As a Scottsdale High School student in the early 1970s, Wendy Raisanen remembers watching the construction of what was then Scottsdale Center for the Arts. Twenty years later she began working at the Center as a part-time gallery attendant. Thirty years after that, she’s still a Scottsdale Arts employee, now as curator of collections and exhibitions for Scottsdale Public Art.
“I’ve always made art,” Raisanen says. “My parents were thrifty, so they didn’t buy me normal toys. They would get newsprint or butcher paper and crayons and those little Prang watercolors. That was my outlet.”
Raisanen initially studied painting at Arizona State University, but she soon switched over to sculpture, which informs her responsibilities for taking care of the Scottsdale Permanent Public Art Collection, which includes more than 150 large-scale artworks throughout the city.
“I’m well-suited for this job because I know how sculpture is made,” Raisanen said. “I know about steel and bronze and aluminum casting and how things are bolted together and about metals and about expansion and contraction rates between different types of materials and about stainless steel.”
While studying at ASU, Raisanen often visited what is now called Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts to attend exhibition openings. Because Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) had not yet been built, the Visual Arts department of Scottsdale Cultural Council (now Scottsdale Arts) operated multiple gallery spaces inside the Center.
“I remember the best part about it was a huge gallery in the atrium with all these big paintings,” Raisanen says, recalling the Center’s layout when she began working there as a gallery attendant in 1994. “Standing in front of those amazing paintings was lovely. So, it was really kind of a perfect job for me.”
Raisanen also worked for the council’s Kool Kids Camp, a summer arts camp, during her early time with the organization. Then she briefly switched over to the Performing Arts side of the organization, working as a house manager during shows.
But in 1997, she returned to Visual Arts to work as an assistant registrar, helping the department prepare to open SMoCA in 1999. Among her tasks was cataloging prints from the Segura Publishing Company Archive as part of what would become the museum’s permanent collection.
The museum opened to the public on February 14, 1999, and it recently celebrated its 25th anniversary earlier this year. Two years later, SMoCA unveiled a landmark exhibition of artist James Turrell’s work, which coincided with the opening of a Turrell Skyspace, Knight Rise, part of the Scottsdale Public Art Permanent Collection.
In her current role, Raisanen now has the responsibility of caring for the Skyspace, which is located at SMoCA, but she had the unique opportunity to observe Turrell overseeing the creation of both the Skyspace and his SMoCA exhibition, Infinite Light. She even helped hang the show. Infinite Light, Knight Rise, and a visit to Turrell’s Roden Crater project near Flagstaff all influenced Raisanen’s admiration for the visionary artist.
“What he does, what he presents for us to experience, is so subtle and sublime,” she says. “[Knight Rise] probably my favorite artwork just because of what he’s trying to get people to see and to experience. And it’s all up to them; it’s up to the viewer. The amount of time you put into it is what you get out of it, and that just says a lot about life.”
The Skyspace construction also became Raisanen’s introduction to public art. Shortly after the Turrell show, the public art side of the organization split away from SMoCA, and Raisanen took the opportunity to become the collection manager for Scottsdale Public Art. In this new role, she was now in charge of caring for artworks like Louise Nevelson’s Windows to the West, which established the Scottsdale Public Art Permanent Collection in 1973.
In her new role, Raisanen traveled to New York City to work with an eminent art conservator who was restoring Nevelson’s then-30-year-old piece.
“That really taught me a lot about looking at conservation as something that’s very important to history,” Raisanen says. “I was kind of like, ‘Oh, this is doing something for the future. I’m not just painting a wall, you know.’ That gave me a lot of respect for this position and what I’m doing with it.”
Photo: Brian Passey.
Another favorite piece in the collection is Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture. Raisanen still remembers when it first arrived with “this velvety satin finish that would never be replicated in the wild,” a fact the public art department would realize the first time the sculpture required repainting. However, to replicate Indiana’s original vision, Scottsdale Public Art makes sure to use the correct colors for the sculpture’s annual paint job.
Raisanen notes how important the LOVE sculpture has become to the community, whether it’s family pictures in front of the artwork or quinceañera photos or marriage proposals.
Through the years, Raisanen has observed the creation of various Scottsdale Public Art endeavors, from the implementation of the IN FLUX temporary public art program during the Great Recession to the Night Lights event on the Arizona Canal that evolved into Canal Convergence in 2012.
Aside from managing the collection, Raisanen’s legacy with Scottsdale Public Art is most evident in community exhibitions at Scottsdale Public Libraries. Her work there began informally in 2007 when she assisted library staff with a few shows. Within a few years, Scottsdale Public Art was regularly programming galleries at both Scottsdale Civic Center Library and the city’s Appaloosa Library, with Raisanen as the lead curator at both.
“This is a cool job, bringing art to people, helping people to expand their experience and their minds and their understanding of what art is,” she says, adding that she wants to bring art to those who might be intimidated by a museum while also providing professional exhibition opportunities to new or amateur artists.
Photo: Brian Passey.
In 2012, the word “curator” was officially added to Raisanen’s job title. She now curates three to four exhibitions each year at the Civic Center Public Gallery, a new space that opened in 2019 inside Scottsdale Civic Center Library. One of her favorite exhibitions was 2014’s Cultural Savant: The Art and Collections of Joe Willie Smith, which exhibited artworks and other objects collected by the Phoenix-based artist.
While much of her career has focused on caring for and promoting the art of others, Raisanen is still the person who found a creative outlet with crayons and butcher paper as a small child. Her personal artistic practice has grown in recent years. A lifelong seamstress, she has made her own clothing since the age of 10. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, Raisanen embraced her identity as a fibers artist, designing a series of art quilts depicting the international shipping industry, which she debuted in 2023 with an exhibition at Phoenix College.
“It’s funny how my whole life experience continues to evolve to bring me to the next thing,” she says. “I love learning new things. I love making with my hands. I love color. Art is so important to my being a realized human being. This is why I’m here, to make art.”
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