What it’s actually like
Marshall Way between Main Street and Fifth Avenue is a gallery row now, and Wilde Meyer is the reason. When Betty Wilde and Mark Meyer arrived from Tulsa in 1983 and opened across the street from the present address, the galleries were on Main Street and this stretch of Marshall Way had none; they were the first, and the block filled in behind them. The gallery has occupied several Marshall Way addresses since and settled in 1990 into the space it holds today, a former veterinary and dog clinic that gives no hint of its past.
Inside is contemporary fine art with a broad, sunny range: abstracts, landscapes, figurative work and contemporary Western, in paintings, bronzes and glass, hung densely and changed often. Where the Main Street galleries lean toward traditional Western realism, Wilde Meyer is the colorful, contemporary counterweight — the gallery for a modern West rather than a historical one. It is approachable in a way that big-ticket galleries often are not; nobody minds a browse, and the staff read a first-time buyer well.
It remains a family business. Betty Wilde, who holds a fine-arts degree and ran a gallery in Tulsa before Scottsdale, built it; her son Jonathan Henderson is a partner; and a second Wilde Meyer gallery operates in Tucson. Forty-plus years on Marshall Way is a long run in a district where galleries open and close with the market, and the longevity shows in the depth of the roster.
What to buy
A contemporary Western canvas. The gallery’s signature register — bold color, stylized figures and animals, the modern West rather than the historical one — and the piece visitors most often leave with.
An abstract or a landscape. The roster runs well beyond Western, and the abstract and landscape painters are where the gallery’s range is widest.
A bronze. Sculpture, from small tabletop pieces upward, for the buyer who has run out of wall.
Glass. Studio glass is the entry point: a piece from the roster at a fraction of a painting, and the easiest thing to carry home.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The gallery sits on Marshall Way just south of Fifth Avenue, a block from the Bronze Horse Fountain. Street parking on Marshall is scarce; the public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal is a three-minute walk and the free Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard a flat ten, and if you are carrying a purchase the Fifth Avenue garage is the one to use. The Old Town on foot note maps the route and the Downtown and Fifth Avenue guide covers the district around it.
Thursday’s ArtWalk is the gallery’s home fixture — Marshall Way is the walk’s northern half, the doors stay open after dark, and the street is at its best around sunset in the cool months. January through April is high season, with the collectors in residence; a weekday afternoon in summer is when you can stand in front of a painting for ten minutes without company. Ask about the Tucson gallery if you split time between the cities; the rosters overlap. The rest of the Main Street Arts District is a five-minute walk south.
Eat while you’re there
Berdena’s in Craftsman Court is the coffee stop a block west. Citizen Public House on Fifth Avenue is lunch or a pre-ArtWalk drink, and FnB around the corner is the dinner reservation that turns an evening on Marshall Way into an occasion. Cartel Roasting Co. holds the west end of Fifth for the second coffee.
How it got here
Scottsdale’s gallery trade grew up on Main Street through the 1970s, the decade the Western storefronts west of Scottsdale Road turned into an arts district. By the early 1980s Main Street was full and expensive, and the streets around it — Marshall Way, First Avenue, the blocks toward Fifth — were the obvious overflow. Somebody had to go first.
In 1983 Betty Wilde and Mark Meyer moved from Tulsa, where Betty had run a gallery, and opened on Marshall Way across the street from the gallery’s present site. At the time this stretch of Marshall Way had no galleries; theirs was the first, and its success drew others until the street became the northern leg of the district and, eventually, half of the Thursday ArtWalk’s route. The gallery’s program — contemporary rather than traditional, colorful rather than sepia, a broad roster of painters and sculptors rather than a narrow Western one — set a tone for Marshall Way that distinguishes it from Main Street to this day.
The gallery moved more than once along the street as it grew, and in 1990 it took the space it still occupies, a building that had been a veterinary and dog clinic. The 1990s were the district’s great expansion, with Marshall Way filling with galleries and showrooms, and Wilde Meyer was by then an anchor rather than a pioneer. Betty’s son Jonathan Henderson came into the business as a partner, a second gallery opened in Tucson, and the roster deepened across abstract, landscape, figurative and contemporary Western work in paint, bronze and glass.
Forty-plus years later Wilde Meyer is, by most accounts, the longest-running gallery on its stretch of Marshall Way and the reason there is a stretch at all. The Main Street Arts District guide covers the whole district; the design house at the other end of the street, Wiseman & Gale Interiors, has been furnishing the same clients’ houses since 1965, and The Legacy Gallery at Scottsdale Road and Main holds the district’s other corner.