Fine Art Museum of Sedona opens its first exhibit

A dream more than a decade in the making came true on Oct. 3, when the Fine Art Museum of Sedona opened its doors at Suite 4 in the Harkins Plaza in West Sedona.

“We gently opened,” board Chairman Harley Todd joked. For the moment, the museum will welcome visitors from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Thursday through Sunday, although the organization hopes to expand those hours as it recruits additional volunteers. Admission is free.

“We’ve explored many different angles of how to make this happen, and the current board decided to make it happen,” Collections Committee Chairman Mike Schraeder said. “So here we are. We’re standing in it.”

“Putting the whole exhibit together took about four months,” board Vice Chairwoman Mary Byrd said. “And finding the space that was already set up as almost a museum with the partitions. We jumped on that. From that point on, it took about four months.”

The Harkins Plaza site, Byrd and Schraeder said, has the advantages of parking, pedestrian traffic, visibility and location.

“There gets to be a fair amount of tourist traffic here between ice cream, movies, thrift store,” Schraeder said.

FAMoS is currently staging its first exhibition, “FAMoS Presents An Art Journey Through Time,” which features works by Dorothea Tanning, Max Ernst, Jim Reynolds, Charlie Dye, Lillian Wilhelm Smith, Curt Walters, Stephen Quiller, Alan Wylie, Jerry Buley, Nika Fleissig, Christine DeSpain, Susan Kliewer, Franklin Fireshaker, David Chethlahe Paladin, Frank McCarthy, Joella Jean Mahoney, Gloria Rothrock, Anna Mary Sefert, James Muir, Theodosia Greene, John and Ruth Waddell and Zoe Mozert. The exhibit will run through mid-February.

“It’s kind of a retrospective of all the different types of art that were here,” Byrd said. Most of the pieces on display have been loaned by local collectors, although a few are on loan from the artists themselves.

“The primary art that Sedona was known for was the surrealists who came and visited Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, who were both very prominent surrealists,” Schraeder said. The surrealist section of the exhibit also includes work by Max’s son Jimmy Ernst and granddaughter Amy Ernst, as well as a piece from French surrealist Yves Tanguy, a guest of theirs, and a unique Max Ernst print whose history is yet to be revealed.

“The other big area of art that Sedona’s known for, of course, is the Cowboy Artists of America, and these are two pieces of original, notable cowboy art from members of the [CAA],” Schrader said. “Lillian Wilhelm Smith was kind of a pioneering woman artist who came and lived in Sedona early on.”

The CAA was founded in 1965 at the Oak Creek Tavern, which is now the Cowboy Club, in Uptown.

“She owned the She-Kay-Ah Ranch where Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning lived before they built the house on Brewer Road,” Byrd said. “A lot of this has different tie-ins.”

Around the corner, a piece by Zoe Mozert offers another Sedona tie-in.

“The state wanted to bulldoze her house and then some people got together and saved it,” Byrd said. “She was one of the four major pinup artists, and there’s all kinds of writeups of her portrayal of pinup women versus the male portrayal of pinup artists, and then she ended up here … She had a lot of Hollywood connections and she did another big Sedona connection with the film industry.”

Mozert was the creator of the famous Jane Russell poster for the 1943 Western film “The Outlaw.”

One section of the exhibit also displays works by American Indian artists or dealing with American Indian themes.

“He has quite an interesting personal history,” Schraeder said of Paladin’s work. “He was half Navajo and half white, and ended up in a German prisoner of war camp when he was like 16 years old because he was recruited by the CIA, or the OSS at that point, because he had a real facility for language and he was streetwise. They found him in Australia when he was like 14 years old. The story’s kind of hard to believe, but he has quite a body of work.”

Outside the museum’s front window stands Muir’s larger-than-life “Man in the Maze.” Schraeder said the bronze was “the first one out of the foundry.” A striking John Waddell painting depicting his wife and fellow artist Ruth Waddell and her friend Nancy Spero with the faces of the sun and the moon in a “Coraline”-like style hangs nearby.

“This one has never been seen before,” Byrd said.

Moving on, the visitor can find an example of the work of Greene, who formerly lived on Coffee Pot Drive.

“This is an earlier piece by her, but it definitely shows some of the edge she had,” Schraeder said. “Pretty engaging. And then Gloria Rothrock, she lived here for a long time. Her art was fairly popular in the New Age world.”

Next to these pieces hangs a large nude by Mahoney, who was recently the subject of a retrospective at the Sedona Arts Center, done in refreshing shades of cool blue and teal.

“This one, the way she set it up, you can hang it both ways,” Schraeder said. “You can hang it this way and then it looks more like her landscapes. It’s wired for both directions.”

“While our theme is an art journey through time, a lot of the other underlying themes are how people came to see Sedona as a refuge,” Byrd reflected. “For example, Nika [Fleissig], [Rabbi] Alicia [Magal]’s mother, was a Holocaust survivor. Paladin, World War II; Max Ernst, World War I, traumatized, got into the Dadasurrealism movement, came to Sedona. A lot of people came here seeking a refuge from what was happening in the outside world. And then also the other theme involved is the idea that art can extend your life. Ruth Waddell started painting those flowers when she was in her 90s.”

The museum also includes a small multimedia room, which is currently screening an oral history film on Muir funded through a grant from the Arizona Community Foundation.

“We had a whole oral history project going originally, and James is one of the first ones we did, but then we’re collecting other oral histories,” Byrd said. “More will be coming, so we’ll have them on a continual loop here for people to see … It is more than just a gallery. It’s an educational experience. And then we’ll be outreaching to schools, looking for school groups to come and so on.”

“I think people are a little bit intimidated to go into a gallery sometimes,” Schraeder said. “They come here, they’re in an artistic frame of mind, they may have aspirations of their own, but you go into a gallery, somebody will try to sell you something. You just want to go and enjoy and learn, but that’s not the environment that you’re in … This we wanted to be a more welcoming place for all visitors.”

“We’re working on planning the next exhibition,” Schraeder said. “There’s a lot of possibilities. We might be able to do another exhibit on Sedona art, or we might find traveling exhibitions, or sometimes there’s artists or people that live here who have relatives or know there’s a collection of a particular artist that they want to display to the public. So there might be an opportunity to display some works of a lesser-known artist of very high quality.”

“We have a couple-year lease here and we’ll have rotating temporary exhibits,” Byrd explained. “Our vision is to have rotating temporary exhibits of the highest artistic merit, and then down the road, we hope to have a larger permanent location.”

“We’ve already done all kinds of surveys of the communities in previous years,” Byrd continued. “Sixty percent said they were in favor of an art museum and would support an art museum. We’ve done feasibility studies, capital campaign feasibility studies, and then in 2017 we did a major business and facilities plan … That is predicated on having a permanent land location where we can do that … So we think we’ve done the due diligence as far as having a permanent location, but then the board decided let’s just go ahead and get this first location here so we’ll have a first presence here, at the same time working for a larger facility.”

Building a permanent collection, Byrd said, will have to await the permanent location.

“In talking to lots of people, without a physical presence, you just weren’t real,” Schraeder said. “You were conceptual. It’s not just a concept anymore. There’s reality, and reality that we can build from and get people excited about the possibilities.”

“We’re looking for grants, private donors, to help on our educational mission,” Byrd said. “We do need volunteers. Committee members. We’re looking for more trustees.”

“Everybody that likes art ought to stop by and say ‘hi,’” Schraeder said.