From Portland to Camas: Attic Gallery finds new home

Maria Gonser started out in the art business at age 5.

That’s when her mother, Diana Faville, launched a gallery in the attic of the family home in Portland’s West Hills. Faville had an artist friend she strongly believed in — and thought the artworks too good for the gallery where they were showing. So she had no choice but to start her own, she said, up at the top of the house.

That was in 1973. Faville’s attic gallery thrived to the point where some people wondered if there really was a residential home buried underneath it somewhere. And daughter Maria more or less grew up in a working art gallery, with artists and visitors tromping up and down the stairs to the attic.

The gallery eventually outgrew the house and the neighborhood, and started “hopping all over Portland,” Gonser said, before settling into spacious downtown real estate in a historic brick building near the waterfront, just south of Burnside.

But an alarming dynamic has overtaken that neighborhood, Gonser and Faville said: even while the streets and stoops are overrun by homeless people who make visitors feel unsafe, the gallery rent has risen like a rocket. Last year, Gosner got notice from a new property owner that the price of the space would quadruple. What the new landlord really wanted, she said, was for the gallery to be gone within 30 days, but they worked out a deal through the end of 2015.

The Shaffer Gallery, a block to the south, also was priced out of downtown and closed recently, Gonser said. The two galleries used to enjoy a friendly, cooperative relationship in a market that’s mostly keenly competitive, Gonser said. That’s gone now, she said.

“What has happened to the heart of this area?” she wondered during a visit to the Portland gallery during its final days.

But in Clark County, Gonser said, the arts scene is collegial and cooperative. When Attic Gallery announced plans to reopen at 421 N.E. Cedar St. in Camas on Jan. 8, it was welcomed with open arms by the whole downtown commercial district — including the two galleries that are already there.

“What a welcoming community,” said Gonser. “They’re even having a ribbon-cutting for us. That’s unheard of.”

Discovery

Gonser and her husband, abstract painter Tommer Gonser, “had various adventures together” until they returned to Portland and joined her mother’s gallery business in 1999, she said. A couple of years ago, the Gonsers bought residential acreage north of Washougal. When news arrived about the Attic Gallery’s gigantic hike in monthly rent, the Gonsers pursued moving the gallery to their rustic new home and opening a cafe to go with it.

But septic and plumbing issues proved prohibitive. Meanwhile, Maria Gonser said, they’d discovered downtown Camas’ upscale, artsy streetscape. “We had no idea that we’d ever have our business out there, but we love it,” Gonser said.

Is she concerned that Portland art lovers won’t follow the gallery across the river? Is she worried that — to put it plainly — some Portland art lovers don’t know what a Camas is?

Not at all, Gonser said. “People in the Pacific Northwest like adventure. They go exploring. I’m not worried.”

Furthermore, she said, local artists started eagerly knocking on the door of the new gallery space in Camas while it was still in early stages of renovation. “Camas needs another gallery” is what they’ve been saying, she said. (Studio 2911, an event venue, previously occupied the space.)

The only thing that does worry her, she said, is shrinking the Attic Gallery from upwards of 6,000 square feet in Portland to around 2,000 square feet in Camas. There’s basically no storage space at all, she said, so the 50-plus artists that the gallery carries have had to pick up and take home many of their works.

“Rotating shows” will become the routine in Camas, she said. And anyway, many art lovers now do their shopping online before showing up in person. The Attic Gallery has a huge online catalog, she said.

Gonser’s husband Tommer isn’t just a painter, he’s a great interior planner and designer, too, she said — and he’s maximized that 2,000-square-foot space by creating modular, movable walls and panels that can be rejiggered depending on what each show requires.

Resurgence

Despite the vagaries of rising rents and galleries that must relocate — a dynamic at work here in Clark County, too, as the North Bank Gallery gets ready to leave its prime Main Street location in Vancouver — Gonser said the gallery business is resurgent after the Great Recession.

“People like art galleries. It’s not going away,” she said.

And working with her mother and husband all these years has been “a lot of fun. We get along really well,” she said.

Most of all, she said, there’s nothing quite like the joy of falling in love with a particular artist’s works, sharing that love with a new fan — and then reporting back to the artist that their work has sold to someone who enjoys it.

“It’s going to have a special place in that person’s life for the rest of their life,” she said. “I get great pleasure from that.”