 photo by FRANK DIMARCO |
STORY The End of VITA's Vitality Vita Gallery closes after five years in business, but owner Linda Grounds says the non-financial rewards have made the venture worthwhile. BY KATE BONANSINGA |
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Vita Gallery 820 NW Glisan St., 295-1154 Vita's current two-person exhibition, which ends Nov. 25, is well worth seeing; Paul Arensmeyer and Ann Carstensen offer wall pieces made from found materials. If you go to the Vita Gallery in December you will catch an exhibit called Vita's Last Picture Show, which features the work of David Berkvam, Jean Erhardt, Nicholsloy (a collaboration between David Nichols and Sondra Loy) and Dardinelle Troen. This will be the gallery's 75th show and its last. Linda Grounds, the founder and owner of Vita Gallery, will tie up some loose ends and shut the gallery down for good at the end of January. This is a significant loss for Portland's art scene. Vita has developed a reputation for exhibiting the work of emerging artists who have yet to establish a strong reputation and client base. Its closure will leave many of them with no reliable venue for showing and selling their work. Some of these artists have great promise, and in this respect Portland's visual culture will suffer with the closure of this gallery. Grounds' decision may signal a shakedown in the Portland gallery scene, which has been in full bloom for the past several years. It seems inevitable that petals will eventually begin to drop; the amount of available art, much of it very good, has exceeded the demand. Art is a luxury that is suffering during these times of economic uncertainty. Some artists may be forced to focus their creativity on projects other than gallery exhibitions. Grounds got into the art business as a fan. Her passion began when she was growing up in El Campo, Texas, where posters from the Metropolitan Museum of Art lined the living-room walls of her family's home. She chose clinical psychology as a profession, however. After receiving her doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, she moved to Portland in 1979 for an internship and post-doctoral work. But she continued to be fascinated with contemporary art, and visual artists were to become some of her closest friends. Vita Gallery's opening exhibition in October 1993, in its initial location in a small space on Southwest 9th Avenue, comprised the work of four of these friends. (Two of them, Erhardt and Troen, will also be part of Vita's Last Picture Show.) Grounds sold a few pieces from the show and continued to exhibit and sell work on a regular basis, though the gallery was open only on Fridays and Saturdays. In spring 1995 Grounds expanded the gallery's square footage and hours, and she and some loyal friends spent the summer preparing Vita's current space, which opened in October of that year. Since then, Grounds has been practicing psychology 31Ž2 to four days a week in a secluded office housed above the gallery. During her days off from counseling, she tends to gallery business. Although she has one full-time and one part-time employee, she still handles most of the sales. Grounds estimates that she has sold around 500 works of art since Vita's inception, but it hasn't been enough to make the gallery profitable. Her clinical practice supports her and funds Vita, which has required investments over the years totaling tens of thousands of dollars and offered minimal returns. While the satisfaction is great, none of the benefits is financial. Grounds now says, "I no longer have the physical or financial resources to run the gallery." Most of Vita's life coincided with an economic boom. Although Grounds' decisions seem to have been sound (she succeeded on a very small scale and then expanded), it's possible that she was attempting to do too much. Not only was she an almost-full-time psychologist, she also wrote and hosted radio segments on art-related topics on KOTK and meanwhile developed her understanding of the retail business and of art (having had no formal training in either). Grounds had no choice but to juggle tasks, as she needed to keep herself and her gallery alive financially. It's apparent that she has a commitment to, love of and feeling for art. Mounting refined installations and selecting good abstract work seem to be her strong suits. Much of the work she shows is figurative, but Vita represents at least two very capable abstractionists, sculptor Paul Arensmeyer (whose show is currently on view) and painter Naomi Shigeta. While gallery owners are respected as propagators of taste and filters for quality and value, they are also often misunderstood to be merchant middlemen, reaping rewards from the toil of artists and the generosity of patrons. In the United States only the most famous galleries, like the most famous artists, seem to survive comfortably, bringing into question what our society values and why. For her part, Grounds plans to stay involved with visual art; perhaps her next project will be more forgiving.
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