ILY2 Brings Radical Care and Community from Portland to New York’s Art Scene

No seated dinner, no hushed white-cube reverence—just an ice cream truck and places to sit. Such was the scene at the opening of ILY2’s New York outpost. An emerging maverick in the art world, the Portland-founded gallery hosted the block party–style event in Chinatown with a deliberately welcoming attitude.

“I think [we’re] taking out some of that intimidation and stuffiness and trying to create a sense of care and playfulness while still taking what we do really seriously,” said Rosie Motley, director of the gallery’s New York space. “And that’s always a very hard balance to find. But that’s definitely part of the goal.”

That ethos has been core to ILY2 long before its arrival in New York. The project began in 2020, when comedian, artist, and philanthropist Allie Furlotti took over a 300-square-foot retail space in Portland. Since then, it’s kept a tight five-person artist roster—Bonnie Lucas, Melanie Flood, Amanda Ross-Ho, Sara Rahmanian, and Leena Similu—while building a reputation for smart, intuitive programming alongside the emotional and material support it gives its artists and community.

With both spaces, the gallery aims to adopt a DIY spirit that invites experimentation from its artists. “The current systems around art and economy are quite negative: extractive, exclusive, transactional,” said Furlotti. “With ILY2, I wanted to really celebrate artists, not just for generating sales, but because they serve and change our world for the better.”

Trust in artists has always been central to the gallery’s way of doing business. When the gallery was founded, Furlotti offered artists the keys to the downtown storefront with no agenda. “She would invite people in, give them the keys, give them a user manual, and say, ‘Do what you want in the space,” Jeanine Jablonski, the gallery’s senior director, told Artsy. In 2022, Jablonski, a longtime gallerist in Portland, first stepped in as a consultant and quickly became a collaborator. Their partnership solidified in 2022, when Furlotti purchased a gallery space in Portland’s Pearl District, and ILY2 made its debut at NADA Miami with a presentation by Sol Hashemi, also hosting a party for the fair’s 20th anniversary. “That was our ‘Hey! We’re here!’ moment,” Jablonski recalled.

Just three years later, ILY2 has quickly developed as a platform for mutual aid, feminist experimentation, and creative trust that stretches beyond the gallery’s program. In 2023, it launched ILY2 Too, a residency for emerging artists to exhibit their artwork, and ILY2 Youth, a daycare program that supports the local community by helping to alleviate childcare burdens and introducing art practices to children.

With the New York expansion, it aims to integrate this spirit into the new space and hopes to shine a light on its roots in Portland and the city’ss arts community.

“New York will definitely bring attention to the Portland gallery and the Pacific Northwest arts scene more broadly,” Furlotti said. “I imagine it like an illustrated stairway between Portland and New York now, because we are in the business of bridging communities and helping people get where they want to go.”

The inaugural New York show, “SOFT PINK HARD LINE: PART II,” features eight artists, including Similu and Lucas, alongside names brought in by Motley—a fixture of New York’s art world known for her now-closed Lower East Side gallery Someday—such as Hannah Levy and Umico Niwa. The show is a survey of the gallerists’ conjoined taste, comprising works that champion experimental, multidisciplinary practices. The show also builds on an earlier presentation of the same name staged in Portland in March.

“Being part of the conversation—the human one—is a superpower,” said Furlotti. “I want us to share more, love more, lean on each other more. I want us to retaliate less, ignore less, whine and grumble less. Like, I’m just here to have a good time, to laugh and cry and feel things deeply—and that only happens when connection feels safe.”

Jablonski and Furlotti met in 2012 and quickly bonded over their shared love of art and their experiences of motherhood, which laid the emotional and conceptual groundwork for ILY2. “She was a single mom, and that was a big part of our relationship then,” said Jablonski. “And then I had my first child three years later. And that was a continued part of our relationship, connecting as mothers.”

That friendship eventually evolved into a working partnership—a natural progression for a pair that are both deeply committed to the arts in Portland, one as an artist and creative, the other as a seasoned gallerist. Reflecting on the vision that brought them together, Furlotti said, “I fantasized about ILY2 becoming a worldwide educational and cultural paracosm, with every type of access point…something reciprocal, generous, and porous.”

In 2021, Jablonski decided to close Fourteen30 Contemporary, the beloved experimental Portland-based venue she founded in 2008. “It can be a really lonely journey to run a gallery by yourself,” she said. “I put all of my money, all of my time, and I was just ready to not be on that journey by myself anymore.”

Furlotti and Jablonski’s friendship undergirds the gallery today and revolves around one theme: care. “I don’t think that’s a word you hear a lot in the art world, but it’s something that I have found to be tremendously meaningful to the artists that we work with,” Jablonski added.

That approach found powerful expression in ILY2’s relationship with the first artist on their roster, Bonnie Lucas, a 75-year-old New York–based artist who has lived and worked in the same fourth-floor walk-up on Spring Street since 1979. Jablonski first came across Lucas’s work, collages and assemblages that explore the intricacies of femininity, through a dealer in Chicago.

“I did a deep dive on [Lucas], and I was like, ‘Oh, this is the artist,” she said. “This artist is the bridge between me and Allie in such a clear way. I showed it to [her] and there were sparks flying.”

When they visited Lucas’s studio in early 2023, they saw large-scale fabric works from the 1980s—pieces Jablonski felt had to anchor their debut Portland exhibition. But Lucas hesitated. “She was 73 and [climbing into] a loft bed,” said Jablonski. “I just realized what she was worried about that…she would be involved in the labor of us getting that work, because for the last 40 years, anytime anyone asked her to be in a show or asked her to do something, it meant that the labor was on her.”

Jablonski, however, ensured Lucas, who never had institutional support, that ILY2 would handle everything with care in preparation for her first show, and Lucas agreed. “So much of this is like the labor of women, the labor of women in the art world,” said Jablonski. “The idea that somebody else would be doing the actual labor was beyond her capacity.”

Once her studio space was clear, for the first time in years, something shifted. Lucas began making large-scale pieces again—something she once believed she’d never do again—“because we cleared out this physical and emotional space in her small place,” Jablonski recalled. The gallery took on representation of the artist in 2023 and brought her to Art Basel Miami that same year. The relationship has led to wider recognition for the artist, who has since been invited to stage a solo exhibition at the Connecticut Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in 2027.

ILY2 decided to open a space on the East Coast when it became clear that their artist-first ethos had something to offer beyond Portland. “It’s rooted in providing a space for the community in a really meaningful way,” said Motley of how the gallery is approaching the endeavor. As Furlotti adds, “For all its international reach, New York often still speaks in a predictably New York dialect…I get the sense that it would benefit from some ‘outsider’ voices, cooing through the streets.”

The pair settled on a flexible storefront in Chinatown that once housed James Fuentes’s original gallery. “The New York space has more of that DIY, punky vibe to it, just aesthetically, which opens up all these different opportunities,” said Motley.

This summer, the team is embracing a flexible approach with a shift away from a traditional group show, which often populates galleries during the season lull. Instead, it will launch a concentrated weekend program filled with rapid-fire exhibitions and events, including a workshop with Alice Sparkly Kat and a performance by Alexa West. The format compresses a range of short-term exhibitions, offering, as Jablonski calls it, “a sample size of larger things that we would like to do.” It’s a structure that enables ILY2 to respond in real-time to the city, to the moment, and to its artists.

“New York feels more like an artist-run space,” said Jablonski. “Part of it is that we don’t have to take ourselves so seriously. We can pop in something for a week. That has so much to do with it—it’s just interrupting a rhythm and interrupting people’s expectation of what a space can be and should be. I think the word ‘should,’ we could just kick that to the curb.”