What it’s actually like
Main Street’s palette is mostly earth tones. J Klein Gallery, at 7136 East Main, is the exception you see from across the street: big, saturated acrylics in broad strokes, flowers and fields and farm rows broken into blocks of color, hung in a bright room that the family who runs it calls “the spirit of art.” It is a modern art gallery in a traditional district, and it is family-owned and -operated.
The center of it is Jim Klein, a Colorado painter whose abstractions start from nature, agriculture, music and form. He is a fan of Matisse and Van Gogh, and you can see both in the work — the flat, joyous color of one, the loaded brush of the other — but the subjects are his own, rooted in the Colorado farm country where he keeps a studio. Around his paintings hang two other family artists: Jeffrey Berryman, who founded a style he calls “Surruralism,” a modern, high-contrast reworking of agriculture, animals and city scenes; and Dan Ostermiller, billed by the gallery as America’s premier wildlife sculptor, whose bronzes run from handheld pieces to large outdoor installations.
The gallery was named to Modern Luxury’s “Best of the City” list of the top five art galleries in Scottsdale in 2016, and it has a sister room in Windsor, Colorado. But the thing locals know it for is the J Klein Art Factory, a small working studio on Main where Klein paints in public on Thursday nights.
What to buy
A Jim Klein acrylic. The reason the gallery exists — bold color, abstracted landscapes, flowers and farm subjects, at sizes up to statement walls.
A Dan Ostermiller bronze. Wildlife sculpture from a nationally known name, from a tabletop animal to a garden piece.
A Jeffrey Berryman. “Surruralism” is the gallery’s most distinctive idea, a modern take on rural Western subjects that sits between Klein’s abstraction and Ostermiller’s realism.
Something from the online gallery. The gallery sells online too, which helps if the piece you saw on Main Street needs to be shipped or you want to decide at home.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The gallery sits on the eastern half of the Main Street block between Marshall Way and Scottsdale Road, near Pejman Gallery and across from Bella Fine Art Gallery, with The Legacy Gallery at the corner. Curb parking on Main is short-term and scarce; 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.
Thursday is the night. The ArtWalk brings the street alive after dark, and the Art Factory is open on Thursday nights so you can watch Klein paint — kids especially love it, and he says he does too. The gallery opens seven days a week; check current hours on its website before a special trip, particularly in summer. Sign up for the monthly newsletter, in the gallery or online, for new work and show dates.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro at 7131 East Main is across the street and has fed the gallery row since 1987. The Sugar Bowl is a block north on Scottsdale Road, pink since 1958, and the Rusty Spur Saloon across Scottsdale Road pours in the 1921 Farmers State Bank. Los Olivos on Second Street is the Sonoran dinner.
How it got here
Main Street grew up in the 1970s as Scottsdale’s Western art row, and for most of the decades since, a bold acrylic abstract would have looked out of place between the bronzes and landscapes. Contemporary work gravitated to Marshall Way. By the 2010s that line had blurred, and Main Street had room for family- and artist-run galleries selling contemporary work alongside the Western rooms.
J Klein Gallery is one of those. Built around the paintings of Jim Klein, a Colorado artist who paints between a farm studio and the city, and filled out with the work of two family artists — Berryman’s Surruralism and Ostermiller’s wildlife bronzes — it describes itself as family-owned and -operated, and it made Modern Luxury’s top-five list of Scottsdale galleries in 2016.
The Art Factory came out of an accident of real estate. Years back, a large storefront next to the gallery sat vacant for about three months between tenants, and Klein turned it into a working studio, painting in front of the windows while passersby watched or came in to talk. The experiment drew so much attention that clients kept asking about it after the next tenant moved in, and the family eventually reopened the Art Factory in a smaller space — “almost like a laboratory test tube,” Klein calls it — open on Thursday nights. In the 2020s the gallery remains a fixture of the Main Street ArtWalk and is listed, along with the Art Factory, in the March 2026 Scottsdale Arts District gallery guide; its sister gallery operates in Windsor, Colorado.