Community. Collaboration. Cooperation.

“Scrabble played a significant role in our courtship,” said Dale, a retired psychotherapist and former Lutheran pastor. Over a worktable littered with cups of sparkling cider and homemade brownies, Dale and others were working hard to make a pleasing anagram out of their names–part of an art project put on by the South Waterfront development team.

To ease the tension, Dale explained that when he beat his young wife-to-be at Scrabble, the couple they were playing with knew it was fate. No one had beaten her at Scrabble before.

“We moved on to Boggle,” Dale said. “We were evenly matched, so it went back and forth.”

Nearby, wife and husband collaborators Maria Inocencio and Mark Smith were calmly leading people through stations where they measured their height, found the distance between Portland and their hometown, and, on a wall map, marked the farthest place they had been from Portland.

On Saturday, April 26, the pair will display the result of their month’s worth of community workshops in the form of an outdoor compass that marks participants’ journeys to Portland’s waterfront with a flag that shows their gender on one side and the color and anagram of their choice on the other, a reflection of identities that may or may not be chosen.

Community on the waterfront

In an interview earlier this year, Inocencio said that she thought the workshops would be a way to “have a place where people come together” to “hang out and talk.”

The compass imagery is “all about finding where you are, as well as which direction to go,” she said.

Though open to everyone, the workshops were geared particularly toward residents in the Southwest Waterfront, and presented a way of “gaining perspective on where you fit in [and] building community in a brand new neighborhood.”

The Southwest Waterfront Neighborhood’s Artist in Residence program (AiR) houses a different artist each month in a studio that is currently an unoccupied storefront in the John Ross Tower, a mixed-use condominium. The projects emphasize site-specific and participatory art, a way of dealing with some of the oddities of a new urban neighborhood.

Riding a bicycle or the streetcar from Portland State along Southwest Moody Avenue makes for an eerie but well-planned journey under the freeway and along an empty industrial portion of the waterfront.

At the end of the route is the Southwest Waterfront Neighborhood, about four blocks on two or three streets of seemingly empty condos and compact row houses that are either brand new or still under construction (rumored to be rented, instead of sold, as the housing market stalls).

The idea of combining a volatile real estate market with art exhibitions is not a new one, but the idea seems to be taking particular hold in a brand new way in Portland, where the virtues of urban density are on the tip of so many tongues. It has long been a tradition for building owners to donate unrented or between-rental storefronts to artists for studio space or temporary gallery shows. The benefits of such a situation go both ways: Artists get a roof and a big window for free, while local real estate owners make nice with the public by showing how charitable they are.

Realtors and art?

The fact that realtors and developers are now looking for such situations puts a noticeable spin on the result. Last weekend, another show opened inside a new empty space. Milepost 5, a planned community of live-work spaces and some retail for artists, intends to have owners and renters moving in next year. But instead of an open house, ArtPlace Development hosted a group exhibition to show off its units.

Curated by Portland artist Gary Wiseman, Self Projections included the work of more than 20 artists, including PNCA students Anna Gray and Ryan Paulsen Wilson, and future PSU professor Jen Delos Reyes.

With installations in each of the almost finished ground-floor units and live music and a bar in a fourth-floor unit with a fabulous deck, the building became a kind of playground for the development’s intended market, the participating artists and all of their admirers and friends. Recently, former Portland Art Center director Gavin Shettler was added to the development’s payroll as creative director.

The difference between future exhibitions and services in the community and those in Shettler’s former nonprofit gallery will be either something–or nothing–to watch for in the year to come.