At Yale Union in Portland’s Central Eastside, artists, creatives, and community come together in a unique brick building with layers of history.
Text by Anna Harmon
Images by John Hook
Cathy Wilkes exhibition, 2018. Yale Union, Portland, Oregon.
From outside, the Yale Union building feels dominating and impenetrable, its exterior flush with the sidewalk and towering overhead. The brick behemoth is granted unexpected grace, however, by Italian Renaissance- style flair including cast-stone decoration and a dramatic number of narrow, arching second-story windows a story above larger ones at eye level. Adding to its air of mystery is the decoration exclusive to the building’s corner at 10th Avenue and Belmont Street, where there are two sets of four cast-stone pilasters topped with lily-flower capitals and connected by geometric stone patterns, all intended to evoke an Egyptian temple. Between the pillars are windows, a door, and six entablatures that feature cast-stone carvings of laundry workers.
These entablatures hint at the original purpose of this building turned contemporary art center and community space. While today a quick walk around the structure might reveal a door open onto a printing studio, a century ago, it was Yale Laundry Company, a bustling commercial laundry. Boilers in the basement heated water for washing and the large second-story windows were intended to allow for light and ventilation during long days of hard, steamy labor. In 1916, Yale Laundry employed 125 workers. Some of these workers were likely part of the laundry strike that swept through Portland in 1919.
Yale Union’s print shop was founded in 2008 and has since given rise to a range of exhibition materials, custom publications, and personal projects. One of Yale Union’s founders, Aaron Flint Jamison, used the shop to make an issue of Veneer magazine with essential oils in the ink, while artist Lucy Skaer used the presses for a series of lithographic prints featuring manipulated pages of the Guardian newspaper.
Today the building is on the National Register of Historic Places. Artists make use of the sprawling upstairs room with a golden wood floor and white walls lit naturally by the rows of narrow windows for mostly site-specific creations. As an organization, Yale Union is open to experimentation and adamantly independent. It does not pander to sponsors or perhaps even visitors. Artists choose the hours for their exhibits; they could be 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., they could be only at sunset. Cathy Wilkes, who debuted her first U.S. West Coast solo exhibition at Yale Union in 2018, blocked the west- facing windows for her show and sparsely placed four childlike figures, two large boxes, and household items around the exhibit’s floor and walls, calling for somber reflection in a space intended to invoke a cathedral.
While it is recognized as an art center that hosts national and international artists, Yale Union also welcomes community gatherings and houses local creatives including a shoemaker, coffee roaster, and printmakers. Emily Johnson uses Yale Union’s print shop equipment for letterpress and also works with artists on custom framing. Gary Robbins, the resident print production manager, employs the offset printing equipment for independent projects and assists featured artists in creating custom printouts for their exhibits. Like everything else about the building, the results are one of a kind.