What it’s actually like
Most rooms on Main Street are galleries that happen to show art. Niki Woehler’s is a studio that happens to sell it. The Scottsdale abstract painter opened her first gallery and working studio here in late 2020, roughly 3,000 square feet where she makes the paintings and hangs them, so a visit can mean walking past a canvas still drying on the floor on your way to the finished ones.
The canvases are the draw. Woehler works in two modes: organic, textural paintings built up in layers and lines that read like weathered surfaces, and high-gloss resins that look like polished stone scattered with minerals. She says she is drawn to objects that nature has worn down, by water, wind, earth or fire, and the work has that feel of something weathered and then made beautiful. It is big work, made for big walls, and much of it is commissioned by homeowners, interior designers and corporate clients.
Then there is the harness. Woehler had a custom motorized harness system built and installed by Hollywood movie-studio riggers so she can hover over canvases too large to reach from the edge, and it is the detail every profile of her mentions. Even if nobody is flying when you visit, the rig explains the scale of what is on the walls. She is represented by galleries elsewhere in the U.S. and in Madrid, but this is the one room that is entirely hers, in the heart of the Main Street Arts District.
What to buy
A large textured canvas. The signature, and the work that collectors and designers come for.
A resin piece. The glossy, stone-like resins are the other half of her practice and the most distinctive thing in the room.
A commission. For a specific wall, Woehler visits the house and builds the piece around the space; past commissions run from private homes to a 54-foot corporate installation.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The studio is on the north side of Main Street between Goldwater Boulevard and Marshall Way, in the stretch of the district with the most galleries per block. Street parking on Main is scarce in season; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is the reliable option, about ten minutes’ walk east, and the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal is the other choice. The Old Town on foot note and the Old Town guide cover the surroundings.
This is a working studio as well as a gallery, so check the website or call before a special trip, especially if you want to meet the artist. The Thursday ArtWalk and the themed Gold Palette ArtWalk nights between November and April are the most sociable times to come. A weekday is better for a commission conversation.
Eat while you’re there
Sel is a few doors west on the same side of the street and is the dinner that suits a gallery evening. Malee’s Thai Bistro is a block east for lunch, Craft 64 at the west end of Main does pizza and beer, and Virtù Honest Craft on Marshall Way is the small, special-occasion table nearby.
How it got here
Woehler came to painting late and by an indirect road. She grew up in Toronto, moved to the Phoenix area in 1994, and studied broadcasting and marketing; she then spent almost 25 years in that industry, including more than a decade founding and running a boutique advertising agency. In 2013 she decided to paint full time. The 2010s that followed moved quickly: she was the featured artist at the Telluride Art Walk in 2016, 2018 and 2019, showed at the Found:re hotel in downtown Phoenix when it opened in 2016, and at Art Expo New York in 2017 sold out her entire resin collection within hours of opening.
Corporate and design commissions built the practice. She completed a 54-foot installation for CBRE’s Phoenix offices and a custom piece for Indeed’s Scottsdale offices, and interior designers placed her resins in homes from Los Angeles to Manhattan Beach. One of her paintings won first place in the Arizona State Fair fine art competition. What she did not yet have was a room of her own.
That came in late 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, when she opened her first gallery and working studio at 7056 East Main Street. The local press covered it largely for the harness, which she had been developing with engineers and technicians so she could work over canvases from above. “It’s always been a dream of mine to open a gallery and fill an entire space with my work,” she said at the time.
In the 2020s the studio has settled into the rhythm of the street, part of the ArtWalk that has run on Main Street since 1975 and among the newer generation of artist-run rooms in a district long dominated by dealers. The Main Street Arts District guide covers the rest of the row.