Everyone seems to have a Woolley story:
There was the time someone's teenage son spotted Woolley at an all-ages electronica show late at night -- dancing furiously by himself. Or the time Woolley mounted an exhibit of paintings by an elephant (this was before the exhibit of glass pipes, but after the sex worker portraits). The time he let a pirate radio station broadcast on his gallery roof. Or the time he couldn't find a shirt he liked to go with a sparkly bow tie, so he opted to go bare-chested. That's the photo that appeared in the newspaper, and which his parents' elderly friends seemed to delight in clipping out and showing them, as if they could have missed it. (The hot pink pants and gold pinky rings also get a lot of attention.)
This, the man who once wore Dockers, who taught public school for 15 years. An Eagle Scout. When he decided out of the blue to open an art gallery in the Pearl in December 1993, he was afraid at first to put his name on the business. That's the exact word he used. Afraid.
But then it became him. Or he became it. Either way, there came to be no distinction between the two. He christened his business the Mark Woolley Gallery. And for the past 16 years, it was Mark Woolley -- the antithesis of a cool, snooty white-box space, a place where unknown artists were given serious showing, outsiders accepted, respected, notable careers launched.
Maybe this is why when Woolley announced he would close his gallery at the end of May, people started telling Woolley stories -- Mark included -- like they were coming to the end of something.
The thing about endings is they are almost always confusing. We mistake where they really start. Or what they really signify. An ending implies some kind of stillness, a resolution, when in fact Woolley seemed to just be getting started.
***
When he was at his most disarmed, Woolley would say that he was closing the gallery because he was truly burned out, that running it for so long had sapped his finances and strained relationships within his family -- that there were times when he had entertained getting out of the art world altogether.
But in his more ebullient moments, he would say that he closed the gallery because he wanted to create a new way of engaging with art, one beyond bricks and mortar, something versatile, streamlined, light, unburdened -- that he realized, after reconsidering his life, he wanted nothing more than to privately broker art deals, to guest-curate shows in venues around town.
He probably meant it all, however contradictory it might seem.
"I'll miss you so much!" a woman swooned at the gallery's goodbye celebration.
"But I'm not going anywhere!" Woolley said it maybe 100 times that night, trying to clarify things, as if he were not just reassuring everyone else, but himself, too.
Yet something is happening. Changes are afoot. He's headed somewhere new, even if he can't see it all clearly yet. (Even if he's moving too fast for you to feel like you can see it clearly.) Closing the gallery feels suspiciously like just the first step.
| Portland art broker Mark Woolley remakes himself |
This is Woolley at 57: gray, hidden by highlights. Both his parents have died in the past two years. He has a daughter who just turned 30, a son who is 26. He and his wife have been married 33 years.
He says he wants to slow down, talks about how good it feels to go to his cabin in the woods near Mount Hood, where there is no cell phone service, where he can simply sit by the creek and do nothing, just lose himself in that white noise. At the same time, a night rarely goes by where there is not some event he wants to attend; his texted invitations show up at all hours.
"Wul there's a hot concert @ WONDER next Tuesday the 28th that i will go to that u might find fun 2 see..."
He cites a desire to travel more as part of his decision to close the gallery, but you need money to travel; as he confides one night, he and his wife have sunk everything into the gallery.
One of the great charms of his gallery was his willingness to present shows simply because he thought they were important or provocative or in the social interest -- as though he saw his gallery as an extension of his classroom -- without worrying whether or not pieces would sell. But that also meant he wasn't necessarily bringing in any money.
"A lot of people our age," he says, "they've stayed with a career and they are retiring right now. We're not close to that."
He says it's his time to "step up to the plate financially." His wife, Angelina, a painter, took on a library job some years ago to help bring in some regular income and to give them benefits. At the same time, Woolley recognizes that he's pinning his current hopes on selling art, the volatility of which drained his bank account in the first place.
He wants to "start doing things he has deferred for so long." And sure enough, vacations have been booked, something he could rarely do when running the gallery: a long weekend to Orcas Island. A visit to Denmark to see a host family from college; Croatia; then Venice for the Biennale. This September, he will go to Burning Man, in Nevada, for the first time. (This year's theme: Evolution...)
Still, at times, you can sense something catching inside him, as if there is still the tiniest part of him that is afraid, afraid of what he is about to put his name on.
***
There is a warmth and openness about Woolley, a guilelessness that makes him deeply beloved. Makes people protective of him even.
One of his college friends wants to know what I hope to write about Woolley before he will talk to me: "Mark is truly one the kindest people I know. He would never do anything to harm anyone."
Woolley maintains connections with literally hundreds of people around the city; it was impossible, for example, to walk more than five feet on a recent First Thursday -- Woolley's first as a "civilian" again -- without someone wanting to talk, often all in exclamation points.
MARK!!! WOOLLEY!!!!
A woman working the counter of one of the edgy little galleries in the Everett Station Lofts grabs my notebook to record her impressions of Woolley. She is a little drunk, fiercely pierced, her peacock feather earrings swaying as she clutches my pen.
She draws a picture of a stick-figure holding its heart.
Other people say similar things, in different ways. Justin Oswald, former owner of Gallery 500, known for its wild First Thursday parties, and one of Woolley's good friends: "He just embraces anyone who comes into contact with him. He's so happy about life. You can have great banter or a deep conversation with him -- it's effortless. Everything is effortless with him. I have seen him in the most outrageous outfits in the whole world. I was in the gallery and he had on a plastic shirt. It's good to see someone so fearless."
Emily Crumpacker, a close friend, who has known Woolley since their college days: "He is absolutely brilliant, honest beyond belief. He is bigger than life and he is so true and confident in his own skin. He's also a very tender guy. He's not at all self-conscious about anything."
Painter Debra Beers, known for her sensitive portrayals of street youth, and who Woolley has represented for the past 14 years: "He would welcome anyone into his gallery. He thinks everyone has a richness; in terms of human depth, I've learned a lot from him."
Without a trace of irony, Woolley signs off texts and e-mails with the words "love you," uses liberal x's and o's. He hugged and kissed so many people at the party marking his gallery's closing, he caught a cold.
He buys clothes in neon colors, is unafraid of stretchy fabric, pants and T-shirts that run tight. One his favorite items of clothing is a puffy ski vest, embroidered with orcas, that dates back to his college days. Most of his friends are a good 20 years younger.
He has an almost insatiable curiosity about a wide range of subjects -- from the bombing of Hiroshima (he made a video documenting its 40th anniversary while on a Fulbright Fellowship to Japan in 1985) to the covered bridges of Scio, where he taught junior high for many years (under his direction, students formed a club devoted to covered bridge preservation).
His house in Northeast Portland is filled with stacks of magazines and books. The former social studies teacher is an avid reader of the newspaper with an almost encyclopedic memory of what has been written about and by whom, clipping articles that fascinate him, building files, studying up on current events.
Lately he has been forwarding letters-to-the-editor he has written, addressing such topics as the renaming of 39th Avenue to Caesar Chavez Boulevard and possible solutions to the funding crisis of Oregon Ballet Theatre.
"He is always trying to help people," says Patti Lewis, a filmmaker who made a documentary about Rama, an elephant at the Portland zoo that took up painting; when she started thinking about who in town might actually consider showing Rama's work "of course who came to mind but Mark Woolley." He enthusiastically agreed.
He enthusiastically agrees to a lot of crazy things and then throws himself into them fully, with an eagerness to please that is striking. Take this profile.
I began speaking to Woolley just days after he made the formal announcement he was closing the gallery at the end of April.
There had been a great deal of eulogizing immediately following the news, about how the closure of his gallery seemed to signify the end of a particular time in Portland, the earliest days of what we now think of as the Pearl, when there was an incredible amount of energy around this wave of emerging galleries -- suddenly: an arts district -- and how Woolley had been at the very heart of that, that particular place and that particular energy, equally embracing it and feeding off it and promoting it.
And that he emerged from those early days as a part of the city's gallery establishment, even if it was to play with being anti-establishment. And that maybe this was a kind of passing of the torch to a younger generation who was now pushing things in the way Woolley did in the previous decade. You can start to see why maybe he felt the need to insist: But I'm not going anywhere.
Our first conversation was very biographical, touching generally on his reasons for closing, what had brought him to this point. He was more ebullient than burned out at that particular moment, though he did say these past few years had been "a challenge on my marriage. ... I think my wife would say, 'I used to be married to Mark Woolley the teacher, who had a job where the end of the day was the end of the day. Now I'm married to Mark Woolley, the gallery.'"
Then, just two days later, out of the blue, he forwarded me a long e-mail exchange with his daughter, who is living in South Africa, saying basically that he thought it might help me understand how the last few years had affected his home life.
It didn't take me long to find the part he must have meant.
"This past year," his daughter wrote, "I've been processing a lot of things around family dynamics, and particularly, I suppose, it has a lot to do with my relationship with you, Dad. Mostly dealing with feeling hurt over the past handful of years, of not feeling like you've been as much a part of the family as I would have liked. Feeling a bit abandoned over the years, as the gallery became more consuming and other friends and parties etc. I wanted to let you know that I love you and don't want you to be in the dark about unknowingly hurting me. I know that you haven't meant to. ... So I would like to talk to you sometime, even though it might be hard. I'm sorry I've never really brought it up to until now. It's just been too hard to as I had a lot of anger for a long time. But I feel I am in a better place (and maybe you are too?) to do so now."
This is when I realized that whether or not he could articulate it, he wanted me know on some level that this is a story about someone at a crossroads.
Similarly, one day Woolley unexpectedly delivered to me the eulogies he had given at his parents' funerals, as well as a print of their wedding portrait. His father, a field biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, died in November 2007, while Woolley and Angelina were in Africa visiting their daughter; his mother, a home economics teacher, died while celebrating Christmas with Woolley in Portland the following December.
It was apparent from reading what he wrote that he had loved and admired his parents very much, and that he had worked incredibly hard to please them. In one of our conversations, he called losing them "a wake-up call."
Clearly, he wanted me to fix their deaths prominently within the narrative of his life.
Woolley often brought up the improbability of what he did, given his background (he comes from a long line of extension agents, field biologists, foresters and teachers), and he marveled at how supportive his parents had been of the gallery, of his quirky life, the pride they took in each clipped-out story or review, even the ones of him shirtless at an opening or in purple pants.
In a letter he sent to gallery clients to tell them he was closing, he wrote: "My dad had a sweet saying: 'I used to be known as the son of George Woolley (a well loved and well known county extension agent in Montana) and now I'm known as the father of Mark Woolley.'"
It was later that Mark would confide the guilt he felt, when, after he left teaching, which had allowed him to visit his parents often at their home in Sun River, and his life became consumed with the gallery, (generating all those clippings), and his visits became much less frequent.
****
When Woolley started his gallery, he had no real formal background in art. At Lewis & Clark College, he had been a political science major, though he had met Angelina while taking a sculpture class as an elective. In later years, he took a single drawing class at Pacific Northwest College of Art. But, as his wife puts it, "He can be somewhat impulsive -- that's the thing about Mark: He's always been a dreamer. If he thinks of something, he can make it happen."
After 15 years in the classroom, he reached a point where he felt deeply dissatisfied with his teaching career. "I felt trapped," he says simply. And so he quit and spent a few happy years working with nonprofits.
But for some reason, he found himself continually toying with the idea of opening gallery. He had worked on some fundraisers that involved auctioning artwork, and enjoyed the experience, particularly his interactions with the artists, and he recalls being especially buoyed by their creativity.
"At that point, I was kind of incredulous, because this came out of nowhere," says Angelina, who had been painting in a studio in what we think of today as the Pearl. But she also recognized that Mark desperately needed a change, and so in 1993, they turned the front part of her studio into a gallery space. At first, Woolley called it Acanthus Gallery.
"I remember the very first show," Angelina says. "It was all very sudden, him deciding, 'I'm going to have a gallery.' He asked me: 'Do you have enough work for a show?' He didn't really have many other artists. I remember painting the floor the night before the opening, literally painting ourselves out the door. I remember on the opening night you could feel a couple of places where the floor was still tacky."
At first, the gallery was only open two days a week, with Angelina staffing it on Fridays, while Mark continued to work for the nonprofit. He'd take over on Saturdays. But then Mark was laid off from his nonprofit job, and he saw it as a sign to expand the gallery, to make that his focus full time.
It wasn't long before his monthly art openings earned a reputation for being among the most adventurous -- and the most fun -- in the city, (though at times also the source of some pretty scathing words from critics).
But even as the gallery began to attract attention -- and not just for the scenes at its openings, but also for the way Woolley would take chances on young, emerging artists, the way he embraced unconventional work -- that didn't translate into a steady income.
"To be honest, it's been very stressful financially," says Angelina, whose library job has left her less time to paint.
"I'd look at our bank account and think, oh, my God," she says. "But Mark has always had the philosophy of being open to different kinds of art. ... And so when I look at it that way, he's provided a venue for a broader spectrum of artists, which has given a lot to the city. That has been a really valiant experiment, even if we've lost money. ... As long as I keep my eyes on that, I've been able to be good with the gallery."
As much as he clearly loved the energy of the gallery, (Patti Lewis described Woolley as a kind of "master of ceremonies") he also was well aware of how hard the mercuriality was on Angelina.
And so when he was approached by promoter Chris Monlux to partner on what would become Wonder Ballroom, a concert venue and performance and event space on Northeast Russell Street that opened in 2005, he didn't hesitate.
"I was looking at that as an ongoing way to bring in some income," he says.
It was an ambitious project -- buying and restoring a run-down 1914 building that once served as the hall for the Ancient Order of the Hibernians -- again, something that Woolley had no formal background in.
But he threw himself into it with characteristic fervor. (Howie Bierbaum, who later came on as a third partner recalled Woolley fondly for his "a starry-eyed optimism.")
To fund his part of the deal, Woolley took out a second mortgage on his house. But when it became clear construction costs were going to run over, he sought out a private loan. "I borrowed $100,000 from an acquaintance at 10 percent interest," he says, grimacing. (The partners sold the building in 2007, which enabled Woolley to finally pay off his loans; he also sold a share of his partnership about a year ago. He retains about 15 percent ownership in the Wonder.)
While all this was going on, Woolley had decided to open a satellite gallery in the basement of the Wonder as well as keep open the gallery space he had in the Pearl at the time. So, in addition to shouldering his stress of getting the Wonder off the ground, and juggling loans, he was now effectively running two galleries -- with all the associated time and expenses, putting up and taking down two shows a month, working weekends and nights. And still maintaining his busy social calendar.
As I slowly assembled these details, I realize I was looking at it from the outside, but it seemed a crazy, unsustainable way to live.
And sure enough, during this time, one night in 2006, Woolley was arrested and charged with DUI.
As he describes it, he had been working all day at the Pearl gallery, hadn't eaten, then met up with friends. An officer stopped him not long after he got in his car, on Broadway near Northwest Hoyt.
When I first tell him that I have learned of the arrest, Woolley -- who has up to now willingly revealed so much, often unbidden -- is visibly shaken.
The first thing he says is: "My parents would have been devastated."
He begs me not to include this in the story. He goes on to say that he is intensely ashamed of what happened. "I told only my wife and my children, and otherwise kept it completely private." Once he had completed diversion, he tried to put it out of his mind. He said he had honestly not thought about in a long, long time, because as far as he was concerned he had dealt with it and it was over now. And while it made me feel terrible to bring all this up again, to open old wounds for him, it didn't feel like a random, irrelevant fact. It seemed to be very much related to where he found himself right now, reconsidering the course of his life, the inherent tensions of it.
He said he just couldn't go on with the story if I included the arrest. I told him if that was the case, as much as it pained me, I couldn't write the story.
A couple of weeks passed like this. Then one night, I was about to fall asleep when my phone sounded.
I found a text from Woolley.
He had gone with Angelina to see Storm Large's one-woman show, "Crazy Enough," where she speaks openly about excruciatingly painful aspects of her past.
"Changed my mind a bit. Can we talk? M"
****
Later he sends me an e-mail. It reads in part:
"If I have chosen the path of art, which I have, owning and sharing one's decisions, however painful, is the only way we move forward. ..."
****
I asked Woolley a number of times over the course of this story what he wanted for himself now.
He never quite answered me directly.
"I'm just trying to open myself up right now, and don't necessarily know," he said at one point. "What's interesting is not knowing what the next step is."
But I felt like he did know, that he had known all along, even in those times when maybe he had been afraid to say it.
It was obvious that closing the gallery had been something that he had been moving toward long before he finally accepted that it was something he had to do in order to see himself more clearly.
But part of what he had realized about himself was that he didn't want to leave the art world, that he wasn't done. At first I wasn't sure if this was out of familiarity. Woolley himself said it at one point: "I have just been doing this for so long."
Shortly after he announced the closure of the gallery, he started meeting with Heidi McBride, who runs an art consultancy business out of her condo in the South Waterfront, and by the end of May, they had decided to work together.
Under the arrangement, Woolley will continue to sell artwork, drawing from a pool of artists he had represented and who he had invited to join him for this new venture, as well as artists represented by McBride. She will handle all overhead and associated costs, and since she shows the artwork in her home, by appointment, there will be no more monthly shows to hang, no gallery hours for Woolley to keep.
He thinks the arrangement will give him a great deal of flexibility, and likes that it will allow him to still do what he loves -- which is meeting with people, making connections, he says -- without the intensity of owning a gallery himself. On the downside, he will not be bringing in a salary, but he says he is confident he can sell enough art to bring in maybe a couple thousand dollars a month. He keeps saying that he hopes one day get to a point where Angelina can cut back her hours at the library and devote more time to her painting again; he feels he owes it to her.
In the meantime, he also decided to keep his business name and had already spread the word that he would like to guest-curate shows in a few different venues around the city.
He had originally said he hoped to do no more than four such shows a year, but by July he had already scheduled three. His first, held at Worksound, a space in Southeast Portland, just one month after his gallery closed, was a group photography show called "Portraits."
The place was packed, and Woolley was in his element, bear-hugging people as they walked in the door.
I wandered over to a back wall, where he had attached a statement, with the following definition.
"Portrait
1. A likeness of a person, especially showing the face, that is created by a painter or a photographer, for example
2. A verbal picture or description, especially of a person."
For some reason, this made me think of a story Angelina had told me, her own Woolley story.
This came near the end of our conversation, which had been quite intense for her I'm sure, talking about the stress of the last few years, the demands of Mark's job, what had been sacrificed.
As I was about to leave, she suddenly remembered something:
For a long time, she didn't have a studio where she could paint. She had been working out of an extra bedroom of their home. Finally, one year, on her birthday he called her and told her to meet him at a particular address.
It turned out to be the corner of a warehouse space in what is now the Pearl, that he had rented for her.
"He said, 'This is your space now,' and it's funny because I'm getting all emotional. I said, 'Mark that's OK we can't afford this.' He said, 'No you really need to have this space outside the house.' Once I started working there I realized how valuable that was. ... to be in a space of my own. I have to say I owe that to Mark, that he had the foresight to know that would help me grow as an artist. "
Then she began to cry.
***
One last Woolley story.
One night in June, right around the time he sent me that late-night text, Woolley went over to a neighbor's to listen to a chamber music performance.
For some reason, the music that night, Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 3, affected him deeply, though he couldn't quite say why, and so he wrote one of the musicians, David Blasher .
"Just curious. To you, what was/is the message of the music that night?"
Woolley, out of nowhere, forwarded me the reply. And as I read it, I realized that it was his way of answering my question, however indirectly, about what he might be moving toward, however colorfully, however imperfectly.
"That particular night it was all about reaching outside myself and being totally vulnerable," the musician wrote. "I knew there were dark scary moments, and totally light happy ones."
And that when you share this with others: "It gives us all a little more courage to embrace our own story, faults and successes and all. ..."