A darling of Portland’s contemporary art scene, Yale Union is fighting gentrification by dissolving and giving its $5 million building to a foundation that has big plans for the space
“How do you reverse-gentrify?” asked Flint Jamison, co-founder and president of the Yale Union contemporary arts center. “Give the fucking land back! Turn the keys over.”
Jamison is saying goodbye to the spacious, angelically sunlit contemporary art center he’s helped run for the past 10 years in Southeast Belmont’s historic Yale Union Laundry Building. When it opened, then-Mayor Sam Adams called Yale Union “a great, bright beacon of creativity that is tangible and real that signals we are going to put our stake in the ground.” Last year, Hyperallergic named Yale Union among the 10 venues defining the Portland art scene. But they’re dissolving now and transferring their $5.36 million building, free of charge, to a new owner: the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation.
“The transfer of the Yale Union to NACF to support the cultural continuance of Indigenous communities is unprecedented, a first,” said Joy Harjo, Mvskoke poet and the first Native woman to become poet laureate of the United States. She’s also board chair of NACF. “This sharing of resources in a place first occupied by Indigenous peoples initiates healing for the whole community. We now have a home, a central place for Native arts in this country.”
“This has been very serendipitous,” said Lulani Arquette, NACF’s president and CEO. “It’s a very magical experience — I’m using that word intentionally.” NACF is small but prolific. Arquette and a staff of nine support around 200 Native artists nationwide. They’re based in Vancouver, Wash., but operate remotely. Arquette said they weren’t looking for a building. But then she got an email from an old friend.
Discouraged by gentrification
The email Arquette received was from Yoko Ott, executive director of Yale Union. The two had met before, and they had a lot in common. They both cared for elderly mothers, came from Hawaii — Arquette is Native Hawaiian — and worked in the Pacific Northwest contemporary arts world.
“There was a lot of mutual admiration I think we had for each other,” Arquette said.
After years of not seeing each other, Ott invited Arquette to the Yale Union building. “I thought we were meeting to catch up with each other, and as we would say in Hawaii ‘talk story,’” Arquette said. What she didn’t know was Ott and Jamison had been planning an offer.
New construction in Portland had hit record highs, and a stumpy midrise luxury apartment building, now typical of most American cities, was going up across the street from Yale Union. A two-bedroom there rents for $3,821.
“Artists can’t afford to be in inner Southeast now,” Jamison said. “Art spaces are kind of first-wave. … I feel kind of complicit in some way to the gentrification of this zone.”
Yale Union has kept its rents low, around $1 per square foot for the six subsidized studios it leases out. But it wasn’t enough. Jamison and Ott agreed on what to do.
After catching up, Ott told Arquette plainly that Yale Union wanted to give NACF the building.
“It was as profound and simple as that,” Arquette said. “I literally was in such shock I didn’t even say anything for probably 30 seconds, maybe even a minute. We were just sitting there,” she said, laughing, “staring at each other.” But she accepted.
“It was emotional. We both were emotional,” Arquette said. “And we’re both really strong women, who run organizations in the art scenes and have been at it for a long time. That’s what was unique, was the emotional aspect of it.”
Ott died in October 2018, before she could see the vision finalized.
‘Systemic change doesn’t happen without loss’
Jamison acknowledged some mixed feelings as he concluded this chapter of his life, which began in 2008 when he started Yale Union with Marriage Records founder Curtis Knapp. But he’s also quick to dismiss those feelings.
“Systemic change doesn’t happen without loss. Straight up,” he said.
To launch Yale Union, Knapp and Jamison had enlisted a family connection. The anonymous donor fronted $3.5 million for the building, plus $7.2 million more for renovations. Yale Union had its first exhibit in May 2011. It began generating income through grants, private donors and space rentals. Now, Jamison said Yale Union owns the building outright. In a press release, he called this “the unearned privilege of property ownership.”
“And our feelings?” he said. “Like, fuck it. We gotta divest. We’ve had too much.”
NACF undertook a 14-month feasibility study of the building and will move in next year.
Jamison insisted it’s not a gift or a donation.
“How can we give something that wasn’t technically ours in the first place?” Instead, Jamison calls it a “transfer of ownership.”
A legacy of social justice
The Yale Union Laundry Building is no stranger to social justice.
In 1914, most laundry workers were women making $9 per 45-hour week, the equivalent of about $230 today, in sweltering and hazardous industrial-era conditions. In 1919, Yale Laundry joined a citywide laundry workers strike that spread across Oregon. The strike, along with public boycotts, resulted in better pay and working conditions for women — and in Portland’s first unionized laundry facility, Victory Laundry on Southeast 69th Avenue and Foster Road. The building’s role in these strikes put it on the National Register of Historic Places.
The two-story, unreinforced brick building was built in 1908. It features an Italian Renaissance revival facade with Egyptian revival bas-relief details, which Jamison described as “kind of embarrassing.” It has 31,000 square feet of rentable space, plus a partial basement — Jamison pointed out the water table, seeping through a pit of mud and rubble beneath the catwalk, which he says visibly rises and falls — and a parking lot beneath a hollow water tower pedestal.
It’s currently home to a print shop, a woodworking space, subsidized artist studios, a recording studio, a chocolate maker and a women’s hacking collective in the basement.
“They have crazy machines. So many crazy machines!” Jamison said. “It’s one of the most energetic places in the building.”
The mezzanine level, which served as Yale Union’s main gallery space, is aglow with skylights and a procession of 10-foot arching windows. It’s uniquely absent of support columns, leaving an expansive, unbroken floor space. There’s also an upstairs cafe and a checker-floored, wainscoted office that gives the impression Cary Grant might just pop in at any time.
“It has so much character to it,” Arquette said. “It also has a lot of what we call in Hawaii ‘mana.’” She described this as a spiritual energy, “something bigger than all of us.”
NACF has enlisted architects to redesign the unfinished basement with the exposed water table into a meditation space, but it’s waiting to get community input before finalizing the plan.
“There’s some greater purpose it’s going to serve. And it’s going to continue a legacy that already started with (Yale Union),” Arquette said of the building. “That’s a powerful thing.”
“The deed of this land and title has a restrictive covenant on it,” Jamison said. “It can only be used for art and culture presentation.” He said that’s part of what has kept developers from homogenizing it into condos and mixed-use retail, and part of why he considers NACF a perfect fit.
“NACF is just awesome,” Jamison said. “They have a very strong vision. The scale is big; they operate across the whole country. They’re able to hit the ground running. It’s pretty inspiring.”
Anti-racism through arts and culture
Arquette’s vision for the building includes exhibition space, a black box theater, a gallery, art-making spaces, a cultural resource room to expand upon Yale Union’s existing library, a media room for audio and video production, and a different kind of woodshop — “more for carvers and canoe builders,” she said.
Programming will focus on anti-racism and other Native social justice issues, overlapping with Black, Latinx and LGBTQ+ communities, among others.
“We’re all in some sense struggling for similar things,” Arquette said, “for more equity, for more healthy living.”
She mentioned Crystal Echo Hawk’s 2018 study with IllumiNatives and First Nations Institute, which Arquette said revealed the “relative invisibility of Native people in this country, especially as contemporary people.”
She said the study helped dismantle some of the romanticized versions of Native people by addressing inaccuracies and stereotypes.
“That’s a really big thing that we want to work on, through an arts and culture lens,” she said.
Arquette said she often hears patrons say a piece “doesn’t look like Native art.” She wants to challenge the public to reframe their understanding of Natives as diverse instead of homogenized. “It’s really this idea of exploding and expanding people’s minds, and hearts, and spirits.” But she also wants these epiphanies to lead to action, resulting in changed laws and policies.
Within the Native community, Arquette looks forward to bringing national and local Native artists together to inspire one another.
“I’d love to have every single Native in the Portland area come to a gathering at NACF when we’re able to have that,” she said.
Changing artists, and the arts world, through relationships
Around the time that Yale Union was established, another development in Portland’s art scene came about: Indigenous drag clown Carla Rossi was born. Rossi is the on-stage persona of multidisciplinary artist Anthony Hudson, who’s enrolled with the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde.
But by 2017, Hudson, who uses they/them pronouns, was on the verge of giving up their drag persona and whole creative career, discouraged by the overwhelming demands of multiple side hustles bearing scarce returns. Instead of continuing as Rossi, Hudson was looking for a full-time job. Then they found NACF and landed a fellowship.
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Hudson said NACF changed the course of their life and career.
“No arts organization has supported my work as fiercely and fully as NACF,” they said. “They actually do the work of getting to know you.”
Hudson considers this rare in an art world they said values artists for what can be taken from them.
“This one isn’t just a business relationship,” Hudson said. “It always felt like it was love at the base. It was love, and it was care for holding up each other.”
When venues closed down due to the coronavirus pandemic, Hudson was one of many artists left with a fractured income.
According to Americans for the Arts, the running tally of losses suffered throughout the arts world is now $9.1 billion.
“It trickles through performance venues, managing of artists, tribal communities and their culture centers and museums, national presenters, the restaurants and the hotels around that book these things,” Arquette said. “It just affects everything.”
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The average creative worker’s annual income has dropped by an estimated $27,103.
In response, NACF created a Native arts emergency fund of $250,000 to help people, including Hudson, with rent and living expenses.
“I love them,” Hudson said. “The amount of support and investment they put in their artists, not just capital investment but actually building relationships, is unprecedented.”
Brenda Mallory, a Portland-based visual artist and a citizen of Cherokee Nation, said the connections she has made through NACF with other Native artists have turned into enduring relationships.
“I found it invaluable,” she said, “to get to know those other artists in person and on a deeper level,” recalling a convening of NACF artists she attended a few years ago. “Just imagine if there had been an exhibition space where we could also have shown our work!”
Performing in Native spaces is different
Soon there will be such a space, and that matters, Hudson said. This is because presenting in a Native space is different. One key element, they said, is the absence of the “anthropological eye.”
“The white arts world, I think, is one of consumption, and it’s product-based,” Hudson said, while the Native arts world is based in culture, sovereignty and celebrating each other. “And, it’s not so much about marketing and branding,” they added. In a Native space, Hudson said, “the work is actually being seen, rather than the work is being consumed.”
As an example, Hudson recounted a back-to-back performance at Dartmouth. Hudson, as Carla Rossi, performed their comedy show about racism first for a mostly non-Native white audience. “They do that ‘mmm’ thing,” Hudson laughed. “Like whenever something kind of resonates with their worldview they go ‘mmm.’ Otherwise it was like a silent, respectful, deer-in-headlights kind of audience.”
Next they performed the same show for an audience of Native Americans. “And it was riotous. Everyone was laughing, and shouting back at me, and snapping and clapping, and singing along to the songs. It was exactly how it’s supposed to be experienced.”
Hudson compared NACF’s new space to the Autry Museum in Los Angeles or the Centre for Indigenous Theater in Toronto.
“I’ve been waiting for something like this to come along in our neck of the woods for a long time now,” they said. “There’s a culture gap Native artists have to leap over when we’re granted or ‘given’ space by white patrons, along with the expectation that we perform gratitude or our identity for them in return.”
“We’re very grateful, very humbled by this opportunity,” Arquette said. “We’ve developed really great relationships with Flint and the staff there.” She and Jamison both said the door is open for potential future collaborations between Yale Union artists and NACF. Now struggling Native artists, like Hudson once was, will be able to thrive as Yale Union did.
'Nourish the roots’ of Native arts
“I credit Yoko and Flint and their team for all this,” Arquette said, “the vision and everything. It’s quite remarkable.”
But Jamison sidestepped the credit. “Not our vision,” he said. “We believe in the presentation of culture, but also, it’s so much more urgent to listen to voices that have been marginalized and pushed out to the fringes.”
Hudson and Arquette pointed out that pursuing true repatriation of land to tribal nations remains an ongoing effort, and that this transfer of title is largely symbolic. The land at the corner of Southeast 10th Avenue and Belmont Street, according to Arquette’s research, was originally hunting fishing grounds for many surrounding tribes.
“If this country is to integrate spiritually, creatively and profoundly, we must nourish the roots,” said Harjo, the poet. “There is no America without Native nations arts, cultures, languages and humanities. Without the acknowledgement and inclusion of Indigenous roots, a land, a country is unmoored, without stability.”
“Our politics have matured,” Jamison said. “I’m sorry we didn’t do this earlier.”
Jamison wore a black bandana as a mask, and after locking up at the Yale Union building, he was headed to the Justice Center to hear Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty speak at what would be one of the biggest gatherings in weeks of Portlanders protesting in support of Black lives.
Hudson imagined the sound of laughter echoing throughout the building.
“How welcome and refreshing that will be to hear in an arts space for a change,” they said. “Native people have the best laughs.”
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