from Inside the artists studios

Tubac was established in 1752 as a Spanish Presidio, Arizona's first European settlement, but its identity as an artists' haven came much later and just as organically. In the 1940s, an art school opened in Tubac and quietly set off the evolution of what would become a genuine artist colony.

By the late 1950s, painters like Sid Cedargreen arrived and helped transform the town entirely, founding the Tubac Center for the Arts and the Santa Cruz Art Association along the way. Today the town is home to over a hundred galleries and studios tucked along its sun-bleached streets, and the creative community it built has its own annual tradition worth showing up for.

For over fifteen years, the Tubac Center of the Arts has hosted the Open Studio Tour each March, a free, self-guided event where painters, sculptors, jewelers, potters, and illustrators across the Santa Cruz Valley open their working studios to the public. It's not a curated gallery experience with white walls and hushed voices. It's something rarer, a chance to walk into the actual space where the work gets made, and talk to the person who made it.

Among the stops this weekend, Eric Broege's studio was one that stayed with you. The space itself tells a story. A newly completed live/work environment that manages to feel both purposeful and unhurried, the kind of place where you can tell someone thought carefully about how a creative life should actually be lived. The work inside matches that intention.

What the Open Studio Tour does well is exactly this: it closes the distance between the finished piece on a wall and the person who made it. Walking into Eric's studio, that distance disappears entirely.

Eric Broege's Studio

It was one that stayed with you. The space itself tells a story.

Things Tell a Story

The things observed and sometimes collected are much more than a thing they tell a story worth sharing.