counterweight to an evening of fine art.
How it got here
The Heard Museum in Phoenix is where Native art in Arizona became fine art, and part of that shift happened in its gift shop. Lovena Ohl, as a buyer there, helped turn the museum shop into a respected showcase for Indigenous artists, insisting on the maker’s name and the quality of the work at a time when most of the regional market ran on anonymous trading-post silver. Her great-nephew, Bill Faust, grew up with that standard in the family.
He opened Faust Gallery on Main Street in 1996. The 1990s were a good decade for it: Old Town’s gallery row had matured since the ArtWalk began in 1975, the Western bronze and landscape trade held the blocks west of Scottsdale Road, and the Native jewelry business had split into a souvenir tier and a collector tier. Faust planted itself firmly in the second, showing contemporary Native jewelry, sculpture, pottery and painting by living artists as art rather than craft — the approach the Heard had pioneered, applied to a commercial room on the gallery row.
The Santa Fe gallery extended the model to the other capital of the field. A dealer with rooms in both cities can follow artists and collectors through the year rather than waiting for them to come to Arizona. It is the structure the top-tier galleries on Main Street share, and it is why the work in Suite 4 is often the same work a collector would find in New Mexico.
The building helps tell the story. Suite 3 next door holds Territorial Indian Arts & Antiques, on Main Street since 1969 and the oldest American Indian art gallery on the street; it deals in the historic side — rugs, baskets, older silver. Faust in Suite 4 deals in what those traditions have become. Between them, and with Waddell Gallery a few doors east, this stretch of Main Street is where the Native art trade that started with the Kiva Craft Center on Fifth Avenue in 1955 has ended up: mature, serious and, finally, treated as the art it always was.