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Labeling Hector Ortega a sculptor is, well, problematic. The 47-year-old Phoenix native creates sculptures, sure, but that hardly scratches the surface of his multifaceted art career. Ortega is also a well-established jewelry maker and metalsmith. So well-established that he’s actually known primarily as a metalsmith outside of fine art circles. Explaining the dichotomy, Ortega says, “Metalworking skills are the basis of everything I do with sculpture. It’s using mind-hand skills, while also emphasizing ornamentation.” Not...

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Curt Mattson knows horses better than the back of his clay-dusted hands. His distinctive sculptures of the animals are a testament to his childhood growing up on ranches along the West Coast. Mattson realized in his late 20s that life on the range would soon render him broke – or broken – and turned to art as another expression of his investment in the life of cowboys. His clay sculptures dig beyond the flesh of...

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Every year, Paradise Valley sculptor William Daggett travels to Northern Arizona or Southern Utah to collect twisted juniper branches that “speak to me,” he says. He has worked with this hard, dense wood for the past decade, finding motion and beauty in the shapes of these 1,000-year-old tree limbs. “I look for a motion – an animal, a bird, a plane – something abstract I can see in it. Usually, [the wood] says what it...