What it’s actually like
Old Town has sold Native American art since the 1930s, and for most of that time the people selling it were not Native. Native Art Market changed that on Main Street. The store at 7215 East Main is owned by Denise Rosales and her daughters Heather Tracy and Devin Shea Tunney, Navajo women from Cameron, Arizona, and it is described as the first Native-owned store on the Old Town gallery row. That fact alone reorganizes how the room feels.
It is a market more than a gallery, and it is proud of the distinction. The business began in 2018 as a program giving Native artists a safe, affordable way to sell directly to the public, and the storefront that opened in November 2020 keeps the model: more than 300 artists from 28-plus tribes, including First Nations of Canada, every one a direct relationship with no dealer in between. Work comes in as the artists bring it, from a roster that runs well past the Southwest, so the stock moves constantly.
Every purchase comes with a certificate of authenticity, which in a district with a long history of imitation is not a small thing. The staff can tell you the artist and nation behind almost anything on the shelves, and on a good day the artist is in the building. The city named it a Scottsdale Business of the Year in 2022, two years after it opened. Next door is the Frybread Lounge, which is what it sounds like and worth the detour.
What to buy
Jewelry with a named maker. The core of the stock, at prices that reflect the artist getting the margin rather than a chain of dealers. Ask for the certificate.
Work from beyond the Southwest. With 28-plus tribes on the roster, including First Nations of Canada, this is the room in Old Town for traditions the Navajo-and-Hopi galleries do not carry.
A painting or print from an emerging artist. With 300-plus makers cycling through, this is one of the few rooms in Old Town where you can buy someone’s early work directly.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The store sits on the block of Main Street between Scottsdale Road and Brown Avenue, the Western storefront end of the Main Street Arts District. Main Street’s few spaces are short-term and usually taken; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a five-minute walk and the Old Town on foot note lays out the loop through the Old Town core. Ride-share to Main and Brown and walk west.
Thursday’s ArtWalk is the night to come. The gallery row opens late, the street fills around sunset, and this is when the store is most likely to have artists on hand. High season, January through April, is when the roster is deepest and the snowbird crowd is thickest; summer means mornings and evenings only, and the store keeps regular hours, so plan a morning.
Because the inventory turns with what the artists deliver, there is no such thing as coming back for it later. If a piece speaks to you, buy it. And leave time for the Frybread Lounge next door, which turns a shopping stop into a lunch.
Eat while you’re there
The Frybread Lounge beside the store is the obvious first choice. The Rusty Spur Saloon, a honky-tonk in a 1921 bank a few doors east, is the Main Street nightcap, and the Sugar Bowl at Scottsdale Road and First Avenue is the sundae. Across Scottsdale Road in the gallery row, Malee’s Thai Bistro has done a reliable lunch since 1987 and Craft 64 at the west end pours Arizona beer with wood-fired pizza.
How it got here
The Native art trade in Old Town is as old as the resort town itself. Sewell’s opened in 1932, the Fifth Avenue jewelry row grew up in the 1950s alongside the Kiva Craft Center, and by the 1970s Main Street was a gallery street selling Southwestern and Native work to winter residents. The makers were Native. The dealers, with rare exceptions, were not, and the margin between what an artist was paid and what a tourist paid was where the district’s money lived.
Denise Rosales and her daughters, Navajo women from Cameron on the western edge of the Navajo Nation, set out to fix that directly. In 2018 they started Native Art Market as a market program: a place where Native artists could sell to the public safely and affordably, without a dealer taking the margin and without the risk that comes with selling alone. It was a marketplace before it was a store, and the artists came.
The storefront came in November 2020, in the 2020s decade’s worst possible season for opening anything. Main Street’s foot traffic had collapsed with the pandemic and galleries were closing, not opening. The family opened anyway, at 7215 East Main, and became by their account the first Native-owned store on a street that had sold Native art for seventy years. The Frybread Lounge next door gives the block a second reason to visit.
What happened next was fast. The roster grew past 300 artists from 28-plus tribes, reaching First Nations communities in Canada; every relationship stayed direct; every sale carried a certificate. In 2022 the city named it a Scottsdale Business of the Year. Against the neighbors on the Main Street Arts District — the collector rooms like Territorial Indian Arts that have been here since 1969, the family shops like Sunrise at the east end — Native Art Market is the youngest by decades and the only one where the owners share a nation with the makers. That is the story, and it is still being written.