Twenty-four years later, I can still smell the hay bales and hear yodeling. But the 2000 gallery exhibit “Taking Space, Making Place” at the American Institute of Architects in Portland was more than a bold sensory provocation (with hay bales for seating and a vocal video installation).

This group show—featuring a visual artist, dancer, filmmaker, architect and chef—prefigured by more than a decade the quirky, iconoclastic spirit that TV’s Portlandia would both celebrate and gently parody. Yet there was an earnest desire underscoring their efforts: to cultivate community.

As an aspiring writer working at the AIA that year, the exhibit and its boisterous opening-night party (part of the First Thursday gallery walk) taught me not to cover my nose and ears, but to appreciate the original ideas often underscoring eccentricity, and to recognize a unique, fleeting moment. There’s an old adage: “Make hay while the sun shines.” In other words, take advantage of opportune times before they change. Nearly a quarter-century later, this show, which made hay both figuratively and literally, reminds me that everything is ephemeral.

I thought back to “Taking Space, Making Place” recently after the sudden, tragic death of celebrated Portland chef Naomi Pomeroy, who catered the exhibit’s opening party with her then-husband, Michael Hebb. I’ve never tasted biscuits and berry preserves so delicious. Yet food was just the start.

A CHEF IS BORN

In the wake of Pomeroy’s passing, prompting tributes and recollections everywhere from Facebook to The New York Times, the story of her career has been lovingly and deservedly told. In the 2000s, she oversaw acclaimed restaurants including Beast, Clarklewis and Gotham Tavern. In the 2010s, she appeared on TV’s Iron Chef and Top Chef, the latter program making her a recurring judge and nationwide culinary star. In the 2020s, though still only in her forties — she was 49 when she died — she became a kind of godmother to her fellow Portland chefs.

As many local foodies remember, Pomeroy first gained notice around the turn of the millennium by serving dinners with her then-husband, Michael Hebb, from their house: the celebrated Sunday Suppers series, on long tables made from discarded doors, where attendees each brought their own chairs.

“She wanted to bring people together around food,” recalls architect Mark Lakeman, one of the “Taking Space, Making Place” curator-participants, along with filmmaker Rankin Renwick, dancer-performance artist Linda K. Johnson, and visual artist Brian Borrello. “She was a food genius, but Naomi wanted the food to be extraordinary in order for people to talk to each other and share a moment. There was a lot to what she was doing conceptually that people may have not understood. They might have thought it was just about the food.”

Hebb and Pomeroy had joined Lakeman in the late 1990s to help birth the City Repair Project, a nonprofit still going today that empowers neighborhoods to transform their urban spaces into hubs of creativity and community life.

City Repair’s signature event is now the Village Building Convergence, an annual eight-day festival, but the organization began with a series of intersection repairs, as they were known: participatory events centered on beautifying four-way neighborhood intersections with street murals and seating areas to de-emphasize automobiles and create impromptu piazzas. As part of their new food business, Ripe, Pomeroy and Hebb provided food and drink for City Repair’s first such project, Share-It Square in Sellwood.

In 2000, when Lakeman partnered with these artists to conceive the “Taking Space, Making Place” exhibit, Pomeroy and Hebb weren’t simply the caterers. Less than a year before their Sunday Suppers began in 2001, and about three months before their daughter August was born, this was a chance to expand and road-test Ripe’s cultivating-community-with-food concept.

Before the opening party in the gallery’s back-of-house kitchen, I remember a pregnant Pomeroy who was also personable, enjoying our astonishment at how much better her food was than what we normally had catered. Though Hebb did a lot of the talking, “she was approachable and clearly the mastermind behind the food,” recalls Amy Sabin-Logan, my former coworker at the AIA, now the executive director of My Voice Music, a nonprofit empowering kids to write and record songs.

PLANTING SEEDS

Longtime Portland dancer, instructor and performance artist Linda K. Johnson met Pomeroy back in 1994, when the future chef was a student in Johnson’s Lewis & Clark College dance-composition class. During one guest-speaker lecture, Johnson introduced Pomeroy to Kristy Edmunds, the future director of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, for whom Ripe later catered. And in 1997, Johnson gave Pomeroy and Hebb their first catering job, for the Conduit dance festival.

“We were kind of all growing up together,” Johnson says, “all these arts organizations and festivals starting up. There were so many things going on and Naomi and Michael were feeding that thing, doing these renegade dinners and catering our events. The late ’90s, early Aughts: It was a very fecund time.”

Johnson’s contribution to “Taking Space, Making Place” was perhaps its most memorable feature. The AIA gallery space was known for its striking, almost flashy contemporary style, fashioned by architect Jeff Lamb: exposed steel, theatrical lighting. For this exhibit, the floors were covered in hay and hay bales brought in for seating.

It was an extension of Johnson’s outdoor installation about a mile away: “TaxLot #1S1E4ODD,” a temporary edible urban garden that utilized a traffic median near Portland State University beside the Interstate 405 freeway. For one growing season in 2000, Johnson tended the garden and grew crops (rosemary, thyme, basil and carrots, all given away to local soup kitchens) in raised beds made from the bales, demonstrating what was possible.

“TaxLot” was not an intuitive act for a dancer, but in 1991 Johnson had decided to take dance off-stage to explore how the body relates to space in the increasingly crowded landscape of her native Oregon. In that year’s Finding the Forest, she had choreographed a dance in 5,000-acre Forest Park. In 1999’s The View From Here, she camped at seven spots along the Urban Growth Boundary, engaging in chats with visitors and living in a self-created muslin dwelling, juxtaposed against McMansions. “What we need,” Johnson told Metropolis magazine’s Bill Donahue, “is considered spaces, spaces that don’t squander land but still allow people to affect the environment.”

“The TaxLot garden had just been planted, so the thing people saw when they drove by were these hay bales I got delivered from Linton Feed & Seed. They were like the building blocks —I mean, talk about architecture,” Johnson says. “Because I’m a tactile person and it’s an embodied practice, to have the bales there at the gallery for people to sit on was natural.”

Saundra Stevens, the AIA’s executive director, recalls thinking that importing hay into the gallery was “nuts,” adding, “we weren’t aware of the hay until it arrived. Shocked to put it mildly.” But she didn’t try to stop them. We all seemed to know something special was happening.

CONJURING BUDDHAS

Over the past 25 years, visual artist Brian Borrello has become best known for prominent public art projects including the “Silicon Forest” stainless steel sculptures at the Rose Quarter Transit Center, the “Corylus” welded-steel sculptures that form a gateway to Tigard’s Main Street, and the “People’s Bike Library of Portland” downtown at 11^th and Burnside (made with Rankin Renwick), which stacks several children’s bicycles on a pole in tribute to the city’s vibrant bike culture. In recent years,

Borrello has also become acclaimed for a series of large-scale graphic works portraying heightened views of natural phenomena: leaves, roots and mycelia. 

From the beginning, Borrello’s work has been infused with a renegade civic and environmental spirit. “I strive to make interesting and unexpected encounters, often in aesthetically-deprived urban environments,” he writes on his website, “in response to local history and context.”

In 1996, for example, in his hometown of New Orleans (then struggling with one of the nation’s highest murder rates), he curated “Guns in the Hands of Artists,” acquiring from the city’s police department a quarter-ton of confiscated firearms that Borrello distributed to 60 local artists for re-appropriation, as sculpture, jewelry and furniture.

Arriving in Portland in the late 1990s, Borrello volunteered with the City Repair Project, organizing at intersection-repair events the group’s trademark street paintings. That’s where he met Lakeman, Pomeroy and Hebb; soon after, Borrello worked with Johnson and Renwick. “We were all doing different levels of street intervention,” he says today. “There was a lot of cross-pollinating and we had all collaborated.”

For “Taking Space, Making Place,” Borrello engaged in live sculpture, making plaster Buddhas during gallery hours and giving them away. I still have mine, 24 years later, displayed in my office. The sculptures were part of a larger citywide project: Borrello would deposit the Buddhas throughout the city, in spots needing infusions of positive karma. “I was putting them in dank dark urban places, under bridges, alleyways, in doorways where homeless people slept,” he explains. “It’s what I do. Positive transformation.”

BIKETOWN VIBES (WITH YODELING AND BAGPIPES)

Rankin Renwick was already an experienced filmmaker and videographer by 2000, having made 15 short films and serving as a videographer for PICA performances. But “The Yodeling Lesson” was Renwick’s first installation. It centered on their 1998 film of the same name, which documented a naked bicycle ride taken by artist Moe Bowstern, four years before Portland’s annual World Naked Bike Ride began. To watch the film at the AIA gallery, one had to ride an exercise bike that was hooked up to the TV-and-video console.

“Moe wanted me to film her bike-riding naked, no hands, down Mississippi Avenue, from Fremont to Russell,” Renwick recalls. It was a cold, wet spring Palm Sunday morning, but because clocks had moved an hour ahead, few people were out. From the back of a pickup truck with a Sony VX 1000 video camera, Renwick filmed Bowstern going downhill three times, and then “made the decision to make her ride uphill, no hands, as well,” the artist remembers. “There was a guy waiting for a bus at the top of the hill, and he asked us if we were going to be back the next day.”

All that month during “Taking Space, Making Place,” the sound of yodeling and bagpipes could be heard from the film’s soundtrack. It drove those of us working at the AIA a little crazy, but as much as the nude bike ride, the film’s music made it memorable. Appropriately given the uphill and downhill course, both yodeling and bagpipes evoke hills and highlands.

And in this case, the music communicated unselfconscious exuberance. “Initially it was to be one person teaching another how to yodel, but I could not get any yodelers to yodel for the soundtrack,” Renwick explains. “Then being of Scotch/Irish and German descent, I’ve always loved the bagpipes, and I came up with the idea for a mix of bagpipes and yodeling.”

The exercise bike powering the video console was also sitting atop a black mat, meant to seem like blacktop, but Renwick had their friend Todd Roberts stencil the silhouette of a naked biker rider. Roberts had already become known for stenciling cheeky images onto the street beside bike lanes all over the city, a culture Renwick has always been a part of and tapped into—including the later “People’s Bike Library of Portland” sculpture with Borrello.

Renwick’s “Taking Space, Making Place” installation helped them expand from filmmaking to a multidisciplinary art career, exhibited in galleries and at museums including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum, the Seattle Art Museum and Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art.

On opening night, people lined up to ride the bike, even though they could see the film while someone else rode. “Over and over again the people got on and rode, and mimicked Moe’s movements in the film,” Renwick remembers. After the premiere, the installation has been repeated in several different cities and gallery shows. “The same thing happens; people line up and wait to get on the bike and ride it themselves! Every time it has been shown.”

HOMAGE TO A PIONEER

For his “Taking Space, Making Place” contribution, Mark Lakeman didn’t display his nonprofit City Repair Project’s community initiatives or designs by his architecture firm, Communitecture. Instead, Lakeman created at the AIA gallery a fanciful tribute to Pioneer Courthouse Square designer Will Martin, and the activist spirit that enabled Portland’s popular civic space.

Martin, who died with his son in a plane crash in 1985, was a gifted visual artist (focusing on botanical drawings) as well as an architect, and he was Lakeman’s mentor. Lakeman’s father, Richard, had been a City of Portland planning bureau executive in the 1970s who commissioned Martin to create a vision for what the future Pioneer Courthouse Square could become, before Martin later won a design competition to secure the actual commission. Along the way, Martin became a hugely influential presence in Mark Lakeman’s life, and the square’s public placemaking a North Star for Lakeman’s career.

Architectural renderings for Will Martin’s Pioneer Courthouse Square.

In “Taking Space, Making Place,” Lakeman hung tree branches with images of Martin’s drawings and notes. “It was a spiral that led you to the center, where you would find the final rendering of the square,” he recalls. “I was telling the story of how as a city we had averted the creation of an 11-story parking garage [which had been proposed for the site]. It was the hill we needed to die on to affect the destiny of the city. Would there be one great social space for the city or not? It was the story of making a choice to create a true heart of the story. But I was doing it in a kind of dreamscape, where you crouch over and read the artifacts on the branches as you went.”

“I really didn’t talk about my own stuff,” Lakeman adds. “I was just wanting to tell Will Martin’s story. It’s still a cause for me to make sure people don’t forget, and to make sure people learn the story. He was really our greatest homegrown architect, like a renaissance man. And I think of Pioneer Square as being the most crucial pressure point in the body of the urban environment to apply creative focus to. It has profoundly helped reinvigorate the city and the region.”

MAKING A LEAP, FILLING A VOID

Just a few months after “Taking Space, Making Place,” I was laid off from the AIA, where the exhibit had been held. In fact, I haven’t had a traditional job in the 24 years since. But working at the AIA helped make my writing career possible.

Though my position was eliminated, the chapter’s director, Saundra Stevens, offered me freelance work, which, along with writing I was doing for Willamette Week and a few other publications, became enough to make the leap into a full-time journalism career. What’s more, getting to know local architects and learn about architecture while at the AIA helped me make the leap from movies (which I was already growing bored of reviewing, given how many bad ones there are for each cinematic gem) to architecture.

Although witnessing “Taking Space, Making Place” didn’t directly lead me to walk away from the stability and security of salaried work, I do think the iconoclastic yet community-minded spirit of that show and its talented participants struck a chord with me.

All five—Pomeroy, Lakeman, Johnson, Borrello and Renwick—were establishing iconoclastic careers: not unwilling to accept mainstream success, yet committed to something larger, for themselves and the place where they live. Some of their creative contemporaries in turn-of-the-21^st century Portland left for New York and Los Angeles, which is not to say those artists sold out—one or two are famous now—but maybe  they weren’t as deeply rooted and connected to this place. Thankfully Pomeroy, Renwick, Johnson, Borrello and Lakeman were.

The night that “Taking Space, Making Place” premiered, including a performance by Portland band 3 Leg Torso, “I remember a lot of people came. It was noisy in there. People were super excited,” Johnson says. “They loved being on the bike, they loved making a Buddha, they loved sitting on the bales. I remember standing outside when everything was over, feeling like that had been a very unusual, very distinct night in the city of Portland: a cool collection of Portland artists who were about to bust everything open. I remember everyone was just insanely enthusiastic and feeling really excited about our city.”

Today Portland, particularly downtown, needs artistic intervention like this even more than in 2000, when the economy was booming and the city, while already becoming gentrified and less affordable, was still vibrantly full of life.

Yet while the past few years have been defined by struggle—from pandemic and protests to crime, empty offices and very slow recovery—history is often a circular rather than a linear progression. And somewhat paradoxically, such urban struggles, whether by puncturing the speculative-real estate bubble or by prompting some to seek new environs, set the stage for new generations and talents to fill the void: to follow their own quirky visions of hay bales and yodeling.

“I do feel that after our years-long Covid pause, that same ’90s Portland feel has emerged again in this town,” Renwick says, “with shows going on in tiny spaces, backyards and small bars.” The artist recalls recently seeing a flier for an experimental film show that evening in their neighborhood: just the kind of event that early-career Renwick would have exhibited at. “I showed up and was wowed and made a great new friend. Portland still has it.”