The most memorable exhibitions this year made a mess, rejecting pristine gallery walls in favor of fish skin, plastic bags, and lived-in spaces like a mall corridor and a home garage. Artists viewed art itself as inhabitable—Ginny Sims turned walls into spaces for dimensional scenes, and Lydia Rosenberg’s experimental lamps gave Society a chaotic, yet domestic feel.
Many of these art projects served as community builders, too, building subtle connections through gestures as quick as stuffing a fish sculpture into a salmon cannon and as sustained as Kye Grant’s months-long club for only children. Taken together, the city saw a turn toward the new. First shows and debuts, idiosyncratic venues, and a preference for experimentation led us to only one conclusion: Portland art is so back.
Ginny Sims: Postcards from the Night at Nationale
May 17-June 2
Much love to reliable local artists, but it’s always a treat to encounter a name we’ve never heard before. In spring, Nationale brought Minneapolis clay artist Ginny Sims to its main gallery space with a solo exhibition, Postcards from the Night, that elevated dreamy, abstracted kitchen ceramics far beyond their everyday use. A tidy row of Staffordshire-inspired pitchers (Sims apprenticed at an England pottery) found its home alongside candlestick holders, egg cups, and mugs underglazed with suggestions of landscapes.
What held my attention, though, were a series of “wall compositions,” maquettes that paired slips of wallpaper with small, oxide-brushed figural sculptures. The little figures felt strangely relatable as they clutched bananas, smoked cigarettes, and stared into space.
Lydia Rosenberg: Lamp Store, Grand Reopening at Society
June 7-August 2
Upstairs from Mother Foucault’s new-ish location in the character-filled and historic Nathaniel West building, Ido Radon’s art space Society feels ultra-contemporary, but never pretentious. Society’s debut show, Lamp Store, Grand Reopening, centered a tangle of experimental lamps by Pittsburgh artist Lydia Rosenberg. Illuminated plastic bags and lettuce lampshades filled the small room overlooking SE Grand, creating layers of visual interest and feeling like your coolest friend’s chaotic studio apartment.
The “lamp store-as-sculpture” idea nodded toward 20th-century artists Claes Oldenburg, Mina Loy, and the readymade; notably, lemon-shaped lamps sold for $100 and nightlights set visitors back a mere $25. The new gallery’s pairing of art-world aesthetics with actually affordable pieces felt refreshing.
Kye Grant: CLUB ALIVE! residency at ILY2 Too
August 1-October 26
How alive are you willing to be? It’s a question artist-experimenter Kye Grant continues to pose, much to our collective benefit. Grant’s genre-fluid queer performance party Club Alive has previously held it down at Kelly’s Olympian and at PICA’s 2024 Time-Based Arts Festival; the project continues to expand and morph into new shapes. Earlier this year, Grant’s three-month residency at Lloyd Center’s ILY2 Too brought Club Alive to everyone’s favorite mall-turned-art-project.
The vibe was “part club house, part party site, part television station, part art gallery, part newsroom, [and] part micro department store,” which meant, at the risk of cliché, that it offered something for everyone, including you. The multi-pronged experience included inventive community-building ideas, like a monthly “only child club” and an exhibition, People’s History Museum of Lloyd Center Mall, documenting the mall’s innumerable stories and quirks.
Sasha Fishman: Shad Mode at ILY2
September 20-December 20
New York artist Sasha Fishman views the extraction of marine biomaterials as a sculptural gesture; her artistic inquiries are shaped by the sea itself. In other words, Fishman’s work is slick, watery, and weird in the best of ways. This year, the fittingly surnamed artist and Columbia sculpture grad hosted a fish skin tanning workshop and a tour of the Bonneville Fish Hatchery, all connected to her ILY2 solo show Shad Mode.
I dropped by the gallery during an atmospheric river to play with the Whooshh salmon cannon, into which visitors could stuff jellied salmon sculptures to watch them rocket through a tube, careen into a wall on the opposite end of the room, and plop satisfyingly into a basket. (The technology’s real-world usage helps migratory fish navigate safely over dams.) The rest of the exhibition felt inventive, too, with tactile explorations in egg yolk, sturgeon skin, and slough sand.
Jade Novarino: mi mano a tu mano at Old-Fashioned Garage Gallery
October 25-December 7
Jodie Cavalier and Alley Frey’s Old-Fashioned Garage Gallery—a newly founded art space operating out of their Irvington garage—offered this year’s most intimate and sincere exhibition. Jade Novarino’s mi mano a tu mano, with its emphasis on expressive friendship and creative correspondence with her pen pals, felt perfectly suited to the gallery’s scale and art-in-the-real-world feeling.
It was OFGG’s fourth and final exhibition of the year, and the implementation spotlit Novarino’s consistently novel, light-touch decisions: kabocha squash seeds bordered paper works, arranged flat on a table; an envelope hung from a window frame; calligraphy curled across a palm-sized rock. As with all Novarino’s work—she’s also a farmer, calligraphy teacher, and one-half of the roaming bakery Babcia Bread—mi mano a tu mano never strayed from its deeply human feeling. It was as much a meditation session as it was an exhibition.
Visual art stories worth revisiting:
Lindsay Costello
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