Pedro E. Guerrero (1917-2012) for whom our Arts Center is named, was one of this country’s most gifted photographers. During a distinguished career that spanned seven decades, he documented the lifestyle and working methods of several legendary artists including architect Frank Lloyd Wright, sculptor and painter Alexander Calder (creator of the mobile) and modernist sculptor Louise Nevelson.
During the Mad Men era in New York City, where he maintained a studio, Guerrero also captured architecture and interiors for such publications as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, House and Garden and Architectural Record. Yet it is his work with Wright for which he is best known. His privileged access as a member of Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship and later on-call photographer allowed him to capture Wright and his associates in many unguarded, natural moments. This unparalleled access to all three: Wright, Calder and Nevelson resulted in an extraordinary body of work.
Guerrero was born in Casa Grande, Arizona in 1917, the second son of Pedro Sr and Rosaura. A year later, his father traded their house for a dozen chickens and a used Model T car and moved the family to Mesa, where he set up a successful sign painting business.
When he was just twenty, Guerrero left home to attend Art Center School in Los Angeles, hoping that a career in art might help him escape the bigotry so prevalent in the Southwest in that era. After two years, he returned to Mesa to look for work and landed perhaps the best job he could have imagined: photographer to architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who was then building his Arizona home, Taliesin West, north of Scottsdale.
For nearly twenty years, from 1940 to 1959, Guerrero chronicled Wright’s life and work, photographing his two homes, Taliesin and Taliesin West, along with scores of other architectural projects. World War II interrupted his work with Wright but not his photography. During the war, Guerrero organized and manned an aerial combat photo lab for the U.S. Army Air Corps in Italy. After the war, he established a successful career in New York City as a freelance architectural photographer.
While working in his New York studio and later from his home in New Canaan, Connecticut, Guerrero became acquainted with two other greats of the art world, Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson. As he had with Wright, Guerrero documented their homes, working methods, and art – and became close friends with each one. Over the years, the photos he shot of these three artists appeared in countless books and publications and were exhibited in such major venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum.
In 1995, after nearly fifty years in the east, Guerrero returned to his native Arizona. He purchased an old adobe house in Florence, the town where his family first set down roots in the 1880s. Guerrero’s great grandfather Peter Collier Warner built three houses in Florence and once served as a justice of the peace. His father, Pedro Sr, was raised in Florence and later Mexico. This house is now home to the Pedro E. Guerrero Arts Center.
“If photography is to be recognized as an art form,” Guerrero once said, “then I suppose some of my work falls into that category. But I’m not going to try to compare what I do to what Calder and Louise and Mr. Wright have done. I look at my work as a violinist might look at a score put down by, say, Bach. If I play their music the way they intended it, if I capture the essence of what they had in mind, I consider myself to have been successful.”