Rebuilding Cornerstones - Mayo House ARTchive

Full Video about our project 

(RE)BUILDING CORNERSTONES
Restore a cornerstone, create a cultural space of memory, advancement, and artistry for Portland's Black Community.

MOVING THE MAYO HOUSE, (RE)BUILDING A CORNERSTONE
Our plan: move the Mayo House and restore 234 NE Sacramento to a cornerstone property for the Black community, creating a place of memory, research, advancement and art.

Cornerstones are places around which communities are built. More than landmarks, they are the buildings which house our hopes and dreams, in which our bodies both rest and rejoice from a job well done, and where we come together to create our futures. This is what we are building with the ARTchive.

The ARTchive’s intended physical location is the Martin Mayo house, built in 1895, moved in 2019 by the Davises to the former site of 7-unit apartment demolished in 1984 as the result of City policies which targeted numerous Black-owned properties, and listed in the Architectural Heritage Center’s 1998 publication “Cornerstones of Community: Buildings of Portland’s African American History.” The Mayo house is on Restore Oregon’s 2020 list of Oregon’s Most Endangered Places, with access to planning and preservation resources, as well as a small seed grant and technical assistance in the adaptive reuse of the Mayo House for the ARTchive.

We’re moving a house. And creating a cornerstone

This round of initial funding will focus on renovations and preparing the Mayo house for use as a cultural community hub.

The ARTchive is an Black/Afro-American cornerstone of creative genius that promotes art, research, and imagination. We are rooted in the Pacific Northwest.

We believe in…

1. Black joy as a personal feeling and artistic expression of love, freedom, and celebration, based in Black culture.

2. Black culture as an ever evolving entity of our unique and complex heritage, tradition, and living memory, electrifying Black futurism.

3. Black futurism as revolutionary thought and a future that is Black-centered.

In creating the ARTchive, we are encouraging and engaging the African American community as contributors and beneficiaries of present and future economic development. As a place of gathering, education and culture, the ARTchive will become a hub for community and economic development through exhibition, programming and performance.