Ken Unkeles is dedicating Building 5 at Northwest Marine Art Works, with FLOCK dance group as the first of many tenants.
Portlander Ken Unkeles has been renting space to artists in his rough-and-ready warehouses for four decades.
At places like Carton Service and Northwest Marine Art Works in industrial Northwest Portland, he typically sheetrocks them into three or four hundred-square-foot studios and charges a dollar per square foot per month.
Now, however, he is doing something more ambitious.
He is converting Building 5 at Northwest Marine Art Works into a permanent artist and maker space. The first tenant will be the FLOCK dance group, which, faced with rising rents at Disjecta in Kenton, was about to shutter for good. However, longtime Unkeles renter and sculptor Dana Lynn Louis heard of FLOCK’s plight and went straight to him with a proposition. Turn the empty…
