Modern Artist Dick Seeger Pioneered Scottsdale; Now He Turns to His Own Backyard

"We finally got hold of a guy there at the bullfights who said you have to go down to the secret service in downtown Mexico City and report it. On the way in a taxi, I saw my car sitting right there on the side of the road, all stripped — battery, alternator, tires, everything."

Per Seeger, the worst part of it all was the theft of a bag of pre-Columbian shards and parts of Mixtec clay figures he had collected while walking in cornfields adjacent to the archeological ruins of Monte Alban. This obviously was years before taking such artifacts was considered seriously illegal theft of national Mexican patrimony.

Jamie Peachey

Detail from the artist's backyard

Jamie Peachey

Looking from the foyer of Seeger's home/museum into his great room; along the walls are artworks he has created over the years.

Details

Take a tour: of Dick Seeger's home in this slide show.

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• Dick Seeger
• Dave Hampton
• Paolo Soleri
• Visual Arts
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Penniless and paperless, Dick and Helen somehow managed to call Seeger's father in Iowa, who, with the help of U.S. Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper, arranged for the stranded duo to make it to the border, where they were greeted by money from Dad and legal identification documents. Not in the least dispirited by their rotten luck, Seeger says, at the border they had "to decide, well, are we going to go back home with our tails between our legs or hightail it to California?"

They chose the latter route, eventually ending up in Carmel, with which they instantly fell in love. Fortuitously, they walked into the office of a realtor, who hooked them up with a wealthy homeowner whose house overlooked Pebble Beach Golf Course on 17 Mile Drive. For a month, the Seegers played housekeeper and groundsman of the woman's estate while she traveled, even though she didn't know the couple from Adam.

But it would be Scottsdale that ended up being irresistible to artist and wife.

After returning to Iowa from their Carmel adventure, the Seegers took a second trip out West; they worked their way up the California coast, hitting every well-known artist's colony along the way, including La Jolla and Laguna Beach. Passing through Arizona on their way back to Cedar Rapids, they eventually stopped in Scottsdale in 1956 and were invited to dinner by Italian émigré Paolo Soleri and his wife, Colly, with whom they would eventually become good friends.

To Seeger, there was something exceptionally exciting about Scottsdale and its burgeoning arts community. During college, he had made his mark on the design world by carving and wholesaling "herds," sleek, abstracted animal forms from wood, especially walnut, and other one-of-a-kind biomorphic, modernist sculptures on commission. He was also well-known by professional designers for his "windwood" sculptures; both were wholesaled through the Chicago Merchandise Mart. Seeger made his wind-carved pieces from weathered red cedar tree limbs he collected during 10 trips to Colorado.

"Soleri just had the original underground house, [was building] one structure at a time at Cosanti on Doubletree Road. I was saying to myself, well, he's here . . . When there are only 6,000 people, there has to be a reason. I figured if the town was good enough for Soleri, it was good enough for me," says Seeger.

In 1957, he and his wife moved into an un-air-conditioned wooden shack behind the original White Hogan, a workshop and retail store on Main Street in old Scottsdale started by Indian trader Johnny Bonnell. The store launched the careers of legendary contemporary Navajo silversmiths like Kenneth Begay and Allan Kee, and seriously dug into Scottsdale's alluring mid-century modern desert lifestyle.

Despite officially adopting the title of "The West's Most Western Town" in 1951, Scottsdale was anything but a podunk, cowboys-and-Indians backwater when Dick Seeger landed there in the latter part of the 1950s.

Since the '20s, the small desert town had lured artists, sculptors, writers, architects, and other creative types to its desiccated terrain. It also drew well-heeled vacationers looking for relaxation in the area's often tony resorts and dude ranches, health seekers searching for unpolluted, non-allergenic fresh air, and celebrities of all stripes searching for some respite from public view.

By the time Seeger arrived, Scottsdale was a well-advertised tourist mecca, garnering a glowing eight-page spread in the March 12, 1956, issue of Life, which described the blinding glitziness of "the gold-plated town."

The story explained the "life steeped in luxury" of "transplanted inhabitants" who "buy $1,000 antiques and $10 cocktail lanterns" and "shop in stores where gift wrapping is as much as $50 extra." In addition to touting Scottsdale's high-end resorts and health spas, the article effusively described its downtown art and fashion scene.

In 1958, Time breathlessly recounted every facet of First Lady Mamie Eisenhower's sojourn at Elizabeth Arden's over-the-top Maine Chance health spa, then located on property that would, in time, become The Phoenician resort.

Small enclaves of ongoing art-related activity were already spread throughout Scottsdale when Seeger and his wife scouted out artist colonies. In the 1930s, untrained architect/engineer George Ellis and his wife, Rachael, began what would develop into an artist colony of working studios and cozy homes in an area off McDonald Drive that used to be an old cattle track. Surrealist painter Phillip Curtis was just one of a number of prominent artists who called Cattletrack Complex home.

According to Scottsdale historian Joan Fudala, in early 1946, local businessman Tom Darlington opened Arizona Craftsmen Center in a former grocery store at Brown Avenue and Main Street in downtown Scottsdale. There, local artists and designers demonstrated their particular crafts for curious tourists, with the obvious end of having those tourists snap up their wares.