Open for Business
In Defense of Portland’s Small Artist-run Exhibition Spaces

In 1961, Claes Oldenburg opened The Store at 107 East 2nd Street.¹ The artist famously transformed the front room of his small studio on the Lower East Side into a shop that mimicked the many cheap bodegas and secondhand stores that lined the nearby blocks. That area of Manhattan in the early ’60s was a racially diverse and affordable bastion for immigrants, the working class, creatives, and progressives living shoulder-to-shoulder on the eve of the Vietnam War, which made artist-led happenings, like Oldenburg’s and those of Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneeman, both politically and financially viable.² Mirroring display tactics of nearby businesses, The Store’s glass shelving sported tongue-in-cheek, plastered, floppy, and oversized replicas of burgers, cakes, and ice cream cones, lingerie and smashed soda cans — all handmade duplicates of their real counterparts.³

Oldenburg’s Store heralded a radical undressing of the art world in that time. A cutting jab at Abstract Expressionism, whose once-avant-garde figureheads by then held monumental status in the art world, The Store offered for sale objects whose likenesses were purposefully poorly executed; the dripping paint, loose construction, and roughly hewn plaster directly poked fun at Abstract Expressionism gesturalism and art’s new status as a commodity, while making the art object no better than a hamburger.

Oldenburg’s Store heralded a radical undressing of the art world in that time. A cutting jab at Abstract Expressionism, whose once-avant-garde figureheads by then held monumental status in the art world, The Store offered for sale objects whose likenesses were purposefully poorly executed; the dripping paint, loose construction, and roughly hewn plaster directly poked fun at Abstract Expressionism gesturalism and art’s new status as a commodity, while making the art object no better than a hamburger. As described in Art Since 1900, interventions into the real world, like Oldenburg’s, marked a monumental transformation in the nature of art itself, exploding art outside the confines of traditional oil painting into “...the new, all-encompassing material of art; the dissolution of hierarchies and value-systems; the suppression of medium-specificity and the simultaneous inclusion of all realms of perception into the aesthetic sphere.”⁴ In other words, in a tiny, gaudy shop on the Lower East Side, Oldenburg sardonically revealed a truth that has since remained impossible to unsee: art could no longer pretend at ideals such as capital-B Beauty or capital-T Truth when it functioned in the same capacity as a can of soda in an increasingly market-driven world. Where Abstract Expressionism maintained a division between “high” and “low” art, and thus a conservative and capitalist-informed worldview (after all, those artists would later officially join the project of Cold War soft diplomacy in the late 1960s),⁵ “happenings” like Oldenberg’s, driven by artists’ unique approach to small physical spaces throughout New York City, allowed art making to shed the confines of disciplinary and market-driven pressures.

And yet, despite the historical importance of these artist-driven interventions in the early sixties, an ironic question emerges in hindsight: how many people actually saw Oldenburg’s Store as it appeared in 1961? It’s doubtful that Oldenburg created The Store imagining its image would be reprinted in art history textbooks for years to come, that its limited lifetime would transcend time and space through the reprinting of its documentation. The Store was, after all, a happening that only existed for two months. Thus, in situ, at the time, who was the work for?⁶

Thus, in situ, at the time, who was the work for?

Oldenburg’s The Store, like many of the “happenings” by Kaprow and others that occurred throughout the ‘60s that had a similar impact, has much to teach us about the framework in which artistic, and thus political change takes place. Even within today’s political crisis in which we find ourselves, I discovered traces of Oldenburg’s radical act and the roots of political resistance in Portland, Oregon. We can compare the political frictions of the 1960s to present day: a growing and stark divide between progressive and conservative politics, Cold War posturing fueled by trade concerns, the upending of social and relational norms, and general fear concerning the future state of the nation. In art, the dawn of 1960s postmodernism, exemplified in works like The Store, provides a model for the built space as a critical tool in probing the capitalist framework in which art operates — thus creating the possibility for resistance and rebirth.

In 2025, from Etsy shops to influencers to sponsored content, technology has paved the way for every human activity to become monetized for financial profit (the “side hustle,” the “gig economy”). There is a growing pressure, in some cases fueled by increasingly sophisticated tools for market analysis and behavioral prediction, to identify a pre-selected audience for products. Marketability, especially in the case of luxury commodities, operates as a mode of scarcity, clout, and the cultivation of persona for visual artists. Brick-and-mortar spaces function as sites for artists to develop a brand and connect with their consumers, and this is the backbone of traditional blue-chip galleries. Maintaining a creative practice in contemporary society is under constant threat, as it must always be purchased by the ever-present invisible consumer.

Oldenburg did not create The Store to actually sell his works, though they were indeed available for purchase for menial amounts as a means of gesturing to a transactional financial framework in which art operated. Nor did he create The Store for personal exposure or to garner a reputational boost through visibility. Oldenburg needed and used the space to explore an idea, to expose the way objects move physically and conceptually in real time and in real space. Oldenburg created The Store as an experiment whose outcome was only apparent once it existed.

As the market continues to expand and infiltrate every aspect of human life, small spaces built by artists, for artists, have come to take on new meaning and importance. I spent a week exploring such spaces in Portland as a sort of litmus test, to better understand how this historic legacy of artist-driven happenings takes on new urgency and functions as an important site for artistic experimentation, and thus political and societal expansion.

On a summer afternoon, I visited SOCIETY, a small space above the progressively minded Mother Foucault’s Bookshop housed in a 1892 building off Grand Avenue. Artist Ido Radon opened SOCIETY in April 2025, selecting the name for its etymological roots, the Latin socius indicating allyship and being in association with others. The gallery — as well as zine — acts as a site for artistic exchange both in-person and transnationally. When I visited, the current exhibition featured lamps from Lydia Rosenberg, a Pittsburgh-based artist who received her BFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2010 before moving East. The centerpiece lamp looks like a silly straw spelling out lamp store in orange cursive, perched in a water-filled jar on a knee-high plinth. Where one lamp’s cover appears to be made of found eyeglass lenses of different tints, another has faux-lettuce for its shade; another blossoms at over five feet tall like a massive blue brocade daisy, towering over a small hand-sized lamp that looks like a lemon. Each is specific, a playful amalgam of found and handmade materials, inviting speculation and imagined narratives (as the artist termed, “novels as objects,”⁷) for each lamp-character — all aptly named after people in the artist’s life. Like Radon’s own practice, which speaks materially to twentieth-century legacies, Rosenberg’s lamp store directly recalls Oldenburg’s. I discovered that many of the lamps had sold while the exhibition was up, and many were priced reasonably, even by Oldenburg’s standards. As Radon would tell me, “SOCIETY is for five people and maybe some imaginary dead ones.” To find the lamp store, I ascended the creaking staircase of a 19th-century building along Portland’s Grand Avenue; the building’s first floor is occupied by Mother Foucault’s Bookshop, a used bookstore replete with Marxist texts and French philosophers in their original language. The gallery itself could not be more than 12 feet by 12 feet. In other words, I had to intentionally find SOCIETY. Like Oldenburg’s Store, it’s easier to imagine a passerby or customer of Mother Foucault’s stumbling into this delightful cabinet of curious lamps. I like to imagine Rosenberg’s lamps being dispersed across the city into apartments and homes, illuminating desktops and shelves, having been born from this one tiny room. While we often discuss objects in a vacuum, where the gallery is supposed to function as a kind of contextless cube, SOCIETY celebrates the fact that it exists within and because of a larger artistic network. The zines with their small print runs, the quirky exhibition space, online talks and programs, the size and accessibility all function to create a network of connection — not between gallerist and wealthy collector, but between artists and their community cross-nationally. As Oldenburg’s Store teaches us, experimentation in small spaces with the intention of other artists as primary viewers is what allows for larger dialogues and larger movements to take root.

As Oldenburg’s Store teaches us, experimentation in small spaces with the intention of other artists as primary viewers is what allows for larger dialogues and larger movements to take root.

Here, in this small space where artists have complete curatorial discretion, ambiguity, nuance, discomfort, and queerness are allowed to thrive and co-mingle.

I would see Cavalier the next day at her home-garage-gallery, aptly called The Old Fashioned Garage Gallery, where a group exhibition of nineteen local artists that, like Helen’s Costume, provided a dazzling glimpse into the creative community that forms the backbone of the city. I was quickly drawn to the beautiful untitled paper and mixed media construction by floral artist Manu Torres, and then spent many minutes feeling lost in the murky waters of a Megan Holmes photograph. A plaster relief with a cigarette, Catie Hannigan’s TRAILER PARK ILLUMINATION (2025), made me chuckle, as did the Guston-esque paintings of butt-smelling and male-pattern baldness, Summer Ass (2014) and Hair (2014) by Nick Norman. Seeing such a wide variety of works was like peeling back a slice of the earth’s crust and looking at all of the layers. Each artist, a universe unto themselves, was in conversation with the other — each forming the potential for collaboration. The Old Fashioned Garage Gallery is “old-fashioned” in that it functions in the way that Oldenburg’s Store did, a pinpoint within a constellation of exchange, one node within an ecosystem.

So, to create spaces that only serve those making art, spaces that offer art to those who care to seek it out, is a way of offering an alternative. Art needs real space to exist.

Halfway through the second decade of the 21st century, under the authoritarian aims of the current administration led by a petty man whose life has been dedicated to wasteful expenditure of wealth, it's easy to lose sight of how to resist the ubiquity of the market’s influence on creative practice. While there is never truly a space outside of the blanketing requirement to participate in market economies as an artist, I would argue that small artist-driven spaces like those popping up with frequent regularity in Portland offer the potential for resistance. And, yes, I am equating the luxury commodity status of art with the growing wave of fascism in this country, not just because our current president himself operates in the realm of the financially elite, but more so in practical terms — those with wealth have the most purchasing capacity and thus the most taste-making power, culturally and politically. So, to create spaces that only serve those making art, spaces that offer art to those who care to seek it out, is a way of offering an alternative. Art needs real space to exist. It’s fair to guess that Oldenburg did not plan to create a revolution in the two months that he sold objects from The Store, but the fact of its existence has created a lasting impact. Revolution begins not at the top, but in the smallest of spaces where people come together in congress with one another. In other words, one may question: who are these small exhibitions even for? I would answer: they are for the few people who see them.

1. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh “Oldenburg and Happenings,” Art Since 1900, Thames & Hudson, 2004. https://monoskop.org/images/6/66/Foster_Hal_et_al_2004_1961_Oldenburg_and_Happenings.pdf
2. Rashidah Ismaili-Abu-Bakr. “Slightly Autobiographical: The 1960s on the Lower East Side.” African American Review 27, no. 4 (1993): 585–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/3041893.
3. Kirpalov, Anastasiia. "Was Claes Oldenburg’s ‘The Store’ the Ultimate Modern Landscape?" TheCollector.com, May 27, 2023, https://www.thecollector.com/claes-oldenburg-the-store/
4. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2004), 490.
5. Cockcroft, Eva. “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” in Francis Frascina ed. Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (Harper & Row, 1985).
6. Wholey, Makiko. “Revisiting The Store by Claes Oldenburg” Inside/Out, June 26, 2013. Museum of Modern Art/ MoMA PS1 Blog. https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2013/06/26/revisiting-oldenburgs-the-store/
7. Lydia Rosenberg. “Lamp Store — Lydia Rosenberg,” 2023. https://www.lydiarosenberg.net/lamp-store.