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The Coyote Collection Lands at Sonoran Art

If you’ve ever caught a coyote eyeing you from the wash at dusk and wondered what it gets up to when no one’s watching, Tucson artist Theresa Poalucci has an answer — and it involves camp chairs, golf clubs, and Sunday football. Her Coyote Collection, a series of vibrant, personality-packed metal prints imagining coyotes living their best desert lives, is now available through Sonoran Art, joining the studio’s lineup of Sonoran Desert landscape prints.

It’s a pairing that makes more sense the longer you sit with it. Sonoran Art has always captured the place — Pusch Ridge, monsoon skies, that golden-hour light we all take for granted until we don’t. Poalucci’s coyotes bring the personality, the wildlife neighbors who make this stretch of desert feel lived-in and a little bit funny. Pieces like “Happy Campers,” “Paws for Par,” and “Sunday in the Sonoran” are printed on metal — bright, durable, and just as at home on a patio wall as a landscape print.

Be one of the first to add a Coyote to your collection.

Sonoran Art is a Featured Business Partner of ILoveOV.com.

View the Collection

What's New in OV

Town Updates

⚑ September 2 Town Council Meeting

OV Path Forward Special: Know Before You Vote

This November 2nd, Oro Valley voters will decide on Proposition 431 — whether to adopt OV’s Path Forward, the Town’s new General Plan. Arizona law requires every municipality to update its long-range General Plan every 10 years, and, if approved, this one will guide the Town’s decisions on growth, housing, water, transportation, and open space through 2036.

It’s a resident-built plan: over 10,700 community comments shaped its goals, policies, and 286 specific actions, each assigned to a Town department with a timeline for completion. It doesn’t raise taxes or set the budget — it sets direction. And if voters don’t approve it, the current 2016 Your Voice, Our Future plan stays in effect until a new one is passed.

Want the details before you vote? Read FAQs at OVPathForward.com, or stop by the Oro Valley Public Library, Community and Recreation Center, or Town Hall for a printed copy.

Restaurant Review

⚑ Happy Joe’s Pizza & Ice Cream

A review by the D&D Diners: Happy Joe’s Pizza and Ice Cream

Happy Joe’s lives up to its name. The entrance mural, done with the Oro Valley Historical Society, ties founder Joe Whitty’s story to the town. It’s built for families (game room, ceiling train, even a golf-swing room), with a bar up front for the adults.

Highlights: Pretzel Bites to start, then three pizzas, the Tucson-leaning Taco Joe’s, the sauerkraut-topped Happy Joe’s Special, and

the Texas Smoked Barbecue Brisket, capped off with ice cream from the counter.

Bottom line: a fun, food-forward night out for families, dates, and everyone in between.

Ongoing every Saturday — Oro Valley Farmers Market at Steam Pump Ranch, Saturday mornings.
Second Saturday — One of Steam Pump Ranch’s favorite community events returns each month from September through April. Stop by for tours of the Pusch House Museum, historic demonstrations, and the Farmer’s Market, featuring arts and crafts from local creatives. There’s live music too, plus crafts for the kids. Live Music on Sept. 12 from Dos Sueños.

Featured Citizen

Dick Eggerding — Part 2: Building the Blank Canvas

Part Two closes out our profile of the man behind Oro Valley’s arts council and public art ordinance — this time covering the fight to save Naranja Park and Steam Pump Ranch from development, the founding of the Oro Valley Historical Society, and the deeply personal project closest to his heart: the Arizona Heroes Memorial, born from watching 9/11 unfold and built, ultimately, on Lisa Hopper’s fundraising work as much as his own.

The Overlook Restaurant at El Conquistador Golf Club

Most Oro Valley residents assume The Overlook is members-only. It isn’t — it’s a municipal restaurant open to anyone, built to stay profitable without the private-club luxury of losing money as a membership perk. Director of Food and Beverage Zach Olfers and General Manager Darryl Janisse walk through how a lean three-chef kitchen, led by Chef Tori Fitch, turns out scratch-made food — the Cajun chicken sandwich is the top seller — while the club plans acoustic paneling this fall to fix a loud dining room and a GPS cart rollout to speed up play. The message: no membership required, just an appetite.

Conversations Across Centuries — Founding Citizen #9: James Madison

As America marks its 250th birthday, this installment sits down with James Madison — chief architect of the Constitution, co-author of the Federalist Papers, and principal author of the Bill of Rights. Small and sickly by his own account, Madison won the Constitutional Convention not through oratory but through preparation. He reflects on Federalist 10’s theory of factions, his reluctant reversal on the Bill of Rights, the bank dispute that split him from Hamilton, and — most pointedly for Oro Valley — what a seven-member town council meeting in the open has in common with the “extended republic” he designed.

The Tooth Fairy

This month’s mythical interview catches the Tooth Fairy at Steam Pump Ranch before dawn, reflecting on what a fifty-year-old town’s oldest ritual says about a place still figuring out who it is. She talks about the same kitchens repeating themselves under new rooflines, September as a month when nothing’s finished changing, and why “letting go” is really the parents’ ritual, not the kids’.