Art Gym’s New Director Wants to Create a Platform for Emerging Pacific Northwest Artists
In 2012, artist Manuel Arturo Abreu was evicted from Reed College housing after a campus drug raid. After struggling to find a new place to live, Abreu moved into the garage of a punk house in Southeast Portland. A few years later, Abreu wrote a blog for San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art about the experience. Titled Notes on the Garage Residency, the essay stuck with curator Ashley Stull Meyers ever since she read it. So when she decided to work with Abreu for Place Names, the first exhibit she curated as the director of Art Gym, she knew the garage had to be in the exhibit.