What it’s actually like
The 7100 East Main building holds the two halves of the Native art trade side by side. Suite 4 is Faust, the contemporary room. Suite 3 is Territorial Indian Arts & Antiques, the historic one, and it has been on this street longer than any other Native art gallery — since 1969, when Rita Neal and her son Alston opened the Old Territorial Shop down the street across Scottsdale Road. Alston and his wife Deborah, who joined in 1976, run it today. Fifty-plus years, one family, one street.
The room shows it. The cases hold turquoise and silver jewelry, as every Old Town room does, but the walls and the floor hold the categories that almost nobody else on Main Street stocks in depth: Navajo rugs, Hopi kachinas, pueblo pottery and antique Southwestern baskets. The word Antiques in the name is doing real work. This is where the older material lives — weavings, baskets and silver from earlier generations of makers, dealt by people who have handled it for half a century.
It is not a hushed white cube. It feels like what it is, a trading room run by a family, and the Neals are the kind of dealers who would rather teach you than close you. Ask what makes one rug better than another and you will get an answer with two rugs on the floor. Thursday’s ArtWalk brings the crowd; a weekday afternoon brings the conversation.
What to buy
A Navajo rug. The gallery’s deepest category and the one that separates it from the jewelry stores. Regional weaves, older and newer, chosen by people who have been buying them since 1969.
An antique Southwestern basket. The rarest thing on the street. The Neals stock the historic basketry of the region, and a good one is a museum object you can live with.
A Hopi kachina or a pueblo pot. Carved cottonwood figures and hand-built pottery, traditional rather than contemporary, from a room that has dealt in both for two generations.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The 7100 East Main building is in the gallery row west of Scottsdale Road, the core of the Main Street Arts District. Main Street’s few spaces are short-term and usually gone; the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard is about seven minutes on foot, and the Old Town on foot note maps the walk through the Old Town core. Ride-share to Main and Marshall Way and walk a block west.
The Thursday ArtWalk has run on Main Street and Marshall Way every week since 1975, six years after the Neals opened, and it is the liveliest time to visit the block. For serious looking, come on a weekday afternoon in high season, January through April, when the winter residents are in town and the stock is deepest. Summer means daytime hours and a quiet room, which for rugs and baskets is no bad thing.
See both suites. Territorial for the historic material, Faust Gallery next door for what the traditions have become, and then Waddell Gallery a few doors east for the turquoise from the family mine. That is the collector’s Main Street in three stops.
Eat while you’re there
Malee’s Thai Bistro, a few doors along Main, has fed the gallery row since 1987 and is the reliable lunch or dinner. Craft 64 at the west end of the street does wood-fired pizza and Arizona beer. A block north on First Avenue, Arcadia Farms Cafe has served the farm-fresh lunch since 1990, and the Sugar Bowl at Scottsdale Road and First Avenue, pink since 1958, is the sundae on the way back to the garage.
How it got here
In 1969 Main Street was becoming a gallery street. The 1960s had multiplied galleries along the blocks west of Scottsdale Road as the West’s Most Western Town found a winter-resident clientele for Western art, and the Native trade that had grown up on Fifth Avenue in the 1950s was spreading to Main. Into that moment Rita Neal and her son Alston opened the Old Territorial Shop — on Main Street, down the street across Scottsdale Road from where the gallery sits now — dealing in American Indian art at a time when most of the district still sold it as curios.
Deborah joined in 1976, a year after the Thursday ArtWalk began, and the 1970s and 1980s were the decades the shop and the street matured together. Main Street’s identity as gallery row hardened, the curio shops thinned out, and the Neals built the depth in Navajo rugs, kachinas, pueblo pottery and antique baskets that distinguishes the room today. Antiques became part of the name because the older material became part of the business: as the trading-post era receded, the weavings and baskets and silver of earlier generations became collectible, and a family that had been handling them since 1969 was positioned to deal in them seriously.
The move along Main Street to the 7100 building west of Scottsdale Road came at a date this page cannot fix precisely; what the record is clear on is that the gallery has been on Main Street the entire time and is described as the oldest gallery of American Indian art on the street. Landing beside Faust Gallery, which Bill Faust opened in 1996 for the contemporary end, gave the building its double identity and gave Old Town its most concentrated address for the serious trade.
Alston and Deborah Neal still run it. In a district where galleries turn over by the season and the ArtWalk is the only constant, a Native art room in the same family for more than fifty years is the deepest root on the Main Street Arts District — older than the ArtWalk, older than nearly everything around it, and still buying baskets.