What it’s actually like
Walk Main Street west from Scottsdale Road and every window tells you where you are: bronzes of cowboys, canvases of mesas, Navajo rugs and turquoise. Then, at 7113, the window holds a carved mask from West Africa. Sissoko Tribal Art Gallery — its own website calls it Sissoko African Art Gallery — is the one room in the district devoted to the art of sub-Saharan Africa, and it is the most surprising doorway on a street that rarely surprises.
Inside are traditional masks and carved figures and sculpture at a scale you do not expect to find in a storefront, alongside some contemporary work. The pieces come from the collection of Sambou Sissoko, a Malian dealer the gallery describes as having started as a boy selling peanuts in Bamako, built a fortune as a gold merchant and entered the African art market in 1961, buying out the inventory of one of the chief Ivory Coast suppliers of the dealer Samir Borro. Six decades later the collection fills warehouses in Phoenix as well as the family’s homes, and the gallery is the public face of it.
It is a quiet room and a serious one. Prices run from collector-level objects to monumental pieces, and the questions worth asking are about region, people and function — where a mask comes from and what it was for — which is the context that makes the work legible to a visitor raised on Western art.
What to buy
A mask. The classic entry point into African art, and the gallery’s most visible inventory — ask about origin and use before you fall for the look.
A carved figure. The family collection’s prize pieces include a Bakongo maternity figure and a Yoruba courthouse pillar by Olowe of Ise; ask what figures are on the floor and what is in storage.
Something monumental. The Sissoko collection is known for large-scale sculpture; if you have a courtyard or a double-height wall, ask what is not on the floor.
A contemporary sculpture. The gallery shows contemporary sculpture too, a newer register alongside the traditional pieces.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The gallery is on Main Street between Marshall Way and Scottsdale Road, across from The Marshall Gallery and a few doors from Paul Scott Gallery. Street parking on Main is short-term and usually full; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is a flat walk of five to seven minutes east, and the Old Town on foot note maps the route. The Main Street Arts District guide covers the rest of the row.
Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday and Monday are by appointment only, so check the day before you plan a weekend visit. Thursday nights the gallery opens from 7 to 9 p.m. for the ArtWalk, which is the liveliest time to see it and the worst time for a long conversation about a particular piece. African art has its own vocabulary of authenticity and age, just as Native American art does; the questions in our guide to buying Native American art — who made it, when, for what, and what paperwork comes with it — translate well here.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro at 7131 East Main has fed the gallery row since 1987 and is the easy dinner after ArtWalk. Růže Cake House at the west end of the block is coffee and cake, and Craft 64 beyond it is pizza and Arizona beer. Across Scottsdale Road, the Rusty Spur Saloon pours in a 1921 bank.
How it got here
Main Street became a gallery row in the 1970s on the strength of Western art — bronzes, landscapes, and the Native American jewelry, rugs and pottery that rooms like Territorial Indian Arts have sold on the block since 1969. For half a century the street’s subject has been the American West, and its non-Western exceptions have been few: Paul Scott Gallery arrived in 2002 as Gallery Russia, selling Soviet-era painting, and stood out for it.
The Sissoko story starts far from Scottsdale. By the gallery’s telling, Sambou Sissoko grew up in Mali without formal schooling, sold peanuts on the streets of Bamako as a boy, built businesses in food and local goods and became a gold merchant who traveled to Europe to sell bullion. As tourists and European dealers began to prize African art, he entered the market in 1961, buying the entire inventory of one of Samir Borro’s chief African suppliers, in Ivory Coast, and spent the following decades assembling what the family describes as one of the most formidable collections of African art anywhere — monumental sculpture from many peoples, held in warehouses in Phoenix, the family home and a house in Bamako.
The Main Street gallery is the family’s way of putting that collection in public. It describes itself as a new gallery in the heart of the Scottsdale Arts District, opened in the 2020s, and by March 2026 it was listed in the district’s printed gallery guide alongside the Western and Native rooms around it. The result is a small but real widening of what Main Street sells: the art of the American West on most of the block, and at 7113, the art of West and Central Africa.