THE GALLERY

Walk into the Gallery in the Sun, and it feels like you’re headed underground. The doorway, styled like a copper mine’s shaft, is narrower at the top than at the bottom. Wooden lattice gates introduce the heavy doors. The elaborate entrance is a preface to the eccentric energy of the gallery — and the man who created it.

Designed and built by artist Ted DeGrazia, the Gallery in the Sun’s sandcastle-like structures sit up against the Santa Catalina Mountains on Tucson’s northeast edge. DeGrazia bought 10 acres of land here in 1949. At the time, it was in the middle of nowhere. Now, it’s where Swan Road intersects Skyline Drive.

Although the gallery is the main structure on the grounds, it wasn’t the first. DeGrazia started by building a mission — as is Spanish tradition — on the west side of the property. He built a modest house for his family, then an adjacent single-room gallery where he played with narrowing walls to create perspective. It wasn’t until the late 1950s that he and a crew of 20 or 25 people — mostly his Yaqui and Tohono O’odham friends — built the main gallery and the attached second homestead. They made every adobe block on-site.
 

DeGrazia grew up in the copper mining town of Morenci, and his experiences inspired his work, including his gallery design. He was a self-taught architect, and when the gallery was nearly finished, he painted all 16,000 square feet himself. “Dry brush on stucco” was among his many media — a list that included oil paint, caustics, watercolor, stained glass and charcoal. He worked with ceramics and made jewelry from what he found while prospecting. He even sculpted the statue for the fountain in the gallery’s courtyard. It seems DeGrazia was good at everything ... well, almost everything. Lance Laber, the gallery’s executive director, says a few of the 73 skylights leak.

Just inside the doorway lies a waxy, pitted floor that’s gorgeous and impractical. It’s made from the dried skeletons of chollas and saguaros, which were placed on end, lacquered and interspersed with handmade turquoise ceramics known as “DeGrazia jewels.” It’s an intricate and strange masterpiece: inspired by the natural Southwest, and executed by a bizarre imagination.

With a wider surface on one end than on the other, the cactus floor stretches, creating a three-room wing that holds the site’s rotating exhibits. Jim Jenkins, the gallery’s curator, is tasked with curating exhibits and maintaining the permanent collection and galleries.

Around the corner, DeGrazia’s studio, a room in the middle of the gallery, is set up as it was when he was living and working there. It’s equipped with a fireplace and a window that looks out to the desert. The artist was nocturnal: He’d work through the quietest and darkest hours of the morning — beginning at midnight and retiring around 5 a.m. — and sign many of his works “Midnight Sketch.”
 

Like many artists, DeGrazia was a creature of habit, discipline and vice. As much as linseed oil and brushes, his supplies included Copenhagen snuff and 12-year-old Chivas Regal. And his palette is caked with the teals, browns and deep reds of the Southwest.

Much of his early work, which is interspersed throughout the gallery, focuses on struggling people, backbreaking labor, war and pain — it’s not the type of art that people buy for above the fireplace. Although he preferred to focus on adults and animals, he was commercially astute. He began painting little children, and the buying public fell in love. And when UNICEF asked for permission to reproduce Los Niños on its Christmas card in 1960, he became the most widely produced artist in the world. Today, DeGrazia is best known for that series of illustrations.

Beyond the studio, the gallery winds outside to the courtyard and then back through the gift shop, where visitors can buy prints and postcards. But Jenkins walks into a tangential storage room where pieces are cataloged and sorted by subject matter and year. The organized chaos spans two rooms. Some of the artwork is stored upright, on a shelf with slats. Other pieces are homeless, leaning against the walls of the cluttered room.

This room is where Jenkins sifts through the collections and makes frames for the rotating exhibits. There are about 15,000 pieces of art housed at this location, and DeGrazia himself cataloged roughly half of them in the vault before he died — a credit to his prolificity, and to his ache for self-preservation.
 

Box No. 18 is the size of a recipe box. It had been missing, but Jenkins recently rediscovered it. It’s full of 2-by-2-inch watercolor sketches painted in 1982, as DeGrazia was on his deathbed. The cards revisit the ideas and scenes he’d painted all his life — chickens, horses and little children, but also whimsical and strange leprechauns and mountain gnomes.

Although Jenkins and Laber have been tied to the DeGrazia family for years, they’re continually astonished by the artist’s oddball ways and fearless self-promotion. When they find new treasures such as Box No. 18, their passion for the artist and his work is renewed. Laber says his strategy to remain authentic to DeGrazia is to keep things running smoothly and not change a thing.

It’s hard to say if that’s what the enigmatic artist would have wanted. He was a contradictory figure: an extroverted salesman who worked alone in the middle of the night; a prolific artist whose work balanced themes of violence and smiling children; a man who could make anything, including his own gallery, into an art project.

This much is clear: It’s impossible to separate the artist from the gallery, because the gallery is Ted DeGrazia.
 

The Gallery in the Sun is located at 6300 N. Swan Road in Tucson. It’s open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily; admission is $8 for adults, $5 for ages 12 to 18, and free for children under 12. For more information, call 520-299-9191 or visit www.degrazia.org.