Wolfgang: A Basic Introduction 

It was 2007, and somehow I fell in with a bunch of cool kids, riding my baby-blue BMX around and running a creative space with a crazy talented product designer, Ali Campbell. Wolfgang was a gallery and design studio in downtown Phoenix’s Roosevelt Row arts district focused on five practice areas: communication, event, space, art, and product. Our mission was to design life lived better and more beautifully.

Wolfgang captured a way of looking at and engaging the world around us. From business card to household object, from the painting on the wall to the party last weekend, Wolfgang was known for ideation and creation as well as for its openings, which were filled with energy and enthusiasm for outsider art, captivating large-scale photography, and immersive installations. 

The gallery featured artists working across many media, including Bobby Castañeda Luis Gutierrez, and Jorell Hancock. In June 2008, Wolfgang launched an exhibition of installation art capturing the spirit of a rapidly changing downtown and the ethos of our creative agency. Carefully gridded artifacts, each catalogued and spray-painted with our Wolfgang logo, served as time-stamped and place-based documents of our everyday essentials: earth, concrete, glass, metal, and human.

The experience was very much like living in a Wes Anderson film. For a brief moment, Wolfgang was the nucleus of an arts movement that in some small way left the Valley of the Sun forever changed. It certainly influenced the way I view art and how I engage artists, and helped me see my own life as art and artistic expression.