Empty storefronts hold a kind of quiet potential. Creative Storefronts is a Nightlab program that fills that potential with art, working with the Portland Office of Arts & Culture to bring light-based art into vacant downtown spaces. From November through mid-March, storefronts across downtown Portland become incubators where artists test ideas and share work, and where the neighborhood finds something to look forward to after dark.
Art that activates downtown Portland
Creative Storefronts enlivens vacant retail spaces with installations by Portland area artists. The site-specific work ranges from interactive LED shadow boxes to projection sculptures that respond to visitors’ movement. All installations are free to view, and the project directly supports creative makers living and working in the Portland area. Creative Storefronts is a Nightlab program presented by the Office of Arts & Culture.
Presented by:
host sites:
Where artists and neighbors meet
Opens October 30
On view through March 2027
Explore the installations
Use the map to find each storefront, then select an artist below to read more about the work and find contact details.
Click on the map to open the location in Google Maps.
SCREEN TIME
Artist: 2025th Street
📍1: 1400 SW 5th Ave.
Host: The Fifth Avenue Building
Telephones, which were once an instrument only used for vocal communication, have become an essential part of how we communicate through text, email, and social media, and have changed how we interact with the modern world. This piece is a faux stained glass installation, made from wood and tissue paper, with interactive and interchangeable elements.
Mini Drive-In Theater
Artist: Brian Capati
📍2a: 1211 SW Fifth Ave.
Host: Pacwest Center
The Mini Drive-In Theater isn’t quite what it seems. At first glance, it looks like a miniature drive-in, but a closer look reveals a set of details hinting at stranger stories underneath. The image on the tiny screen adds another layer of mystery. What are these characters watching? What world are we really looking into?
Still life
Artist: TiMM
📍2b: 1211 SW Fifth Ave.
Host: Pacwest Center
The installation embraces the city rushing past it, rewarding those who pause before it. A field of LED tiles draws passersby in, blending their unique silhouettes into an infinite reaction-diffusion system of increasing complexity, driven by the same mathematical models found in organic patterns in the natural world.
Vivarium
Artist: Twisty Maurice
📍3: 825 SW 5th Ave.
Host: The Taylor Building
Vivarium is a series of illuminated acrylic tube specimens that reimagine a pond as a vertical core sample, layering murky water, frog eggs, and dense foliage inside light-filled columns. Built from found materials and finished with reclaimed elements from an earlier work, the piece turns overlooked scraps into a glowing, slightly alien wetland display.
Swirl
Artist: Jean Margaret Thomas
📍4: SW Fourth & Taylor
Host: The Standard Building
Wind, as an unseen force, rushes through tree limbs, whip through ones hair, or gently waves in a meadow of flowers. Vector wind maps show and measure the directions and force of winds. From those concepts a lantern design was born, showing the randomness of wind, with both ferocity and elegance, through the visual use of vectors in shape and directions. The lanterns hang in a cluster of 5 or 3, maybe one or two spinning for effect. The vectors seen in the design form project on nearby surfaces, often in various bright colors.
Chromatic Vortex & Willamette LiDAR
Artist: Hilkbuilt
📍5: 522 SW Yamhill Ave.
Host: The Collective at The Pacific Building
Chromatic Vortex-
A layered wooden sculpture that spirals inward through shifting light and reflective chrome surfaces. An infinity mirror at its center extends the vortex beyond the physical form, creating an illusion of endless depth and movement.
Willamette LiDAR-
An interpretation of a LiDAR image of the Willamette River taken by cartographer Dan Coe . The layers represent elevation and portray the effect the river has had on the landscape over the past 12,000-15,000 years.
Dimensional dreams
Artist: Shiny Design Lab
📍6: 818 SW 3rd Ave.
Host: The Director Building
An interactive series of shadow boxes inspired by the question “What is your happy place?” Each box features over 300 LEDs and multiple layers of laser-cut acrylic that display a calming and mesmerizing landscape. Participants can press a button to change the colors and patterns of the LEDs inside.
Kaleidoburst
Artist: Scott Keva James
📍7: 230 SW Ash St.
Host: 230 Ash
KaleidoBurst is a cluster of colorful, glowing forms that come alive with shifting kaleidoscopic imagery. Patterns grow, split, and flow between the translucent shapes, sometimes moving together and sometimes taking on lives of their own. The piece moves through a playful series of visual transformations, from quiet, slowly evolving patterns to lively bursts of color and movement.
Interstitial Threads
Artist: Shria Blake
📍8: 111 SW 5th Ave.
Host: Big Pink
Interstitial Threads grew out of a fascination with neural networks and how information moves within and between us. Moving light catches fine fibers inside two facing profiles, creating patterns that echo electrochemical signals along neural pathways. Sparse filaments connect the figures eye to eye, making the invisible exchange of energy between two people visible.
caverns of light
Artist: Third Nature Art
📍9: 620 SW 5th Ave.
Host: The Newberry Building
Caverns is meant to produce the sensation of depth and mystery – the onlooker has the sensation of seeing the beginning of a pathway into a cave system of light structures.
pulse of the mojave
Artist: Elwood Flatt
📍1O: SW 5th and SW Alder St.
Host: The Newberry Building
Inspired by a deep affinity for Yucca Brevifolia, Pulse of the Mojave transforms the 2D into seamless, continuous 3D LED light forms. Modeled after individual Joshua Trees, each sculpture carries its own personality and glow to share nature’s silent signals with the bustling city night.
Projection Mapping and Layered Wood Art
Artist: Echo | PiCraft
📍11: 711 SW Alder St.
Host: The Alder Building
Over the months, the artist will continue installing new art panels and projection-mapping them with different effects and animations, starting with one of his classics, a centered layered rainbow mandala surrounded by colorful geometric angles. These art pieces will be mapped and animated to give the illusion they are moving, shifting and breathing. The animations and art pieces will continue to evolve through the months, giving the viewer a chance to return and see new art, and new projections.
Offer a window for the next round
Property owners and managers with vacant ground-floor space in downtown Portland can partner with Nightlab and the Portland Office of Arts & Culture to host art. Hosting puts a vacant space to work for the neighborhood while it waits for its next tenant. Email Misty Post, illumination curator for Creative Storefronts, at misty@nightlabpdx.org.
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