What Portland’s First New York Art Gallery Means for the City

This May, Portland art gallery ILY2 (“I Love You Too”) opened the second installment of its group show SOFT PINK HARD LINE in its new exhibition space. This second gallery is a trek from its Pearl District HQ, sandwiched between Chinatown and Tribeca in New York, New York. Yet another art opening in Lower Manhattan is hardly news—except that this one marked the first time a Portland gallery had set up a permanent outpost in New York.

Everybody knows that if you want to be a serious artist—or a serious anything—you go to New York. What “serious” means is certainly up for debate. But it’s well documented that most American visual art past a certain price point earns its market value by passing through the big city’s vaunted scene. Breaking into that scene requires what the writer Bianca Bosker euphemistically calls “context,” things like an MFA from Yale’s painting school, or a similarly fungible degree, and the subsidy of generational wealth that usually precedes it (very few, extraordinarily successful artists manage to make a decent living from their art).

Historically, Portland galleries have maintained a more localized mission. While a select few draw artists from around the globe, heavyweights like Russo Lee, Elizabeth Leach, and PDX Contemporary Art are primarily focused on representing regional artists and investing in the regional arts scene. Keeping things closer to home has helped establish the city as a distinctive art hub, but it’s also left little runway for local artists looking to expand into the international art market.

“Having a conduit to a place like New York will absolutely create a lot of opportunity for artists in the area,” says Portland painter Morgan Buck, who recently had his first solo show with ILY2 in Portland, and whose work is expected to travel to ILY2 New York in the coming year. “The art community [in Portland] is tight-knit and intimate but can also tend to be incredibly insular. This expansion breaks that mold in a lot of ways.”

Living and working in Portland no doubt looks different than in New York, especially for studio artists. While some would say New York’s cut-throat hustle is what makes its diamonds, the extremely high barrier to entry supports an equally compelling argument that the less-than-merit-based “context” Bosker writes of is what’s really deciding which art is worthy.

Asked whether she considered moving to New York, now that ILY2 New York has officially opened, ILY2 senior director Jeanine Jablonski smiles and shakes her head no. “I’ve spent 20 years living and working and investing here,” she says.  

The simple fact of giving Portland artists the chance to show work in New York is huge. But a gallery founded around a contrastingly humane Portland sensibility (“They promise not to use ‘cortisol as a weapon,’” Interview magazine reported ahead of the ILY2 New York opening) could also be an opportunity to reexamine what success looks like in the broader art world. “This allows me to export some of our city’s tremendous talent,” Jablonski says, “but also to move back the other way.”

Philanthropist and former president of the Calligram Foundation Allie Furlotti originally dreamt up ILY2 as a way to support local artists during the pandemic. It’s lived many lives in the intervening years. In September 2020, Furlotti began with a series of pop-up retail residencies, handing over the keys to an early downtown space so artists could host live performances, sell their work, and rebuild their community. There were parties, then an emotional support hotline when the space was burglarized, even a “glamshot” pop-up at another experimental outpost in the Lloyd Center Mall, a storefront the group now runs as an artist residence space, ILY2 Too. (Today, the organization also offers youth arts programming through ILYouth2.)

In 2023, Furlotti recruited Jablonski and set up ILY2’s commercial gallery in the Pearl District, which quickly became a major local player, showing Portland artists as well as those from afar. Most notable, though, was the way it promoted its artists. ILY2 was one of the city’s only galleries regularly bringing its artists’ work to international art fairs, like Frieze London, Art Basel, and New Art Dealers Alliance. “Fair” is a misleading word here: These temporary marketplaces account for a huge proportion of sales in the larger contemporary art world; galleries bring billions of dollars worth of art to the major ones. Adams and Ollman, a gallery blocks from ILY2’s space in the Pearl, has shown work on the fair circuit since the early 2010s, but has largely been an outlier in Portland’s scene.

In carving a nontraditional path to New York City, Jablonski says the idea is to continue the organizational shifts ILY2 has made while building itself around Portland’s needs, rather than adopting the big-money art world’s notoriously lawless, shadowy, and fickle norms. “A lot of people in the art world have the resources to be able to make change, to be artist-, staff-, human-focused,” Jablonski says, “but they choose not to do so.” The industry, especially its secondary market, has been explained as a legal insider trading scheme.

Expanding to New York, ILY2’s small team found a kindred spirit in Rosie Motley, who founded the Manhattan gallery Someday and has over a decade of experience working inside the New York art world, including at the longstanding Casey Kaplan gallery. She knew what it would take to realize ILY2’s East Coast plans. She also seemed to share in its vision. “I had been feeling disillusioned with the art world in general,” Motley says. In her first conversations with Jablonski, however, it became clear that ILY2 was doing something different. “For all the discourse in the art world about community,” she says, “this is a gallery that is actively making structural changes to address that need—that was really exciting to me”—exciting enough to take the job as ILY2’s New York director. 

The trick is finding a way to balance the local, the national, and the international. In its short five years—and really only two since it formalized as a gallery—ILY2 has managed to support its staff and artist roster while expanding the city’s reach through art fairs and traveling group shows. Anyone who shows up in New York is always going to be late to the party. That’s how that party works. But out here in the provinces, this feels like the start of something.