After an early tour of the Portland Soho House’s art collection in February, as I handed over my hard hat and safety vest, the painter Julian Gaines showed up outside the construction site. He was carrying a painting so large it covered most of his own 6’6” frame. “I heard y’all needed some art,” he said. “I figured I’d just drop by.”

Gaines is one of 60 artists featured in the new social club’s collection, which includes nearly 150 works displayed across its three sprawling floors. It stands to be one of the most thorough representations of Portland’s art scene at present and features works by Paige Powell, Jessica Jackson Hutchins, Dan Attoe, Storm Tharp, and Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe. Gaines, who’s been profiled by the New York Times, was joking about showing up unannounced hoping to offload a painting. But his joke does hint at Soho House’s art-buying methods. Almost all of the more than 8,000 works in its global, permanent collection were acquired via a barter system: artists are asked to trade their work for membership credit.

Portland’s mixed feelings about its new Soho House, which opened in March, extend well beyond art. Willamette Week wrote with confused ambivalence of the decidedly un-Portland company’s exclusive allure. The Mercury argued that the spendy members club adds to a sea change of moves depleting the city’s communal spaces. (It’s worth noting that the location once housed artists’ studios.) But what is Soho House’s intent? “We’re trying to reach a crowd that’s creative in their souls and like-minded,” Soho House CEO Andrew Carnie told the New York Times, in a piece it ran questioning whether Portland even wanted a Soho House. With its profuse use of the word “creative,” a major goal of Soho House appears to be massaging the gap between “creatives”—in the advertising, commercial sense—and capital-A Artist “creatives.” The former pay their way in; the latter trade.

The art collection itself is far more sophisticated than it has to be. Luxury hotels and athletic clubs often take a decorative, boring approach to embellishing their walls. You’d only have to look across the river at the new Ritz-Carlton to see that. Ostensibly, the bartering system enables this. It’s inspired by La Colombe d’Or, a quaint and idyllic, family-run hotel in Provence that’s fantastically adorned with Picassos and Matisses and sports a Georges Braque mosaic and an Alexander Calder sculpture by the pool. Lore is that the artists would trade work for room and board; they told their friends, and eventually a priceless collection amounted.

As Soho House global art director Kate Bryan explains on the company’s website:

Picasso, for example, would turn up for two weeks, have a beautiful holiday, torment whatever mistress he was with, and leave a cracking painting on the reception to say thanks for his stay. That’s the principal way in which we acquire art. It’s really special to do something so old fashioned in a world that’s become so rampantly commercial.

Soho House’s art collection manager for the Americas, Anakena Paddon, mentions the Villa Santo Sospir, a.k.a the “tattooed villa,” as another example. It’s the country home of a patron just 45 minutes from La Colombe d’Or that Jean Cocteau, Picasso, and friends famously decorated with sprawling murals in the ’50s. In New York, the Chelsea Hotel, a fixture of Andy Warhol’s 1960s and ’70s Manhattan, was also known to accept art as rent on occasion (and apparently carried on doing so into the aughts).

While others did directly exchange work for their stays at La Colombe d’Or, Picasso only gifted the hotel a few “cracking” paintings much later. Some Soho Houses do function as hotels, but the Portland Soho House doesn’t—it’s more like a snazzy gym with a bar and restaurant upstairs that’s tucked into a modest brick building in the Buckman neighborhood. But you get the idea. A bigger difference is that Soho House is not a Provençal villa or a seedy, Warholian hub. It’s a publicly traded, $1 billion company with 43 “houses” across the globe.

Paddon spent nearly a year amassing the Portland collection, scouting the city beginning in February 2023, then coming back for a week in June, another in August, and a few days in November. She says most of the local art community was “very, very receptive.” Beyond the barter system, this meant associating their name with the brand’s. This was the biggest sticking point among the several artists I spoke with who chose not to participate, or rescinded their works after initially including them, though none were interested in commenting publicly.

Paddon acknowledges that the arrangement isn’t for everyone, but says Portland artists were specifically drawn to the “noncommercial, noncapitalist” aspects of the barter system. Artists and gallerists I spoke with unanimously recounted Paddon’s process as thorough, genuine, and transparent. “They did a ton of outreach,” the gallerist Amy Adams, who represents four artists included in the Portland collection through her gallery Adams and Ollman, told me. “They definitely did their due diligence.” Paddon says her research involved a lot of word-of-mouth recommendations: “You know, who you should talk to?”

“It’s been one of my goals, to be a part of the Soho House collection,” Gaines told me over the phone a few weeks after I saw him dropping off his painting. “That’s why I wanted to hand deliver the piece, and not have my gallery deliver it.” He grew up in Chicago and was familiar with the Soho House there. He’s also visited locations in Paris and New York—and has seen their art collections. For Gaines, being in the same broader collection as Mickalene Thomas, Theaster Gates, and Damien Hirst was a major honor.

He chose to include a painting from a series he will show at Russo Lee Gallery in August. It’s a recreation of a 1958 cover of Jet magazine featuring Ruth Carol Taylor, the first-ever Black flight attendant who went on to become a journalist and civil rights activist. “I wanted to put this piece in Soho House specifically,” Gaines said, “because I wanted Black women out here in Oregon that were going to Soho House to feel seen.” The sizable painting features prominently on the second floor just outside the main bar and lounge.

When asked about the barter system, Gaines spoke mostly about the opportunity it presented: “It’s always better to have your work on a wall than just sitting in the studio, I think.”

The artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins, whose pair of paintings hang in the lobby, shared a similar sentiment. Despite her stature (she’s a former Guggenheim fellow with works in the permanent collections of the MoMA and the Whitney) she says she has “so much shit in my storage.” Still, she wasn’t immediately sold on the arrangement. “At first I was like, Agh, I don’t want to trade,” she told me. “I sort of think trades are almost insulting—I mean, trades are also cool. But I was like, They’re a big corporation; they should give me money.” She went on. “No one ever wants to pay artists.”

The networking opportunities membership provides aren’t her style (“I don’t need a place to hang out”). What sold her was the chance to crash at Soho Houses when traveling. She remembered that her friend Kim Gordon once traded with Soho House and stayed at its Berlin location while visiting Hutchins when she used to live there. (Soho House offers single-house and global memberships; local is $1,950 annually and global is $4,500.)

Like Gaines, Hutchins is also happy to be included in the heavy collection, especially such a heavy local collection. It “creates a picture of what Portland art is right now,” she said. “And that’s sweet. That’s kind of cool. That is a kind of a snapshot of history,” and added that she’s excited by the generations of artists it includes, naming both Paige Powell, the photographer known for her work in the ’80s on Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, and sidony o’neal, a Portland rising star who works across mediums. “Pretty nice little bookend of generations,” Hutchins said.

Membership aside, the indirect benefits of being in the collection are harder to quantify. It’s not the Met, but it does carry some weight in bolstering an artist’s CV. There’s also the thought that having your work on its walls gets it in front of people who can afford it, though that seems to be an oversimplification of art-world dynamics. “Selling art is harder than that, for some reason. It’s not like a pretty dress,” Hutchins told me, before sharing an anecdote about trading a piece of art for several dresses in the ’90s (“I felt like a princess”).

In situ, the works fold into the space, which is tastefully cluttered with conspicuously expensive, vintage-looking furniture and art. It’s eclectic in an exciting but not distracting way. “I’m not buying art to color-match the walls or the fabrics,” Paddon told me, adding that cultural value drives her curation over aesthetics. At the same time, she’s pragmatic about the context. “We’re not a museum,” she said. “We don’t have wall labels or explanations.” There is an art map on the Soho House website, but it’s less an exhibition catalog than a series of photos of works accompanied by the artists’ names.

The space and its art collection read like an extraordinarily well-appointed house. To learn about the works, if you find yourself inside, you’ll have to ask around. Theoretically, the artist might be at the next table. That’s not to suggest you can just walk in. There is some history of Soho Houses opening to the public for specific events—Paddon cites Nashville’s Artville festival as one example—but day-to-day the collection, like the rest of the house, is available only to members and their guests.

If that’s you, there’s a good chance you’ll run into Julian Gaines. “You can find me there daily,” he told me. “Yesterday, I brought one of my collectors through. He’s 74 years old. He’d never heard of Soho House.” The collector was impressed with the space and the art collection, Gaines said. “He loved the pancakes, too.”