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

Included in the group were groundbreaking leather and clothing fashion designer Lloyd Kiva New, a front-running supporter of the Native American crafts movement heating up nationwide. Also working in the center's display studios were woodcarver Raymond Phillips Sanderson, silversmith Wes Segner, painter Lew Davis, ceramic artist Mathilde Schaeffer Davis, and calligrapher-photographer Leonard Yuschik.

When the demo studios burned to the ground in 1950, Lloyd Kiva and Wes Segner spearheaded a drive, with financial underwriting from Anne and Fowler McCormick, to build a new Craftsmen Center on empty land north of downtown Scottsdale. Completed in 1955, the complex of studios and high-end shops centered on a breezy open patio and featured the distinctly Southwestern designs of local designers, craftsmen, and artists who were attaining international recognition. It was christened Fifth Avenue Craft Center, after New York's highly fashionable Fifth Avenue, and later renamed Kiva Crafts Center.

Jamie Peachey

A collection of photographs and mementos held dear by Seeger.

Jamie Peachey

Foreground: Clay sculptures created by Seeger's ex-wife, artist Betty Helman. Background: Modular murals the artist has built around specific themes.

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
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In addition, Frank Lloyd Wright had established Taliesin West as his winter residence and architectural school in the then-untouched hinterlands of North Scottsdale. Soleri, who had apprenticed with Wright, had completed several eco-architectural structures at Cosanti on Doubletree Road and was producing iconic pottery and sand-cast bells that spoke of the desert landscape. It was art that Dick Seeger would begin selling in his first Scottsdale studio gallery, along with his own windwood sculptures, abstracted woodcarvings, and ethnic objets d'art that crossed his path.

Dick Seeger was into plastics long before a bewildered Dustin Hoffman was taken aside in 1967's The Graduate by a smarmy businessman and memorably told: "I just want to say one word to you — just one word — 'plastics.'"

In Cedar Rapids, Seeger had begun experimenting with fusing liquid polyester resin onto acrylic sheets and carving it after his first summer in Scottsdale forced him and his wife to return to Iowa until the desert's notoriously oppressive heat let up.

"We stayed at her family's house," the artist recalls. "I took over the garage and started experimenting. I was a woodworker and found out those same tools would work on acrylic. Adding the polyester added another dimension to it. You could add color dyes to it."

Taking a dozen or so samples of textures and designs in this revolutionary new medium to the Chicago Merchandise Mart, the artist ended up in the Dunbar showroom. "It was like out of a movie — when I would show them my samples, all the receptionists would immediately get me right in to their manager."

The manager at Dunbar made a phone call, then gave Seeger an address, telling him to get a cab and go there immediately, which he did. At his destination, designer after designer was called into the large reception area to see his work. After some back and forth between Scottsdale and Chicago, Seeger landed his first plastics commission — designing and making 29 decorative bulkhead dividers for Boeing 720 jets owned by United Airlines. Every one of the panels was handcrafted by Seeger in an outside closet of that sweltering wooden shack behind the White Hogan.

And who commissioned them? None other than Raymond Loewy, the history-making father of industrial design, who's been variously crowned "the man who designed America" by Life and, most recently by Vanity Fair, the re-inventor of mid-century American consumer culture. Thanks to fashion illustrator-turned-industrial designer Loewy and an army of associates, the world was given, among other instantly recognizable bits of classic Americana, the Lucky Strike cigarette package, the new, more svelte Coca-Cola bottle, the John F. Kennedy memorial postage stamp, the Schick electric razor, the Pepsodent toothbrush, the Sears Coldspot refrigerator, several models of Studebaker, a line of Frigidaire kitchen appliances, the Greyhound bus and logo, and the logos of Shell, Exxon, the U.S. Postal Service, and Nabisco, not to mention the interior living spaces of Saturn I, Saturn V, and Skylab Space Station.

Not bad for an inaugural commission — and there would be many more in the 1960s and '70s from not only prominent local architects, but also nationally acclaimed ones like L.A.-based Welton Beckett, the architect responsible for the Capitol Records Building in Hollywood, UCLA Medical Center, the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Los Angeles Music Center, and Century City, among other L.A. landmarks. In the early '70s, Beckett would also design downtown Phoenix's looming Chase Tower (originally Valley Bank Center), still Arizona's tallest building.

That first commission from Loewy was hefty enough that Seeger, wife, and growing family (he eventually had three children) could comfortably move to 28 West First Avenue, where they occupied living quarters, a workshop area, and his first gallery, the adjoining Seeger's Showroom of Contemporary Crafts.

Out of this showroom, he sold his own wood sculptures and art in plastic, Soleri's early hanging bells, organic pottery, and wind chimes, as well as sculpture and pottery by artist friends like Hawaiian-born Ben Goo and Maurice Grossman. The four of them, along with Lloyd Kiva and Charles Loloma, would be founding members of the Arizona Designer Craftsmen, a group started in June 1959 that still exists today.

Seeger remembers that his gallery always seemed to have sculptures from all over the world for sale, folk carvings, and Mexican stone metates: "I'm proud of that and I don't know how it evolved," he says. He does recall that, in the '60s, a dealer got a load of pre-Columbian artifacts from Mexico through U.S. customs as "decorative items" that Seeger eventually sold in his gallery.