What it’s actually like
Main Street sold the West before it sold anything else, and in the decades since, much of the street has moved on to contemporary painting, glass and photography. Open Range Gallery has not. It describes itself as the only 100 percent Western art gallery on Main Street, and it is a small, focused room in the courtyard at Marshall Square, the cluster of suites off Main Street at number 7077, where several galleries share a quiet interior court away from the sidewalk.
The gallery belongs to Sherry Blanchard Stuart, a working Western painter, and her oils are the core of the walls. She paints in a traditional, representational style, with a strong sense of sunlight and color: horses above all, cowboys, buffalo, Native subjects and Western landscapes. Her career includes museum purchase awards from the Tucson Museum of Art, the Desert Caballeros Western Museum in Wickenburg and the Phippen Museum in Prescott, and Best of Show prizes at Desert Caballeros’ Cowgirl Up! and the American Plains Artists Signature Show. Alongside her hang the meticulous graphite drawings of Roger Archibald.
The third element is a secondary market. Open Range resells work by established Western painters, among them Earl Carpenter, Roy Grinnell, Tom Hill, Richard Iams, Ralph Oberg, Dell Parson and Melvin Warren, along with sculpture by Dave Anderson and Chris Navarro and recast originals by Frederic Remington, C.M. Russell and Joe Beeler. It is the kind of inventory you usually find only in the big traditional rooms such as Legacy Gallery, in a much smaller space.
What to buy
A Stuart oil. Horses and the working West, painted by the person who will sell it to you.
A secondary-market canvas. Established Western names that have come back onto the market, the gallery’s most distinctive offering on this street.
A graphite drawing. Archibald’s drawings are the quiet surprise in the room and a different way to own a Western image.
A bronze. Sculpture by Anderson or Navarro, or a recast of a Remington or Russell, for the collector who wants the classic Western bronze.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Marshall Square is on the south side of Main Street, west of Marshall Way; the gallery is inside the courtyard, so look for the suite number rather than a storefront on the sidewalk. Street parking on Main is limited in season; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is the reliable choice, under ten minutes’ walk east, and the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal is the other. The Old Town on foot note and the Old Town guide cover the rest of the area.
The gallery keeps daytime hours Monday through Saturday and opens on Thursday evenings for the ArtWalk. The themed Gold Palette ArtWalk nights, especially Western Week in late January, suit this room best. If Native American art is part of your Western interest, read the guide to buying Native American art before you shop the district.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro is a short walk east on Main and the district’s longtime lunch. Sel, a short walk west, is the serious dinner. For a Western evening to match the art, the Rusty Spur Saloon is further east on Main, and The Mission beside the Old Adobe Mission on Brown Avenue is a ten-minute walk.
How it got here
Western art made Main Street. Troy’s Cowboy Art Gallery opened in 1968 as the street’s first gallery, and through the 1970s the blocks west of Scottsdale Road filled with dealers selling bronzes of cowboys and oils of the open range to winter residents. The Thursday ArtWalk began in 1975, and for years Scottsdale ranked with Santa Fe and Jackson Hole as a place where serious Western art changed hands.
The street has diversified since. Contemporary galleries arrived through the 2000s and 2010s, and contemporary Western art reinterpreted the old subjects with modern color and abstraction.
Open Range, in the Marshall Square courtyard, holds the original line. Sherry Blanchard Stuart was born in Newport, Arkansas, raised in Wichita, Kansas, and earned a BFA in painting and graphic arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design before settling in the desert of north Scottsdale. She built a national career in traditional Western painting, with memberships in American Plains Artists and Oil Painters of America and a founding role in the Creative Women of Pinnacle Peak, and in Open Range she shows her own work beside a secondary market of the generation of Western painters whose canvases first made Main Street’s name.
In the 2020s, with much of the street looking forward, Open Range is the Main Street Arts District room that looks back on purpose, and does so with a painter’s eye.