Photo Credit: KJZZ
There are people who work in the arts, and then there are people for whom the arts are simply how they exist in the world. Lisa Sette is the latter, and the recognition she is receiving right now, through the spotlight cast on her current exhibition and the broader acknowledgment of her four-decade legacy, is long overdue.
A Career Built on Curiosity
Sette’s story begins not in Phoenix but in Connecticut, where a middle school photography class cracked something open in her. She learned, as she has described it, to see through photography rather than through the printed page. That instinct followed her west in 1978 when she left the East Coast to study under British photography historian Bill Jay at Arizona State University. She never left. Arizona became her canvas, and she became one of its most consequential cultural stewards.
From a Tempe Living Room to a Phoenix Institution
What strikes you about Sette’s origin story is how organic it was. Her first curated show was staged on the blank walls of a large Tempe house she shared with roommates. Nothing sold. She didn’t care. The process was the point, and that philosophy has guided every exhibition since. The Lisa Sette Gallery moved from Mill Avenue to Old Town Scottsdale, where it anchored the arts community for 28 years, before finding its current home in a reimagined Alfred Beadle-designed building in downtown Phoenix. The space was renovated with intention: visitors descend a set of stairs before entering, a design choice meant to signal that you are leaving the ordinary behind.
Filling a Void Left by Bentley Gallery
The retirement last year of Bentley Gallery, a cornerstone of the Valley’s fine art market for decades, left a real gap in the regional arts ecosystem. Sette’s gallery has long complemented that world, and now its importance feels even more acute. Her current exhibition, “Art is History,” arrives at a moment when historical erasure is a live concern, and she has curated a response that reaches back as far as the 18th century to make its case.
Forty-one years in, Lisa Sette remains what she has always been: the conscience of the Valley’s arts scene, still running with the ideas that come to her, still drawing a community in.