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Metropolitan
Art Studio
2808
NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., #13, 422-9052, www.metroartstudio.org
The Standard Dairy Building on Northeast Martin Luther King
Jr. Boulevard is the kind of residential building planners--and
other people--get really excited about. It's a close-in, mixed-use
hunk of property
where lately a lot of creative people have been setting up
shop. Restored by North Portland developer and renovator Billy
Reed, the dairy was converted from an ugly duckling the shade
of Pepto-Bismol into a state-of-the-art swan reworked by recycled
beams, galvanized steel, and stretches of copper
veneer. Last month, the building christened its bar and
restaurant, Billy Reed's, before a buzzing crowd of young
and old. The place was packed to capacity with an enthusiastic
crowd of neighbors, artists and musicians.
Marvella McPartland, a resident of the building, was in
the crowd that night. McPartland has worked as a fine-art
framer for the past 25 years and sings and plays bass in
the jazz/blues combo Lighten Up. When her friend Reed approached
her and offered her a space in which to live and work, she
gladly accepted.
"This is the nicest place I've ever lived," McPartland
said of her new digs. In true urban-village style, she lives
directly above her new gallery, Artisan, which had its first
show in December and now has 25 artists scheduled for shows
in the next year. Retailers Vessels, Sheba's House of Elegance
and Diane's Boutique will soon follow with plans of their
own for the remaining commercial spaces.
Bryan Markovitz, founder of Portland's Liminal performance
group, and visual artist Steve Kratowicz had just moved
into one of the live/work spaces on the Northeast Graham
Street side of the block a week before hosting their first
show, "fasterharderbiggerbettermore," on Feb. 5. Their space,
the Metropolitan Art Studio, is divided into a gallery and
performance area in the front and living quarters on the
upper level. "This building is really a model of what people
mean when they talk about mixed-use development," Markovitz
says.
The two artists kicked off their new project with their
vision for a multidisciplinary space for contemporary artists
fully intact. Kratowicz says he hopes MAS can create an
atmosphere conducive to artists' coming by and sticking
around, unlike the often frantic experience of taking in
the Pearl District galleries on First Thursday.
Indeed, the pair's first show seemed to accomplish just
that. John Berendzen played electronica via a computer and
mixing board, while big-eyed art students mingled with older
artists juggling side careers in everything from Web development
to graphic design. The featured visual artists were Kratowicz
and Kieran McGuire. Kratowicz's honeycomb-patterned, optical
paintings hung on one wall opposite McGuire's work. The
spaces between and around the fractal-like paintings on
Kratowicz's portion of the wall were filled with glued-on
green, white and tan packing peanuts. Along the floor, a
drift of unattached packing peanuts lay strewn; the compulsive
viewer couldn't help but want to finish the job of attaching
them to the wall. Across the room hung McGuire's drawings
and paintings, like glimpses of a puzzling internal world
turned inside-out. They were surrounded and sometimes upstaged
by hand-written words and stories scrawled in black Sharpie.
The walls looked something like a caged person's writing
experiment.
For their next project, a couple of shows down the road,
the two plan to incorporate talent from Liminal and feature
a performance-art show with slides and sound. "We're going
to mix it up," says Markovitz. "There will be a lot of sushi
involved, too."
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Willamette Week | originally
published February 16,
2000
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