When I was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago I would visit the galleries every month during the openings. There were perhaps 30 galleries, most of them filled with derivative bourgeois junk at asking prices north of $5,000. 2 or 3 galleries had genuine paintings or photography grappling with the human condition. I don’t recall any having “cutting edge postmodern art”, perhaps because the Art Institute graduate students trumped them all by being the cuttingest edgiest of all. It was so cutting edge it wasn’t even art, it was Marxist sociological discourse in the guise of mundanity, a la a Barthes barf.

I remember vividly my first critique at the Art Institute when I was a naive 19 year old. I pushpinned my photographs on the wall, a series of nighttime street photos depicting downtown denizens leaving work who I photographed with a Rolleiflex and an umbrella flash. For my “artist statement” I stood in front of the class, scared witless at feeling so exposed, and described myself as a humanist. My professor, Claire Pentecost, said to me, “are you not aware of the colonial implications of humanism?” In retrospect, that was my rude awakening to the negativity inherent in the post modern art scene. I suppose she thought honest depictions of humans was nothing but the assimilation and co-opting of souls for the profit of the state propaganda apparatus.

Today Chicago has changed and the elite galleries are now getting a run for their money by young upstarts. And so it goes in Portland as well. The Pearl gallery district is also filled with derivative bourgeois decorative art, and clumsy attempts at postmodern social commentary. Froelic Gallery stands out as an exception. In the Alberta arts district there are a plethora of Hippie galleries, pushing their own Ken Keysian bent.

But the best art in Portland, in my opinion, is found in coffee shops and bars. May Juliette Barruel curates the Stumptown gallery downtown. Wendy Schwartz, perhaps the most enlightened curator in Portland, stocks the Stumptown coffee shops on Division street and Hawthorne street. They focus on young, hungry, dynamic artists, with a strong humanist bent. Artists who I assume have not been indoctrinated by an elite art school.

Today I visited Grendel's coffee shop and Billy Ray's Dive Bar, which are both showing Violet Aveline’s paintings. Her images contain classical imagery, pagan motifs, primal interactions, and bold colors. She is inspired by history and humans not theory and orthodoxy. Artists like Violet make me very happy to be living in Portland, and not New York City or San Francisco.