Candice Davis and Michael Dominguez sit in Davis Dominguez Gallery, which is showing the works of more than 60 artists in observance of the gallery's 30th anniversary.

Greg Bryan / arizona daily star

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Thirty years ago, Michael Dominguez was fed up with the corporate life. And his wife, Candice Davis, was ready for a change from teaching the English Romantic poets at Arizona State University.

Their unrest gave birth to the Davis Dominguez Gallery, one of Tucson's largest and most respected art galleries. It's celebrating its third decade with its current exhibit, featuring works by 60 artists who are or have been associated with the gallery.

"When I graduated from college, I went into the credit-card business and moved up the corporate ladder until I was responsible for offices all over the Southwest," recalled Dominguez, taking a break from a busy day at the Downtown gallery.

"After a while, though, I discovered that I didn't like either corporate life or traveling all the time. Candice was teaching at ASU and we were living in Phoenix, but when we started talking about moving to Tucson, it turned out to be an easy decision."

What to do, however, wasn't as easy a decision.

Real estate seemed the likely choice. But then the poster shop presented itself.

Davis had been thinking about the possibilities of art as a business for a while — a friend of theirs had an art and framing shop in a corporate high-rise and sold a lot of art for office walls.

"I kept pushing towards something like that all the time we were looking around Tucson, and then one day we got a chance at a fine arts poster shop Downtown, in the Pioneer building," she said.

The building had just been renovated and the shop was attractive; the art business it was.

Fine-arts posters, it turns out, weren't such an easy sell.

"Our biggest challenge in the beginning was convincing customers that paying $40 for one of our graphics was a sensible move," recalled Dominguez, who never stopped dressing the part of the executive: He still wears a suit and tie when he's doing business.

But the corporate side of the business flowed more easily.

"When we were getting started, no one else was offering to decorate Tucson office interiors with contemporary art," said Davis. "That part of our business took right off, and it's been a mainstay with us ever since."

As the business grew, Davis made a decision to go back to her maiden name.

"We didn't want to sound like a mom-and-pop business, 'Mr. & Mrs. Dominguez,' " she recalled with a laugh. "We even called it the Davis Gallery for a while at the beginning. Mike never quite got used to people calling him 'Mr. Davis.' "

When they first established their business, competition was minimal.

"Ours was one of only three Tucson galleries dealing with contemporary art — cowboy and Western art were the big favorites," said Dominguez, a Tucson native with a close-trimmed gray beard and a sober, professorial look that melts away when he speaks in his animated, articulate manner.

"But it wasn't long before we branched out beyond graphics — one of those other two contemporary galleries was Spectrum Photography, and when they decided to go out of business, they had a contract to show Jack Welpott, an internationally famous photographer. We took over the Welpott show, and one thing led to another. Before too long, we were moving to a new gallery on the Northwest Side, on Oracle (Road)."

The corporate business continued to grow. And individual buyers were finding their way to the gallery, too.

Then, one day in 1980, artist Bruce McGrew walked into the North Oracle Road store carrying one of his watercolors. The gallery began to represent him. The artist's first show was a flop, and Dominguez was hugely embarrassed. To his astonishment, McGrew said the show was "just great," and the next one would be "even better." It was, but Dominguez has never forgotten that moment of generosity.

McGrew, who taught for more than 33 years at the University of Arizona before his untimely death in 1999, had many colleagues and students who were, or later became, important artists. Many of them ended up among the gallery's exhibitors.

The gallery's emphasis began to change. "We started moving beyond graphics to paintings and sculpture," said Davis.

"As we started hanging bigger and bigger paintings, the space at the Oracle store started seeming smaller and smaller."

The hunt for new gallery space began.

"Mike had always wanted to find a big space Downtown, between the UA Museum of Art and the Tucson Museum of Art, and when we found the warehouse on Sixth Street, we knew it was the right one."

The location is one that many space-starved galleries in New York or Los Angeles would drool over — a spacious, high-ceilinged, 5,400-square-foot area that housed a Packard dealership back in the 1930s. It had to be gutted to the walls and painstakingly rebuilt when they began the move in 1998, and Davis Dominguez Gallery had to close its shutters for six months. When it reopened, the drenched-in-filtered-sunlight space had trendy concrete floors, a breathtaking exposed bow truss fir ceiling, and two small galleries surrounding a massive one.

It has plenty of high white walls for paintings and dramatically lit pedestals and platforms for three-dimensional work. It's an ambience more like a museum than a dealer's showroom, but Dominguez emphasizes that he and his wife are very much merchants. "We have a lot in common with a Goodyear dealership," he says with a twinkle in his eye.

Traditionally, art and commerce are supposed to be at war with each other; some art dealers like to be regarded as cultural philanthropists rather than "just" merchants. This makes Dominguez laugh. He sees the dealer as the basic nexus between art and commerce, bringing welcome sales to artists and beautiful and interesting art to buyers. But while he speaks of the gallery's work in brisk, businesslike terms, the fact remains that Davis and Dominguez have made a mark in Tucson art circles that goes beyond just doing good business.

"Nobody has done more to raise the level of cultural discourse in Tucson," said Robert Cocke, a nationally known artist who paints mysterious, luminous landscapes and interiors. His work is among those included in Davis Dominguez Gallery's anniversary show.

"Not only do they show interesting and ambitious work, they educate, they bring groups to the gallery for tours, they hold special shows like the annual Small Works Invitational, they founded the Central Tucson Gallery Association to give art activity a focus. I think they're a great thing for the community, and I wish them another 30 years in business."

He paused, then chuckled and said: "I want to stay with that gallery as long as I'm on the planet."