Cattle Track Arts Compound

The story

In 1937, long before Scottsdale got swallowed by manicured golf courses and million-dollar real estate, this 11-acre pocket of desert was cobbled together using redwood salvaged from old water pipelines. It grew into an unpretentious refuge for desert painters, potters, and printmakers who wanted to work away from the noise. The painter Philip Curtis—who later co-founded the Phoenix Art Museum—lived and worked here for decades. If you want proof of how little the compound cares for sterile museum etiquette, look no further than his 1972 Ford LTD: it's still sitting right where Curtis parked it, slowly weathering beneath the palo verde trees.

What makes Cattle Track remarkable is that it never got bought out or turned into a sanitized historical park. Somewhere between 20 and 30 working artists still occupy the rustic adobe studios and historic timber outbuildings scattered across the acreage. Walk through the brush and you'll stumble across decades of quiet creative accretion: ceramic pots nestled in the soil, outdoor sculptures hiding in native desert flora, and a communal player piano that three successive generations of resident painters have covered in custom brushwork.