The gallery's owners, painter Ron Mudge and jewelry maker Carol Bowes, support emerging artists. Though he opened by showing his own work, Tidbit is not a vanity gallery. The space is cramped, the aesthetic conceptual, the talk intellectually rigorous, but the atmosphere is Portland-friendly. When New Jersey transplants Catherine Matthias and jeweler Stewart Jones opened Indigo Gallery seven years ago, they already had clients for Jones' rings and pendants. Now the gallery represents 20 contemporary artists in many media who primarily are regional and national, although Italian painter Sandro Negri is part of the stable.
Shows stay up two months.
You can't miss the gallery in this multi-purpose art center, which also houses a theater and classrooms. It's right in the entrance lobby. That way, people can immediately engage in the works, according to center director Andrew Edwards, who calls it a living-room atmosphere. The gallery, which began in 1979 when the center opened, displays six to seven shows a year, and the center promotes primarily regional artists, with an emphasis on art education. Now, he carries hundreds of artists, many of them 19th-century Northwest regionalists.