What it’s actually like
Anyone who has spent time in the Southwest knows an R.C. Gorman before they know the name: a Navajo woman rendered in a few confident, flowing lines, wrapped in a blanket, seated or kneeling, her form simplified to a monumental curve and washed in color. For decades the image has been one of the most familiar in Southwestern art. The R.C. Gorman Navajo Gallery at 7116 East Main Street is where that work is sold at the source — the headquarters of the gallery that represents the artist’s estate.
The room is a single-artist gallery, which makes it unusual on Main Street. Everything on the walls is Gorman: original drawings and pastels, the stone lithographs he is best known for, serigraphs, woodcuts and etchings, authorized giclée reproductions in several sizes, and bronze sculpture and ceramics. There is a gift collection for the visitor who wants the image without the investment, and a counter of collector services — verbal art assessments, certificates of authenticity, valuations and framing — that reflects the gallery’s role as the keeper of the estate.
The name goes back to Taos, where Gorman bought a gallery in 1968 and renamed it the Navajo Gallery. After his death in 2005 the estate and the name passed to Bob Sahd, a Scottsdale-based Southwest art and real estate entrepreneur, and the galleries multiplied; Main Street is now the headquarters, with sister rooms in Tubac and in Santa Fe’s La Fonda hotel.
What to buy
A stone lithograph. Gorman learned lithography in Mexico City and returned to it for the rest of his career, often drawing directly on the stone. The lithographs are the heart of his market and the classic first purchase.
An original pastel or drawing. The direct line of his hand, and where the estate’s original inventory is most rewarding.
A giclée. Authorized reproductions in multiple sizes, the affordable way to live with the image.
A ceramic or bronze. Gorman worked in three dimensions too, and the sculpture is the least familiar side of a very familiar artist.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The gallery sits mid-block on Main Street between Marshall Way and Scottsdale Road, a few doors east of The Marshall Gallery and across from Sissoko Tribal Art Gallery. Street parking is short-term and scarce; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a five-minute flat walk east, and the Old Town on foot note maps it. The Main Street Arts District guide covers the rest of the row.
The Arts District lists hours of Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Thursday ArtWalk from 7 to 9 p.m.; confirm by phone before a special trip. Gorman’s work is widely reproduced and widely resold, so if you are buying on the secondary market, use the gallery’s authentication and valuation services, and read our guide to buying Native American art for the broader rules on provenance and paperwork. Main Street’s Native jewelry and pottery rooms — Territorial Indian Arts, Faust Gallery and Waddell Gallery — are all within a block.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro, a few doors east at 7131, has fed the gallery row since 1987. The pink Sugar Bowl is a block north on Scottsdale Road, and Los Olivos on Second Street has served Sonoran food to Old Town since the 1940s. The Rusty Spur Saloon across Scottsdale Road is the nightcap.
How it got here
R.C. Gorman was born in Chinle, Arizona in 1931 and grew up near Canyon de Chelly, where, by the estate’s account, he drew on rock, sand and mud while tending sheep. Art ran in the family: his great-grandfather Peshlakai learned silversmithing after the Long Walk, and his father, Carl Nelson Gorman, was a painter and educator who served as a Navajo Code Talker in World War II. After Navy service, R.C. studied in Mexico City, where he absorbed the Mexican modernists and learned stone lithography from master printer José Sánchez, then at San Francisco State, and by the mid-1960s he was exhibiting and organizing Native artists in San Francisco.
In 1968, after a show at the Manchester Gallery in Taos, Gorman bought the gallery and renamed it the Navajo Gallery, giving himself control over how his work was shown. Over the 1970s the Taos gallery grew under director Virginia Dooley, his lithographs came off the presses at Tamarind Institute and in Paris, and a second Navajo Gallery opened in Albuquerque’s Old Town in 1978. Exhibitions followed at the Museum of New Mexico and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Gorman’s work reached collectors across the country and abroad — the same national market Scottsdale’s Main Street was building through the 1970s and 1980s for the work of the West.
Gorman died in Albuquerque on November 3, 2005. The estate and its rights were acquired by Bob Sahd, a Southwest art and real estate entrepreneur who lives in Scottsdale, and the Navajo Gallery name spread to new rooms; by 2020 the Navajo Times counted the Gallup, New Mexico location as the fifteenth gallery bearing Gorman’s name, with Scottsdale among the others. Today the Main Street gallery is the headquarters of the estate’s operation, with sister galleries in Tubac and in Santa Fe’s La Fonda, and the work that began on a Canyon de Chelly rock is sold half a block from Scottsdale Road.