Helen’s Costume owner Steve Brown in his gallery, which he built in a detached garage behind his home.

When the pandemic shuttered the city’s arts spaces, Portland State University instructor Steve Brown opened a gallery in his kitchen. He styled it after the Bay Area DIY galleries he fell for in the 1990s. With artists from around the world, he mounted shows on two walls he built in his duplex, then invited in the masked public, one by one.

Ben Skiba was inspired by Brown’s space but wanted an even more domestic feel, instead hosting shows in his industrial apartment’s open kitchen/living room/art studio. When visiting his gallery, Hide and Seek, it’s impossible to forget that you’re hanging out at his apartment. “It’s like, You want a coffee?” he says.

Ben Skiba with his dog, Penca, inside Hide and Seek, the gallery that doubles as Skiba’s apartment.

Skiba and Brown’s residential, experimental galleries exist outside of the commercial art system—often a financially prohibitive arena for artists and curators. Taking things in-house, so to speak, presents a more accessible option. But does it also leave you languishing outside of the larger contemporary art landscape?

“We definitely want to be part of the global dialogue of contemporary art,” says Brown, whose gallery, Helen’s Costume, is now located in his detached garage. “And I feel like we are, even though this is, you know, a garage full of spiderwebs.” Programming rides the same tension of this juxtaposition; Brown pairs local artists with others from as far as Scotland and France, and emerging artists with established, curating an eclectic blend that would be near impossible in a more formal space.

Derek Franklin at his gallery SE Cooper Contemporary, which sits between his family home and art studio.

Derek Franklin has a similar vision for his gallery, SE Cooper Contemporary, which occupies a small building between his home and art studio off SE 110th Street. He’s seen the artists who show with him form a strong community that reaches across state lines, mediums, and generations. “In a strange way, you become part of a family,” Franklin says of the growing network. And that family includes the rising star, 30-year-old multidisciplinary artist Malcolm Peacock, as well as B. Wurtz, whose 2011 retrospective New York Times critic Roberta Smith called “wryly beautiful,” and “morally invigorating.” If you’ve shown here, Franklin says, you’ll likely be welcomed into the art communities of the other artists who have.

Though they tend to live shorter lives, Franklin says the gap between garage and blue-chip galleries is often “tiny.” He thinks of local predecessors like Car Hole, a gallery that lived for a single influential year in writer and curator Sam Korman’s Portland garage, or Appendix, a former Alberta Street garage gallery whose founders went on to open American Medium in New York. But the history isn’t limited to Oregon, or even recent decades: alternative spaces crop up anywhere people are making and looking at art. With each era, the practice restructures itself around the current moment, as evidenced by Brown’s scrappy initiative.

A lack of resources or alternatives isn’t the only reason to open a domestic gallery. Something beyond the Bay Area’s DIY spirit stuck with Brown through the decades. “I was scratching my head but also loved it,” he remembers. “It was serious art, but the vibe was different.”

That vibe shift enables low overhead, freeing artists to pursue wild ideas and curators to embrace them. The residential setting recontextualizes contemporary art for viewers, too: it welcomes a neighborhood crowd, who might not venture to Pearl District white boxes, without alienating usual gallery goers. And none of this sacrifices the experience of feeling, as Brown did once upon a time, “like you’re in a really important art place.”

One corner of Helen’s Costume during the show Mediums, featuring work by Ricky Bearghost, Gemma Browne, and Mike Paré

Helen’s Costume est. 2020, Montavilla

Gallery director Steve Brown is also a Portland State University instructor and an artist working with sound, drawing, and painting. Helen’s Costume is in a detached garage behind the house he shares with his wife, Sarah Chase, the gallery’s exhibition planner, and their cat, Penny.

“Our landlord said, ‘Do whatever you want with the gallery—with the garage,’ and we thought, ‘I hope they mean it.’ So we built these walls and made a white-cube gallery within the first month of living here.”

One window at SE Cooper Contemporary looks out at owner Derek Franklin’s family playground. This shot was taken in June during B. Wurtz’s show Organic Yogurt and the Poetics of a Sock.

SE Cooper Contemporary Gallery, est. 2021, Lents

The artistic director of the arts nonprofit Converge 45 and an accomplished painter and sculptor, Derek Franklin houses SE Cooper Contemporary in one of several buildings on the property where he lives with his wife, Heather Franklin, and four of their six children, aged 6 to 21.

“The idea is to bring artists from out of town who are working in the commercial gallery space and give them almost a refuge, or a break, to experiment and have a holistic experience with our arts community. The audience situation is about making a space that feels family friendly—because there’s a family here—and normalizing children experiencing art in a domestic space.”

The view from Ben Skiba’s kitchen, which sits in the middle of his gallery, Hide and Seek, during Donyel Ivy-Royal’s show Ceremony in June.

Hide and Seek Gallery, est. 2023, Eliot

Also a bartender and a ceramic artist, Ben Skiba runs this gallery in the living room of the apartment he shares with his dog, Penca.

“When I want to work on something, or hang something, or just think about this space differently, like, I’m already in the space; I don’t have to go to it, I can just be here. I’m trying to find ways to offer that to the artists that show here.”