PORTLAND, ORE.- Elizabeth Leach Gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary with the publication of an official monograph detailing the gallery’s history. Published by Lucia/Marquand and distributed by DAP, Forty Years is a gorgeously bound art book with something for everyone, including essays by friends and collaborators, as well as an extensive interview with Leach herself. The book is a comprehensive account of four decades of exhibitions, artistic endeavors and community connections that also alludes to the intimate details and rigorous energy of growing a small regional gallery into a national flagbearer. The gallery will celebrate the release of Forty Years with a collector’s weekend on October 15 – 16, including a public discussion between Elizabeth Leach and former Portland Art Museum curator Bruce Guenther, introduced by critic Sue Taylor, on October 16, 2022 at 11 a.m.
Elizabeth Leach Gallery was established in Portland in 1981 when Leach was just 24 years old. In the years since, it has presented over 800 exhibitions in its gradually expanding footprint, including groundbreaking new work by artists essentially unknown to Portland and the Pacific Northwest at the time. An adventurous advocate of contemporary art, Leach balanced important, challenging shows featuring the work of Vito Acconci, Hans Haacke, Louise Bourgeois and William Kentridge with smaller exhibitions presciently calling attention to emerging artists not yet widely known, such as Noah Davis, Al Taylor, Justine Kurland and Gus Van Sant.
“Forty Years is a massive milestone for the gallery and a chance for our team to step back and appreciate some of the incredible things we've accomplished during that time,” said Leach. “Elizabeth Leach Gallery is still very much thriving and focused on the years ahead, but it's important to remember how much has changed since 1981 — a time when Portland had practically no visibility in the national art scene. A lot of what has happened in the art world since then is the direct result of conversations and movements we've been lucky and keen enough to participate in.”
Last year, a colleague urged Leach to commemorate her gallery’s 40th anniversary with a record; the Forty Years monograph is the result of that appeal. This is a rich, specific narrative history that gestures toward the broad changes in curation and presentation which have taken place in the art world over the past half-century.
Forty Years is filled with artwork and ephemera spanning the gallery’s four decades, offering glimpses of ELG’s walls and time-capsules of their offerings from every step of the journey. Featuring an introductory essay by Guenther and an in-depth interview between Leach and the independent curator Linda Tesner, the book’s centerpiece is its 100+ page visual timeline – a sweeping and detailed record of the gallery’s exhibitions, programming, partnerships and fair participation over the years. This chronology includes full-page spreads of exquisite works from exemplary gallery standbys such as MK Guth, Ann Hamilton, Lonnie Holley, Ed Bereal, Dinh Q. Lê and Christopher Rauschenberg.
Explored throughout the book are the makings of Leach’s legacy in the world of contemporary art, including her formative experience with California’s Light and Space Movement; her audacity in showing unconventional and avant-garde national figures; her prescient understanding of the importance of international art fairs during their proliferation in the 1990s and her continuing success as a tastemaker today.
Forty years on, Leach continues to grow her gallery’s representation with up-and-coming artists including Jeremy Okai Davis, Derek Franklin, Alexis Day and Peter Gronquist. The founding chair of Portland’s city-wide biannual arts festival Converge 45, Leach maintains an active presence in the community and continues to agitate for the expansion of local sensibilities and reception to new ideas. While maintaining a steady presence at the helm of her namesake space, Leach has quietly collaborated with and advised on some of the best private collections in the region today, including the gallery’s neighboring contemporary art space, the lumber room, public installations of works by Sol Lewitt and Sean Healy and the acquisition of Roy Lichtenstein’s Brushstrokes for the front steps of the Portland Art Museum.
