On August - 17 - 2010
Rahsaan Muhammad (left) and Spencer Burton are working to build community across cultural lines at the new Boise-Eliot Outdoor Market at Northeast Fremont Street between Williams and Vancouver avenues. Photo by Mark Washington.
Jake Thomas
jthomas@portlandobserver.com
In north and northeast Portland there is no shortage of vacant lots. Some are overgrown with foliage. Some are littered with rubble. But many are were once businesses, homes, and community institutions that were steadily swept away with the tide of gentrification that has washed over the area, leaving it socially shaken.
But a group of neighborhood activists see a potential in at least one of these lots to bolster community ties and the local economy.
Rashaan Muhammad, a local community activist, and Spencer Burton, a one-time City Council candidate, launched the Boise-Eliot Outdoor Market on a typically vacant lot sandwiched between Williams and Vancouver Avenues with Fremont Avenue bordering it on the south.
For about the last month, about 15 to 20 vendors have gathered at the lot every Tuesday and Saturday, selling goods including coffee straight from the Sidamo region of Ethiopia, fried cat fish, tarot readings, local produce, clothes, and gluten-free cornbread.
Burton, who works as a stone mason, moved from northwest to north Portland last year and saw the potential for a market on one of the area’s many vacant lots that could help bridge social divisions, and give locals the chance to pull in some needed extra cash. A longtiime ambition of his, he decided to make a go of it after having a few encouraging conversations after the election.
“This market will look like the neighborhood,” said Burton.
He soon began beating the bushes for support for the market and met Muhammad, whom he hit it off with. Muhammad loved the idea and quickly signed on.
Standing under the hot August sun, Muhammad explained that he hopes the market will help serve as a bridge between older African American residents of the area and the new whiter and more affluent new-comers.
“In order to merge they need a unifying thought or a common thread,” said Muhammad, who hopes that bringing together hidden talent in the neighborhood in a social setting will help create a cornerstone for a stronger community.
One of the key components of the market is its focus on all things local. It includes local food, crafts, arts, and music.
Bathsheba Israel, a vendor at the new Boise-Eliot Outdoor Market, serves up a plate of vegetarian rotti with cornbread to a customer. Photo by Mark Washington.
Bathsheba Israel has been a regular at the market where she set up a booth selling all-natural body oils and lotions, hand-made jewelry, and organic vegetarian food.
“It’s been excellent, everyone here is like family,” said Israel of her experience
Speaking over a guitarist playing in the background, whose repertoire includes jazz standards like “Autumn Leaves” and Bob Marley’s “Stir it Up,” Israel said that street vendors are a common sight in New York City, where she moved from about four years ago looking for a better place to raise her kids. An entire culture surrounds street vendors, she explained, and sees Portland as ripe for people who want to create their own opportunity.
“I just want to bring a little bit of the city to the West Coast,” said Israel. “This opens up Portland for another avenue,”
Burton and Muhammad have gotten plenty of help of other people in northeast Portland Ben Kaiser, a property developer who owns the lot, is letting the market operate free of charge to get it started. La Von Van, the owner of neighboring Club Twelve 22, and Kenneth Doswell, the owner of clothing outlet Betty Jean Couture, provide electricity . The Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods, which helped launch the King Farmers Market, is also helping get the word out.
“It’s been a real range from produce to arts and crafts to resale items where people have come and done their own little mini yard sales,” said Paige Coleman, the executive director of the coalition, who was helping sell raspberries, peaches, and strawberries of a local vendor at the market last Saturday.
Coleman said that at the market she’s seen people bump into each other who haven’t seen each other in years, and that the vendors at the market, who pay $20 for a booth, often change each week.
Organizers of the market liken to it to a traditional village economy based on community relationships and self-sufficiency. With people still reeling from the effects of the great recession, many are looking for less conventional means of making money, which organizers hope the market provides an opportunity for. They also hope that it will create a lasting local economy that’s relatively insulated from the national business cycle.
Long term, Burton and Muhammad hope to launch other projects in lots in northeast Portland, particularly ones geared toward urban agriculture. Vegetables will be grown on one lot and sold on another.
But for now they’re concentrated on generating interest in the current market with the aim of keeping it open everyday year round.
To get more attention, Muhammad and Burton have are setting up a fence of 4 by 8 foot art panels around the market. Once it’s finished, they plane to auction off the panels with half going to the artist, and half going to the market.
Burton likens the interest, so far, to a wind current: sometimes strong and blustery, other times a gentle breeze.
To set up a booth call Spencer Burton at 503-803-2699
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From the Skanner:
New Boise Eliot Outdoor Market Draws Local Vendors, Families
Lisa Loving Of The Skanner News
August 13, 2010
Spencer Burton and Rahsaan Muhammad have a vision for building a new local economy – and it’s taking root on a vacant lot on North Fremont between Vancouver and Williams Avenues.Fresh produce, clothing, music and art are blossoming like a vine at the Boise Eliot Outdoor Market, open for business every Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Tuesdays from 3 to 7 p.m.
Local institutions including Betty Jean Couture – which provides the electricity for the stage -- and Mother Dear’s Tasty Pastries, are joining up with area farmers and residents looking to re-sell clothing and useful items, all in the heart of Albina.
“It’s potentially a model for a new economy, a restructuring of the country,” Mohammed says. “Bringing people out of their homes, bringing people out of their houses, to meet, to talk to one another, which is something that’s been gone in our everyday activity -- making money together, sharing together, eating together, sharing what we grow out of our homes -- that’s kind of the idea behind our market.”
“We opened it up to the community to make some money, because one of the things I campaigned on was to have local markets for local people,” said Burton, who ran unsuccessfully for City Council last year.
“Right now you don’t have a lot of jobs, and people can’t afford a storefront, but collectively we can create a market.
“So with our vision and with all our sweat equity getting out there, bringing all the other people with that similar mindset to go out there and sell directly to the public, people have a way of earning a supplemental income,” Burton said.
 Local farmers are setting up at the Boise Eliot Outdoor Market |
The two have had significant help from the Boise Elliot Neighborhood Association, Page Coleman at the NE Coalition of Neighborhoods, and Kenneth Doswell at Betty Jean Couture – who with his family is set up to sell their original clothes, art, coffee beans and eggs.
Mohammed, who is also well-known in the community for his 16 years of organizing projects, including most recently events and rallies on police accountability, said he has always had a focus on art, specifically stained glass and graphic design.
“I’ve always been on the streets and activist, but I picked up this craft when I was 16 of stained glass and it’s led me into other things like designing and whatnot,” he says.
“Meeting Spencer, and him sharing the idea of a market right on this vacant space -- with what I already had on my mind I saw how we could very quickly put something together that the whole community could latch on to.”
Mohammad and Spencer have paid out of their own pockets for the flyers and signs up on the lot, and now they’ve taken their community organizing vision onto an even more artistic direction.
With contributions of giant plywood sheets from the Rebuilding Center, Burton and Mohammad are recruiting local artists to paint colorful panels that will be placed around the lot.
Eventually the panels will be auctioned, Burton said, with half the money going to the artists and half going back to the market to produce a neighborhood mural.
“This is a business model that I believe in,” Burton said. The fact that we’re starting with nothing and it’s starting to happen organically says – it can happen.”
For more information on how you can participate with the market, call Burton at 503-803-2699, or email boiseeliotmarkets@gmail.com.
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From Neighborhood Notes:
Boise-Eliot Outdoor Market Launches Mississippi Mural Project
A mural by Andrey Nedashkovskiy greets shoppers at Boise-Eliot Outdoor Market
A wall-like structure is materializing around what has long been a glaring vacant block on North Fremont between Williams and Vancouver. It’s not the kind of wall you would expect. There’s no barbed wire fence or unfinished plywood mounted here to prevent loitering or other unwanted activity. Wrapping around the corner of Williams and Fremont are shoulder-high panels depicting a vibrant spectrum of images, ranging from colorful cityscapes, graffiti-inspired neighborhood portraits, fantastical sea creatures, a winged heart flying across a brilliant blue sky and an East-meets-West depiction of a dragon targeted by a bow-wielding cherub.
Economic Opportunity and Neighborhood Prosperity
This emerging art wall is appearing piece by piece as each week new 4 by 8 foot panels painted by local artists are erected along the property’s border. The beginning stage of the Mississippi Mural Project, this outdoor art installation is inspired and fueled by the shared vision of stonemason and recent City Council candidate Spencer Burton and artist/activist Rahsaan Muhammad. The murals, each painted by a different artist, are the pieces of what they envision as a “Magic Box” to bring attention to the newly-established Boise-Eliot Outdoor Market, provide exposure and income to local artists and raise funds for a neighborhood mural project.
The beginnings of the "magic box" around Boise-Eliot Outdoor Market.
Bordered by three main thoroughfares, the Boise-Eliot Outdoor Market sits at the Southern border of the Boise Neighborhood. The Market takes place on the property each Tuesday and Saturday until early October and focuses on local vendors selling local goods. It is the centerpiece of a grassroots community effort to transform blighted properties into a space that brings neighbors together and provides an economic opportunity for artists, urban farmers and neighborhood residents.
Plywood panels, which were donated by the ReBuilding Center, are provided to artists to create murals for the market that will eventually be auctioned with half the proceeds going to the artist and half to the Market. The Market will invest half its share to The Mississippi Mural Project, which will commission artists to work with neighborhood residents to create murals on buildings that are prime targets for graffiti tagging.
The maintenance building on North Mississippi is targeted for a mural.
The group has their sights on a City Maintenance Building, and if negotiations with the City go well, they hope to launch their first mural project in the spring or summer of 2011. Meanwhile, the murals panels are being mounted along Williams, Fremont and Vancouver, as a semi-permanent installation, trusting the neighborhood to care for these artworks until they are auctioned this fall.
A Dream Becomes Reality, Gains Momentum
Burton and Mohammad’s dream, which is shared by the property owner, Ben Kaiser, is to soon transform this block into a year-round open market with a constant border made up of murals that will rotate out as they are auctioned. When asked if he worried about the murals getting tagged, Burton replied that he believes that most people who do graffiti respect other people’s art work enough not to tag it.Even though she has seen murals that have been tagged, artist Taloah Bain is not worried about leaving her mural in the hands of the public: “I think putting murals up to deter graffiti is a good idea. I've seen murals tagged before, but it does seem to make some people reconsider the act.” For Bain, sharing her work is worth the risk: “It is very fulfilling to pass by something enjoyed daily by the public that you've helped to create.”
While the Market is still in its fledgling stages, it has swiftly gotten the attention of community supporters and local media. The Market is currently supported with significant help from the Boise and Eliot neighborhood associations, and Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods, Working Artists Network, as well as the property’s owner, Ben Kaiser and adjacent business owners Kenneth Doswell of Betty Jean Couture and La Von Van of Club Twelve 22. In August, the market was featured in three Portland publications—the Skanner, Portland Observer, and Oregonian—as well as on KBOO Community Radio’s Talk Radio.
Rahsaan Muhammad (left) and Spencer Burton (right)
There’s no question that this outdoor market is being watched, seen by some as an experiment that, if all goes well, can serve as a model for an alternative way of developing Portland’s neighborhoods. However, as Oregonian reporter Larry Bingham pointed out in his August 27 feature, the market’s future depends on whether or not it can grab the attention of the passing auto and bicycle traffic.
This is just what the market’s “Magic Box” is intended to do. The art panels are creating a boundary that compels people to pause at this once-desolate space and wonder about what it now holds as well as the potential for what the space could become.
“I think that once the lot has all the murals up that the space will be very visually stimulating and will draw people in,” says Bain, who created a mural of a winged heart against a blue sky for one of the panels. Bain is excited about the new marketplace’s potential. “Portlanders are great about taking creative freedom and making an event or venue flourish,” she says, “The space could become something unique to the neighborhood that people travel from other parts of town to see.”
Healing Blighted Properties with Art
The Boise-Eliot Market is as much about supporting local artists with opportunities to get their art out in the community on a larger scale as it is about providing neighborhood residents and the artists with the opportunity to buy and sell their arts and goods in an open market. With the Mississippi Mural Project, Burton hopes to provide an example for how art can be used “to heal blighted properties.” The artists come in first, and the rest will follow.
Artist Andrey Nedashkovskiy with his two murals
Bain, who once lived four blocks from the market’s location, feels that, especially in this time when the Boise neighborhood is undergoing immense changes, that “creating outlets for emerging artists and vendors will keep vitality in the neighborhood.”
That’s why Burton enlisted Adrienne Fritze of the Working Artist Network (WAN), who serves as an artist liason and web/social media manager for the project. Fritze sees the Boise-Eliot Market and its mural project as a great way to fulfill WAN’s mission locally, which is “to provide business tools, resources and opportunities for Portland artists to get their work to market and create sustainable careers.”
Burton, who lives a few blocks from the property, sees building an art-enclosed open market as a way to “create synergy in the community by building a gateway into the neighborhood.” At the time of our interview, nine murals had already been installed, four were being mounted that day, and fourteen artists interested in painting a panel had contacted him the past week.
Artist Alex Minch with his mural.
Alex Minton, an artist who was born in Northeast Portland, created a panel depicting an octopus and crabs on a bright blue background. He thinks the Mural Project is a great idea. “I love that they support art,” he says, “I love to be supported as an individual artist thriving without any one above me but with tons of people all around me.”
For Laura Nothern, who is usually “an isolated easel painter,” the mural project provided her with a larger canvas and the opportunity to connect with a bigger community. “I loved the feelings of expansion and creative freedom this opportunity provided,” she says.
Her panel, entitled “Death of a Dragon,” was inspired by the wood grain of the plywood panel, which reminded her of the texture of Japanese woodblock prints. Nothern, like many of the artists involved, sees great potential in the Mississippi Mural Project. “I hope this project leads to more opportunities for artists to transform and enhance our city by creating more public art throughout Portland,” she says, “hopefully providing some much needed color and care in depressed places, to maybe ease our dreary winter months, lift our rainy spirits, and brighten our everyday experiences.”
Murals clockwise from left: Laura Northern, Chris Haberman, and Taloah Bain
Artists can get involved by contacting Burton, who talks to them about the project and gets an idea of their vision. Burton has no desire to dictate what artists create for the market. The only stipulation is to keep it positive. Artists are asked to create panels that are uplifting, colorful, and vibrant to bring out the love and light of the community. “The market looks and feels like the neighborhood,” Burton says, “We’re taking on a piece of property and trying to reclaim it. Not from the point of view of developers, but from activists and artists.”
To get involved in the Mississippi Mural Project, contact Spencer Burton boiseeliotmarkets@gmail.com or 503.803.2699. To learn more about the project and the Boise-Eliot Outdoor Market, visit the web site: www.boise-eliotmarkets.com.
