A gallery with selections from the Greenberg Collection at the Portland Art Museum's new Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art.

Critical i

A completely biased history
The Portland art scene
by Jeff Jahn

t's an anxious time in Portland. There's a new museum wing, a contemporary art fair, new galleries everywhere and old ones are upgrading. The hoard of artists includes many who are now showing abroad (Melbourne, France, L.A., Istanbul, Boston, Oslo, Iceland and New York).

The secret is out.

It's a rather new feeling in town. Six years ago all I heard was, "Portland can't and Portland doesn't." But Portland has a tradition of grand efforts, like the 1905 World's Fair. The city simply needs to apply itself. Of course, who is leading the charge very much matters.

Now that Portland has gotten over the fact that, yes, lots of very good artists have moved here (some of the best were here already because there is a tradition in town), everybody wonders how all this art alchemy will direct its energy. At a certain point, though, it isn't civic. It's about the individual accomplishments of individual artists and there are some very good ones in Portland.

The local art scene's current heat makes sense. Portland is a city where most of the things that were swept under the rug during the late-20th century became conscientious talking points about community, the individual, cultural invention, man's place in nature and the necessity of bohemians – as well as variegated and intelligent urban development.

Most U.S. cities were blithely screwing themselves with '70s corporate globalism and development (a freeway through downtown Portland was planned but stopped). But there is an almost Roman civic engagement amongst Portlanders. This is the place to go against the purely hierarchical corporate flow and I think of Portland as a rebel base.

The brand-new PDX Gallery by hot Portland architect Brad Cloepfil: The space is still just as ultra-refined but more adventurous and less constrained ... what about future shows? Word on the street (although not exactly accurate) is that PDX is synonymous with "quiet" art; I think it's more about exquisite states. Lavadour and Henry, the gallery's two most mature artists, are anything but quiet. Also, proprietor Jane Beebe has a zesty streak – which her window project really showed. The question is, how will PDX Gallery evolve now that it is less constrained?

Some have pointed out that this has happened here before, but it hasn't happened on this scale with so many leaders and definitive events. Now, with real infrastructure changes, the changes seem like a new baseline. Sometimes smaller eruptions set the stage for larger ones and I believe that is the case here. Still, Portland is not a media hub and we simply need to make noise to get credit where credit is due.

So why here? Those of us who were kids during the 1970s, '80s and '90s recognize Portland as the one major American city unwilling to screw itself. Portland seems open to the idea of being a national leader in terms of reenergizing urban life.

I think of Portland as the conscience for the country, not so much isolated as different. It reminds me of one of my favorite plays, Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People," partly because development is held up to moral scrutiny.

Portland is not going to be Houston, Atlanta, L.A., Seattle or New York; it's a rebel base for progressive-minded people. It has a very vibrant cafe culture too. Portland is a city where respect is not just a human-to-human thing and the Gen X- and Y-ers moving here uphold that tradition. They bring new ambition and competitiveness even when they say they aren't. Overall, the city itself is not the final issue; it's the rigor and savvy of its individuals.

Mathew Picton's last solo show in Portland, but the DeYoung museum in San Francisco recently acquired the piece. He recently left this gallery and one wonders which gallery has the cajones to show this sort of work?

Still, longtime Portlanders do have this knee-jerk reaction to newcomers. Half the time they assume we are trying to remake Portland into New York; the rest of the time they still say Portland "just can't ..."

Which is simply not true.

Critical mass seems to be at hand with the new museum wing, art fair and numerous new galleries. It's all happening in a very intelligent way ... not even the 2003 recession could derail it.

I came here because the city allowed development in a world where artists came pre-packaged and fitted with defining gallery shoes right out of grad school. Portland is a from-the-ground-up occurrence without the benefit of a major graduate program. (PSU has improved but needs a full-scale effort from the top.)

A key factor in all the recent changes is that artists and audiences are developing quickly together – it's what Dave Hickey calls "communities of desire."

Rebel Base
A totally biased history of the Portland renaissance

Jamison

Recent past
In the late 1980s, First Thursday was started by William Jamison in the then-fish-smelling Pearl District. In 1995, PICA was founded by Kristy Edmunds and, since the Portland Art Museum had scant interest in a contemporary art program, the institution had several itinerant warehouse shows. PICA held down the fort. When Jamison died in '95, the city grieved and things slowly re-germinated.

I moved here in 1999 and sensed a gaping hole, but did not yet understand it was left mostly by a single man. I think of Jamison like Obi-Wan Kenobi. When Darth Vader cut him down his example and spirit spread out, becoming "more powerful than you could ever imagine."

Years later, I was a bit overcome while watching Scott Ray Becker's 2002 documentary,
"Gridlocker's Paradox." Yes, when I jumped into Jamison Fountain for an Oregonian photo, it was a li'l improvised tribute; in all things actions speak louder than words.

Raising standards, 1999
The 1999 Oregon Biennial, curated by Katherine Kanjo, took up twice the space of the 2001 and 2003 Biennials and was a wild affair.

One video piece repeated the words "I'm sorry."

Hued Schwegler's Mouthpieces Starred at the1999 Oregon Biennial.

Michael Knutson and Heidi Schwegler were the stars, but the show also featured Sean Healy, Tom Cramer, Mike Shea, Storm Tharp, Molly Vidor and introduced us to Brenden Clenaghen.

Kanjo even recruited Jacqueline Ehlis, who was still in graduate school at UNLV (arguably the hottest graduate program on earth during the '90s).

The show pissed off people with its garbage sculpture, tarot cards by Sarah Taylor and Swallow Pressx2, but it absolutely set the stage for what's going on now.

Today – tellingly – the show would be instantly accepted.

Also in 1999, Jamie Bollenbach, a Reed student and former head of the ACLU in Alaska, worked with the college to create the Bollenbach Art Labs at Southeast 3rd and Alder (it was next called _Hall and has recently been renamed Homeland). Its initial purpose was to give Reed students a gallery to show in, along with cheap studio space.

"Lace," photograph by Todd Johnson.

Momentum builds, 2000
In spring 2000, PICA invited all the artists it could fit onto its walls. Only 493 showed up and, waiting in the hours-long line was where many artists started to talk to one another (I met Diane Kornberg). Most spoke about how crass a promotion it all seemed to be for PICA. But I think it had a lot of good side effects and was a common precursor to the Portland Independent Salon, the Modern Zoo and Meeting People.

In summer 2000, Todd Johnson curated Popcicle, a damn good show at the Everett Station Lofts. Hardly anyone noticed Popsicle in the press, but artists started getting more serious.

Not coincidentally, Muriel Bartol opened Nil Gallery in the Lofts and her exhibition program was very good, outstripping anything that had been done before in those galleries – and rarely equaled by the official galleries at the time. She is going to Art Center in Pasadena, Calif., but longs for Portland and frequently returns.

Noland's "Air Beauty," from the Greenberg Collection.

Also in 2000, the Bollenbach Art Labs became the site of Cris Moss's first Donut Shop show, featuring himself and several other installation/video artists; it garnered good press in the Willamette Week.

Two months later at the Labs, I staged a three-person show with Nic Walker and Kelly Newcomer.

A good deal of art sold for not insubstantial sums.

Moss continued to do donut shops, most of which looked good but were most notable for their adventurous locations (something Portlanders were not used to at the time).

Later that year the Portland Art Museum acquired the Clement Greenberg Collection, signaling big changes in the museum's direction.

That same year, curators Bruce Guenther (PAM) and Stuart Horodner (PICA) arrived, giving new muscle for modern/contemporary art within their institutions.

(As an aside, "contemporary art" was a retrograde term to people like de Kooning and Pollock. For them it meant socially acceptable and implied impressionist, ashcan or even social-realist art; modern was a freeing impulse. Some things change, some don't.)

In addition, these two curators began a series of great lectures, including Peter Schjeldahl, Dave Hickey, Robert Storr and Larry Rinder. These lectures were very important and Portland just didn't seem isolated anymore ... unless of course you were lazy.

Hildur Bjarnadottir and the 2001 Biennial.

2001: The shit hits the fan
In 2001, the Oregon Biennial took place with standout work by Rae Mahaffey, Jan Reaves, Mark Smith, Melody Owen and, especially, Hildur Bjarnadottir. Still, it seemed safe compared to 1999, which had twice as many standouts.

Red 76 (Sam Gould) and the Alphabet Dress (Zefery Throwell) took Moss's itinerate or "popup" show system and added a large-scale party element. Disjecta worked with both of these organizers, as well as independently of them.

These popup shows occurred monthly or bi-weekly and the scene suddenly got very social, while copious amounts of Pabst were drunk.

Also in 2001, a small, simple protest to the Biennial took place at Groundswell on Alberta Street and the Biennial's curator, Bruce Guenther, showed up. Then, a show I spent nine months planning, "The Portland Independent Salon," took place at the Bollenbach Art Labs.

Portland Independent Salon: Works by Natalie Davis, Liz Obert, Muriel Bartol and Michael Hernandez (from left).

An 11,000-square-foot success in the same location where Donut Shop 1 took place, it was unjuried and each artist was simply given nine feet of wall space, first come, first served.

The more on-the-ball and serious artists showed up first and quality ensued.

The Oregonian's Randy Gragg wrote critically on the show ... to this point only the Donut Shop had gotten mention and nobody said anything much more critical than "it looked good."

Natalie Davis and Jacqueline Ehlis starred, but Muriel Bartol, Laura Fritz, Todd Johnson and Marcello Munoz also stood out. The Bollenbach Art Labs then became Eagerwally Gallery under Tim Dalbow's tenure.

Harrell Fletcher at PICA.

The Donut Shop also traveled to Bellingham, Wash., at a time when Portland was all about Portland. (Now, in 2005, most of the better artists show nationally and internationally.)

On the institutional side, PICA's programming included excellent shows by Erica Blumenfeld, Malia Jensen, Kate Shepherd and Harrell Fletcher. Most were a bit too clean, but Jensen had the strongest work. Her "Knotty Situation" is without a doubt a museum piece (why the hell is the plywood tree sitting in the window of the seaplane fashion boutique in 2005?).

The big room at the old Savage Gallery.

Harrell Fletcher's Everyday Sunshine opened at PICA and proved to be very influential, although it wasn't one of his best shows. His Bay-area aesthetics and participation-based conceptual happenings were copied clumsily by many journeyman Portland artists until 2004.

Tracy Savage also opened Savage Gallery with a gorgeous solo show by Bryan Hunt.

At 5,000 square feet, it was and remains the single toughest commercial gallery space the Pacific Northwest has ever seen. For an accurate comparison, it was more impressive than Mary Boone's Chelsea space but not as nuts as Larry Gagosian's Chelsea digs.

Latteier and a Hamms.

2002: Things get more defined
The Lab, a mock institution, kicked into gear with a lecture series that took on practically anything and people like Camela Raymond, Matthew Stadler, Michael Hebb (before becoming a restaurateur with clarklewis, etc.) and the magnificent Andrew Dickson all delivered esoteric information as performance. Again, the David Lynch-approved beverage, Pabst Blue Ribbon, had unsubstantiated reports of being consumed. One notable lecture series person wisely chose Hamms, "the beer refreshing."

The apotheosis of the lectures was a fake professor, Amos Latteier.

Latteier delivered an SCTV-worthy Powerpoint lecture on models. The wonderfully terrible Lego sheep are worth checking out (you can stream it here: http://www.latteier.com/).

In winter 2002, Charm Bracelet put on the Meeting People show. The idea was that 500 artists would create uniformly small, square works. It was a striking success as a community project, but there were sly overtones that many caught and distrusted, such as participants being used as a number to substantiate a project. A rift developed between "primary participation" and "visual efficacy" artists.

Both sides have conceptual aims, but I argued that the shows that emphasized participation above all else often did so to the detriment of deeper conceptual rigor (they also seemed to be Harrell Fletcher rip-offs). In most cases the participating artists themselves got little out of it. It wasn't anywhere near as articulate as Robert Smithson or Vito Acconci and seemed more like a simple combination of speed-dating and crass art-scene networking.

Both Smithson and Acconci could and did write, which these so-called conceptual artists tried everything to avoid. Later in 2005, half of the Charm Bracelet, Brad Adkins, became a process artists (after stating for years that making art is the least interesting part) and hit his stride with some interesting and inwardly obsessed work.

Fleck Gallery's final show = James Boulton.

The Fleck Gallery and Soundvision anchored the Everett Station Lofts along with Zeitgeist. Field also emerged in the former Nil space; Michael Oman Reagan had been Gallery Nil's other programming voice.

Emily Ginsberg Wallpaper from Subscribe.

In spring 2002, a group show called Slowness took place at the Art Gym. According to some of the arists, the show was sparked conceptually by the title of Milan Kundera's book, making this part of the Slow movement.

Only Emily Ginsberg's video effectively slowed anything. Most of the work was very elegant, but seemed too similar – as if the general absence of color is a visual code for effecting slowness. It was a show that simply combined too much of the same thing and became flat. I decided dynamics are key to any group show. Other flat shows in 2002 included Northwest Narrative at PICA.

Also in 2002, Jacqueline Ehlis curated Subscribe with Chandra Bocci, Emily Ginsberg and Trish Grantham at Pacific University for Women's History Month.

Ehlis's solo show at Savage was the first by a local artist to realize the potential of the Savage Gallery (although the long wall-hang was adequate, it could have been better). Savage as a space was so tough that many top international artists would have to plan for a year to pull off a show.

The big gallery closed in 2003 and only seven of its shows in 18 months really fulfilled its promise to any degree. Heidi Schwegler, Diane Kornberg, Bryan Hunt, Suen Wong, Ehlis and Heidi Cody were among them. In 2004 it reopened in a smaller but equally nice space.

The lesson? Details and the artist matter a lot more than the room you put them in.

Heidi Cody (a native portlander who lives in New York) at Savage 2002.

May 2002
Matt Fleck, Marcello Munoz and Jim Archer curated Next Now at the Littman Gallery.

Standouts were Laura Fritz, Marcello Munoz and James Boulton, whose "Spark Gap Transmission" was one of the stars of the 2003 Biennial.

July 2002
Elizabeth Leach hosted a trio of excellent German Painters, including the amazing (and now red-hot) Norbert Biskey.

At the time it was a rare international show. Now, in 2005, the gallery regularly hosts such high-caliber shows.

September 2002
My show, Play, also at the Littman, was an experiment in playful competition and interaction among artists who were not necessarily friends, but became so. The artists, Jacqueline Ehlis, Hilary Pfeifer, Todd Johnson, Bruce Conkle and I, all had extensive experience outside of Portland. I saw it as an artist-initiated art-scene intervention and it became a bellwether.

Unique for indie shows, it took a year of planning and it obliquely referenced 9/11. It was a concerted effort to raise the stakes. With a postgraduate-level thesis and color catalog, there was hope that others would attempt similar intellectual and aesthetic rigor. Many whined instead. But attendance was great and lots of good vibes came, too. A serious press fandango signaled everyone to wake up. It set the tone in town for higher expectations.

That same month the Organ, a Portland-based arts newspaper, published its first issue.

November 2002
Maritime and Hug Me opened at _Hall and Pacific Switchboard, respectively. The two shows were baptized when James Boulton and Adam Sorenson from Maritime and Cynthia Starr from Hug Me got into the 2003 Oregon Biennial. The kids are alright!

Red 76's Dim Sum.

At some point, letters to the editor at this publication develop, as does some sort of rift between the Hug Me's and the Mods, as two young art camps emerge.

I suspect the Hug Me's are on Prozac and the Mods come from well-to-do families (and lack Prozac), but it all seems odd to me. The psychic condition of the two alleged camps is interesting, though I think I'm from a different and rarer camp, whose parents never divorced. Also, is Prozac bad for art?

Red 76 put on the Art Stall during the summer and Dim Sum later in the year. Very nice ideas, they shook up the art-viewing experience.

Oursler from Beamsplitters.

2003: New standards tested in group shows
In January, Beamsplitter's MachineWorks outed video, both international and local, and coaxed Portlanders into a dark, possibly toxic, but excellent environment.

I suspect few of these video artists entered the 2003 Biennial.

In March 2003, Red 76's glorious polyglot of international and local DIY offerings, called I.A E., defined the idea of protean artistic impenetrableness at the Laurelhurst Theater.

Too many wrongly tried to understand it as a whole; that was impossible. Instead, it was a smorgasbord of ideas in need of distillation – a tantalizing prospect in a city full of artists.

I.A.E. was the armory of indie … although I think fetishing DIY is a mistake and a bit like those '90s discussions of "who's more alternative?" The 21st century was looking more interesting every day back then. It keeps getting more complicated.

Video still from "Cablevision" by Paperrad at I.A.E.

But it doesn't matter if it happens in a basement or a high-profile warehouse by people with graduate degrees. If it's fresh, it's worth promoting and sharing. The arts die primarily because of neglect, not through knowledge of what is happening elsewhere.

Next in 2003, Brad Adkin's Blood and Guts Forever show at the Art Gym showed us less about friendship than a study of psyche, failure and fragility – all important themes.

It looked good, if not a little timid, for such a feisty title. Frankly, that's how most Art Gym shows look (David Eckard exempted, of course!). In fact, Eckard's Art Gym show wins my vote for most fully realized 2003 exhibition involving a Portlander. Group shows are nice but always a bit too scattered; we do them to understand the moment. Statements are for individuals.

David Eckard's "Tournament Lumens" at Art Gym.

In May, the Best Coast challenged top young guns from up and down the West Coast to test themselves in a tough urban warehouse, along with viewers overly accustomed to prissy didactic environs.

It served as a wake-up call and was a bit like going to a gym to build one's art-viewing muscles accustomed to sterile walls.

Portland stood up and out in these honest, less-digested environs. Unlike museum and gallery shows, it was not aimed at novices.

Thousands of museum professionals were ensconced at the AAM convention nearby and connections were made. With hundreds of curators at the opening, it created a concrete example about the buzz Portland has had for over 10 years.

"Bedroom Project" at The Modern Zoo.

Next, the populist art experiment called the Modern Zoo grew and evolved to fill a 100,000-plus square foot corporate complex. For three months everyone, regardless of chops, intellect or taste, was invited ... anything could and sometimes even did happen.

I don't disparage the lack of curatorial control; it was a great way to organically engage the scene. By being so amorphous it took a baseline temperature of the city and, consequently, forced everyone to think about what they really want to do next.

What this means is everyone just got better and expects more. It wasn't a showcase like the other shows of 2003, it was an experiment and a concerted field observation testing.

The the summer of 2003, the Oregon Biennial, normally the arbiter of taste, provoked a lot of discussion due to its comparatively conservative "painting is where it's at" stance and comparisons to the Modern Zoo, I.A.E, and Machine Works. This alone verified that a new standard was now in effect and taste alone was no longer enough.

Portlanders expected challenges. Portland is more demanding now, and we've grown to like both taste and difficult to contend with energy. It must be said that being a juror of any biennial or official survey is an impossible but very important job. The upcoming one in 2006 (put off for a year because of the PAM expansion) is going to be very difficult to pull off.

Pope L.'s eRascism at PICA.

Then Core Sample happened for one weekend in October. With more than 30 exhibits, installations, performances and screenings throughout the city, it was a massive effort that doesn't happen in other places anymore.

Pablo Ocampo's U.N. resolutions, Core Sample, 2003.

For the city of Portland, Core Sample was a massive follow-up job and, just in case some of the locals missed the obvious, there was something going on here.

True, some shows like Realagories, Painting Portland, Crafty and The Hunt were just too regionally predictable for my tastes and it seemed like organizer Randy Gragg wanted to make sure some of the older Portland artists could claim they were participating in the city-wide art renaissance.

But that is all good (up to this point it was mostly us whippersnappers). The more progressive shows like Flush, Second Cycle (curated by Stephanie Snyder), Symbiont Synthetic (so I'm told), David Eckard's Scribe, James Harrison's two-by-four constructions and the video art at the Belmont Factory were very important, as was the catalog. I really liked Pablo Ocampo's U.N. resolutions at the Belmont Factory space as well.

The more progressive shows collectively declared that a new, more internationally engaged reality was in effect here. In spring 2004, the Organ officially freaked out about the fact that something clearly was going on in town and started becoming more of a literary publication rather than addressing the details of the art-scene renaissance. The Organ stopped publishing in December 2004 but one thing was certain: the visual art scene vitality wasn't some pigment of the imagination for all these newcomers flooding the city.

Tom Cramer's "Silver Exstacy"

Suddenly, between I.A.E., the Best Coast, TBA and Core Sample, Portlanders were seeing the local art world and the rest of the world side by side and, in many cases, the level of achievement was comparable. Very quickly that odd and undeserved self-deprecating attitude regarding Portland art vanished. People were shutting up and doing something and 2003 was a magical year.

Amidst all this hubbub, Tom Cramer switched galleries and proceeded to nearly sell out a very large show at Mark Woolley Gallery. This was the height of the recession and a long-known fact was reiterated: Portland loves abstract art. Since Rothko grew up here you'd think this would be obvious, but it needs to be restated – especially because there are a lot of unique abstractionists in Oregon (Matthew Picton, Jacqueline Ehlis, James Lavadour, Ellen George, Jesse Hayward, Mark Smith, Brenden Clenaghen, Michael Knutson, Mel Katz and Cramer, to name a few).

In November 2003 the Art Gym put on the Ulterior Motives show to try and wrap its head around this trend. Also, Jack Shimko and Leah Emkin, two then-recent Lewis and Clark grads, started the beautiful Haze Gallery and proceeded to put on the best series of shows the city had seen since the legendary PCVA (which showed Carl Andre and Chris Burden, etc., back in the '70s and early '80s).

Also, the people who put on the Modern Zoo decided to create a populist arts organization, PCAC, and did the process show with the idea of proving they had something to offer in terms of art expertise. The results were mixed and, by June 2004, the organization had split into two organizations: the Portland Art Center and Disjecta.

2004, the solo show year

Bruce Conkle's the Lala Zone Expedition at Haze Gallery, June 2004.

Haze Gallery opened its first solo show in January with Nic Walker and instantly upped the ante in the city with shows by Jesse Hayward, Ali Schmeltz, Corey Lunn, Kenny Higden, Melissa Smith and Lisa Bowduin Keys (with a real, grumpy miniature cow). Throughout the year it dominated the art season with good-to-excellent shows.

The two most memorable were Chandra Bocci's Bubble Speak, which sported a 70-foot-long otterpop rainbow and a yellow brick road made of mustard packets, and Bruce Conkle's fantastic Lala Zone Expedition.

Lala Zone was a pseudo-historical museum that combined altered videogame screenshots, tin-foil weaponry and hundreds of figurines depicting an encounter between natives and invaders. The diorama looked like a family reunion picnic and a genocide-producing battle – and that multiplicity of meanings made it very powerful.

Suddenly every gallery in Portland seemed very tame by comparison, although that isn't fair because it really didn't try to sell art. In fact, most sales galleries in New York (except big production value shock houses, like Dietch projects and Gagosian) seemed tame by comparison.

The fact that Haze was in Portland showing mostly Portland art was very eye opening and as an experiment had a huge impact. Haze closed in October 2004 with Chandra Bocci's Bubble Speak.

The first Affair @ the Jupiter Hotel Art Fair.

Also in January 2004, PICA's visual arts program under Stuart Horodner ended with a great lecture by Jerry Saltz, who indicated he was "intimidated" by what was going on here. The lecture can be seen in PICA's resource room.

The competitive Saltz seemed to be very aware that Hickey, Schjeldahl, Rinder, Aconcci and Storr had come through recently and really wanted to have the best lecture Portland had ever seen.

General consensus is that he achieved it.

By summer 2004 it became apparent that everyone needed to step up and Elizabeth Leach made the big move of buying a building in the Pearl District, which solidified the Pearl as the top gallery district. Other galleries, such as Mark Woolley, PDX and Pulliam Deffenbaugh, followed suit in 2005 by buying spaces as well.

Last but not least, the now cast-off curator Stuart Horodner snatched victory from the jaws of defeat by putting together Portland's first contemporary art fair, The Affair @ the Jupiter Hotel.

Horodner's fair drew large crowds and solidified what I had purported long ago: Portland is a kind of island in the art world that allows people to do their own thing. Horodner's oft-repeated catch phrase, "does the world need another art fair? No, but Portland does," was brilliant and said a lot. We weren't as isolated as many thought and Portland still enjoys a good reputation elsewhere that is increasingly drawing people to show here.

Just prior to the Affair, the art scene had been featured on CNN and art-world people all over the globe asked, "how did you get them to do something on art?" The answer: "overwhelming legitimacy." Portland's scene isn't the fabrication of of some cabal of art-world insiders, it stems from artists reimagining a city.

Nan Goldin, Richard Misrach and Sam Taylor Wood at the New Elizabeth Leach Gallery.

2005 gallery space explosion
There was also a proliferation of new galleries that came into their own in 2005 (even though some were open before that). The list: Motel, RC, Savage Art Resources (a much smaller but more adventurously programmed followup to the original Savage, which just closed), Portland Art Center, New American Art Union, Chambers, Beppu-Wiarda, Gallery 500, Homeland and Small A Projects. This culminated in the opening of the new Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art.

These new for-profit and non-profit gallerists are an interesting lot and, as mentioned before, both PDX and Pulliam Deffenbaugh just opened in new spaces, too.

Ehlis's "Vigor," June 2005.

So far, 2005 has been a year of excellent solo shows as well, with standout work by Matthew Picton, Amanda Wojick, Dianne Kornberg, Storm Tharp, Zach Kircher, James Lavadour and Tom Cramer. But the prize belongs to Jacqueline Ehlis, whose show Vigor at Savage Art Resources managed to be both very challenging and financially very successful.

With five separate bodies of work that all worked together as an investigation of painting's possibilities, it was a show that took that "seen that, heard that before" subject and managed to breathe life into it. Her what I call "phaintings" or photographs of paintings took Stieglitz's equivalencies (one of the most important bodies of work in abstract art) and gave it a new spin.

Portland artists also received rave reviews for shows outside of Portland in 2005. Here are a few: Bruce Conkle (Boston and Seattle), Matthew Picton (L.A. and San Francisco), Red Shoe Delivery Service (Melbourne), Laura Fritz (Seattle), Mary Mattingly (Hamptons, Venice), Justin Harris (Melbourne), etc.

PICA restarted its visual arts programming in 2005 with a lecture series and a warehouse show (that wasn't as interesting as it should have been). PICA's lack of exhibitions seems out of step with the very active visual-art community, which is more cutting edge than PICA itself seems to be. PICA's commitment to visual art is in question and we have yet to hear any formal plan regarding their visual-arts programming.

Other arts organizations, like the brand new Portland Art Center, have some interesting plans but word on the street is that their level of expertise lags behind the galleries and leading artists in the city. Events like Taking Place and frequent warehouse shows are simply more interesting. We also have new arts groups like Rake Arts, the MOST and Manifest Artistry, in addition to the venerable Red 76. With that kind of ruckus the intellectual standards in effect in the city's art scene far outstrip the typical university art gallery.

The School of Becher, the inaugural show at the New Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery.

The second Affair @ the Jupiter Hotel took place in October and was more adventitious and a bit more successful than the first, despite the soggier weather.

The presence of Mona Hatoum and White Columns, etc., upped the ante. In general, the galleries were better but there was too much of the same sort of art (self-conscious, faux clumsy drawings and other termite art) that should be addressed with a strong jurying of what work each gallery brings. This is a typical problem that most art fairs have.

At the same time, the Portland Art Museum opened the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art and this metro area of 2.1 million finally had a place where you could be guaranteed to see first-rate Minimalism, the School of Paris and Abstract Expressionism, along with some Pop and more contemporary work.

Installation at Motel Gallery, July 2005.

This provides an important historical baseline for artists, collectors and all art institutions in the city. Although one must wonder how the existence of all the other high-quality shows in town put pressure on the museum to do a truly challenging Oregon Biennial (slated for July 2006). There is no way around it: If it is a step backwards they'll be punished in a way no curator west of the Mississippi has ever been punished (tarring and feathering is not beyond this city). But if it is great the love should be intense.

I don't envy that curator and, though the new curator hasn't been announced, their name had better not be Custer.

Other plans are in motion and the city needs a serious Kunsthalle (at least three separate plans seem to be in play). Gallery 500 just closed, so Justin Oswald can focus on his next art project in the city.

Oswald is dangerous and it's still up to the galleries and artists in town to support and expand what has already happened here.

Things have progressed a great deal in Portland, to the point where galleries opening and closing isn't a big deal anymore. I suspect the biggest news about Portland art in 2006 will be that it isn't just for Portlanders (and those in the know) anymore.

We've been spoiled, but the secret is out.