What it’s actually like
Most of Old Town’s Native art rooms lead with jewelry. King Galleries leads with clay. It occupies a string of suites in Marshall Square, the single-story courtyard complex on the south side of Main Street just west of Marshall Way, and the shelves are given over almost entirely to Pueblo pottery: black-on-black San Ildefonso bowls, carved Santa Clara jars, Hopi-Tewa polychromes, micaceous Nambe vessels, Acoma fine-line, with a few paintings and bronzes for contrast. The 2026 Arts District guide lists a main gallery and an annex in the same courtyard.
Charles King opened the gallery in 1996 and has spent the thirty years since becoming one of the people museums call. He has judged pottery at Santa Fe Indian Market, the Heard Museum Indian Market and Gallup Ceremonials, was elected to the board of SWAIA in 2008, and has written books on Margaret Tafoya, Tony Da and Virgil Ortiz, plus Spoken Through Clay. The gallery’s stated aim is to encourage traditional methods while pushing potters toward new forms, and the room shows both: a signed 1930s pot can sit three feet from something fired last spring.
It is a quiet, light room that suits the work, and the staff talk pottery the way other galleries talk provenance. A second King Galleries operates in Santa Fe, and the gallery shows there during Indian Market each August.
What to buy
A contemporary Pueblo pot. The heart of the stock: work by potters such as Tammy Garcia, Nancy Youngblood, Les Namingha and Russell Sanchez, and the younger potters the gallery has been encouraging for years.
A signed historic piece. Pottery from the 1920s onward by the matriarchs and innovators of the early twentieth century, the category that makes this room different from every jewelry case on Main.
A miniature or a small bowl. The website’s new-arrivals list regularly includes pieces in the low hundreds, which is where King himself started collecting as a teenager.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Marshall Square opens off the south side of Main Street a few steps west of Marshall Way; walk through to the courtyard and the King suites are among the studios and galleries ringing it. Main Street’s few spaces are short-term and usually gone. The free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is about eight minutes on foot, and the Old Town on foot note maps the route through the Old Town core.
Regular hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and the gallery opens for the Thursday ArtWalk from 7 to 9 p.m. Come on the Thursday for the courtyard at night; come on a weekday morning if you want someone to walk you through why one Santa Clara jar costs five times another. The guide to buying Native American art covers the questions worth asking.
For the rest of the Native trade on the street, Faust Gallery and Territorial Indian Arts & Antiques share the 7100 East Main building a block east, and Waddell Gallery holds the turquoise. That is four very different rooms in under ten minutes of walking.
Eat while you’re there
Sel is almost directly across Main Street and is the dinner reservation for an ArtWalk night. Malee’s Thai Bistro has fed the gallery row since 1987, Craft 64 at the west end of the street does wood-fired pizza, and Arcadia Farms Cafe on First Avenue is the daytime lunch.
How it got here
Charles King came to pottery as a collector before he was a dealer. He grew up in Estes Park, Colorado, worked in high school at his parents’ gallery, Serendipity Trading, and saved summer wages to buy miniatures because that was all he could afford. In the 1990s his parents ran Leona King Gallery in Scottsdale, which carried some ceramics. After a business degree from Thunderbird and a stint working overseas, King came back to the Valley and in 1996 opened a gallery of his own devoted to the clay vessels he had been buying since he was a teenager.
The timing suited the work. Pueblo pottery in the 1990s was in the middle of a long shift from tourist ware to fine art, a shift King later traced in his article “Pueblo Pottery: Folk Art to Fine Art” for American Indian Art Magazine. He began judging pottery at the major markets in 1996, and the gallery built its reputation on the potters pushing that shift furthest while keeping signed historic work from the 1920s onward as its anchor.
The 2000s and 2010s made King an author: Born of Fire, on Margaret Tafoya, in 2008, published with the Carnegie Museum; The Art and Life of Tony Da with Richard Spivey; a book for the Denver Art Museum’s Virgil Ortiz exhibition; and Spoken Through Clay in 2017. He spent part of 2015 and 2016 working on projects with the Smithsonian’s museum stores, and the gallery added a second location in Santa Fe.
By 2018 the Scottsdale gallery’s address was the Marshall Square courtyard on Main Street, the complex of small galleries and working studios at the corner of the district’s two gallery streets, and it has since spread across several suites there. It is a fitting address: a block from the Main Street Native rooms, steps from Marshall Way, and in the middle of the Main Street Arts District that has opened every Thursday night since 1975.