Conversation Series Sofa Issues Uncategorized Winter 2026
Let’s Figure It Out Together
Alex Deets in conversation with Elbow Room’s Katie Savastano and Quinn Gancedo
“That’s what we’re doing every day, facilitating connection. And those are always our biggest success stories that I think that a lot of our outside guests don’t get to see or understand.” -KS
I recently met up with Katie Savastano and Quinn Gancedo who, along with Malcolm Hecht, collectively run Elbow Room, a progressive art studio here in Portland, Oregon. Elbow Room’s mission is to offer material support, mentorship, and meaningful exhibition and collaboration opportunities for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Participating artists are given an open studio space and assistance with public exhibitions, as well as access to diverse programming. This includes projects like Video Tones, where artists create video diaries and audio art using digital media, and their workshop, Elbow Grease, which allows participants to develop adaptive woodworking techniques. These projects illustrate Elbow Room’s increasingly varied and unique programming available outside of the more traditional models of a progressive arts studio.
I was given the opportunity to be a visiting artist at Elbow Room in July of 2025, and during my workshop, it became clear just how important adaptability and play are to the spirit of the studio. I had decided on my plan for the workshop in advance: I’d share with participants how to create their own unique emoji stickers based on a funny project that I’d developed out of boredom that summer. As the workshop progressed, we naturally pivoted a few times to include each person’s interests and level of engagement– some artists wanted to hand-draw stickers, some artists wanted to guide me in making the digital version of their ideas. What became evident the longer we hung out was that the group, along with staff, ensured everyone would be able to participate however they were able to. In the same vein, no one was forced to come to the workshop if they weren’t interested (several artists decided not to join us and continued to work on their individual projects). I was struck by how each artist’s autonomy was valued and supported. Elbow Room’s approach reflected many of the principles of my own work in peer support: mutuality, working with someone’s strengths, and remaining person-centered and adaptable to the goals of each individual.
I’ve often wondered what goes into running a community-based, collectively run organization like Elbow Room– from the challenges of the day-to-day to the larger obstacles like navigating funding and the administrative aspects that are rarely seen by the public. What follows is a conversation illustrating how Elbow Room shows up for both the obstacles and the little wins, how everyday really is “a comedy, a tragedy, and a success story” when creating a space for community.
Deets: Could you explain just a little bit about the evolution of Elbow Room, and how you both got into doing this kind of work?
Quinn: Yeah, so everyone that started Elbow Room used to work at a number of other programs in town that have all since closed.
Katie: They were all under the Albertina Kerr umbrella, which is this huge organization here, basically one of the biggest non-profits in Oregon.
Quinn: The last place we all worked was Portland Art and Learning Studios. Most of us met working there, but then that closed when the pandemic hit. Some of us stayed on for a little bit doing remote work, but most of us were laid off. Eventually, we were all laid off.
So in October of 2020, a few of us started meeting on Zoom and began talking about creating something of our own. The main impetus for this was we were thinking about the folks we’d been working with, and that they were all at home probably without art supplies, and without any sense of community. So it was a way to try to keep this community together that’s become very important to all of us.
Katie: A lot of our artists have known each other for a long time. They’d been in programs like Project Grow, Art from the Heart, Port City, and they’d been doing that since 2010, but even before that, really. I think Ricky and Chanel have known each other for almost 18 years. For most of them, these programs had been their social time. So when these spaces began to close, they really had no access to their friends or to any resources for their creative practice. We were all going through this huge grief during lockdown and it really felt like such a heavy thing.
For me, I was having this identity crisis, because in so many ways, working for this huge nonprofit was the worst job and the best job. Every day it felt like we were navigating some huge disappointment or something fucked up happening and we were just like, how do we get out of here? We were all so frustrated working for a large organization, and we’d already been talking a lot about ways we could make our own better program.
Deets: Yeah, coming from working at a lot of non-profits, it always seems like the people you’re trying to support are the last people on the priority list.
Quinn: Definitely. And the people making decisions are usually so far removed. As for Elbow Room, when we started to become more of a real thing, I think the one thing that we all agreed on was that we wanted to do something different from all of that.
Deets: Elbow Room definitely feels like something special and like a very different model than most.
Quinn: I think there’s a lot of reasons for that. One is just that we’re not very professional.
Katie: (Laughs) Yeah, we’re way more DIY.
Quinn: So that’s maybe a big reason for the different vibe. I think because we all started as facilitators and DSPs…
Katie: DSP is a Direct Support Provider. It’s, like, the lowest paid position.
Quinn: Yeah, so really none of us knew how to run a business or administrate any of this, and we still don’t, in a lot of ways. We’re figuring it out as we go.
Katie: I think we’ve figured out a lot over the past five years, but yeah, when we started we were kind of cobbling it all together.
Quinn: I think another thing that makes this space different is in how we’ve known a lot of the artists for a long time, and we’ve built a real sense of community with them. Before Elbow Room, when the pandemic hit, we were doing this as volunteers for almost a year.
Katie: Yeah, December of 2020 is when our first Zoom party happened, and then after that we were doing Zoom for 7 days a week.
Deets: Wow, that sounds like a huge endeavor.
Quinn: It was, but I think that transition period where we were volunteers, and we were on Zoom, contributed a lot to the culture that’s come about here. For one thing, we weren’t their staff anymore, which in some ways changed the relationship we had with a lot of people we work with. I think transitioning back to being paid staff, there’s something that sort of remained of that time.
Also Zoom was a really interesting form for working with people, because we discovered it actually worked for a lot of our artists in really surprising ways. It also brought us into people’s homes in a way that we hadn’t been before. So now we have these really close relationships because of needing to work in that fashion.
Katie: Yeah, it’s amazing to have this more in-depth view of our artists after that time, because now we’re in pretty constant contact with everyone’s families or their home staff. They’ve all become sort of like extended family, or like close knit co-workers, and it just feels way more intimate than it had ever been before.
Quinn: Another aspect of the culture here is that we’re collectively run, which I think contributes a lot to how things feel here. There’s no one that works here that’s not working on the floor directly with people, at least at some point during the week. I think that really influences how things feel in this space.
Katie: It really does. As we’ve gotten to know other progressive art studios since starting this, and going to progressive art studio symposiums, we still witness a lot of day programs with a structure that’s very top to bottom. It feels really exciting to have cut a lot of that out, and to be on the same level as everybody. We’re kind of an anomaly in our field in that way.
Also, I think it’s a big deal that since we started in 2020, none of the staff here have left. Compared to the four years that I worked at Albertina Kerr where I saw around sixteen people leave, that feels like a big accomplishment. Some of the staff members that left Albertina Kerr had worked with our folks for a long time, and each time someone left it was a huge heartbreak. Those people were immensely important to participants, they were some of the few people in their lives that understood them. That adds a level of seriousness to what we’re doing here. It can be very destabilizing for our artists to lose their support people. So coming from that background, it’s important that we show them we’re in it for the long run.
Quinn: And to sustain that, we’ve had a ton of help from community partners, organizations like PICA, the IPRC and Public Annex, to name a few. And various people in the community, they’ve all come through for us to such an extent that I can’t begin to express how true it is that we really wouldn’t be around if there weren’t a bunch of people that, for whatever reason, believed in us and what we were doing.
Deets: I think that’s so important to mention, especially as so many organizations are losing funding. Unless you are a part of these support networks, I think it can be hard to see how important all of these organizations really are to each other and to all of us who benefit from arts programming.
You mention working with PICA and other art organizations, I’m wondering if you can talk about the aspects of running Elbow Room that engage with the ‘professional’ art world. For instance, are there challenges or ways you think about navigating how to co-author artists’ work in a more formal conceptual ‘art’ language? I love that the titles for artist’s work and their shows really emphasize everyone’s personality, and you can tell they are written in the artist’s voice. Then on your website, you have bios and writing about the work seems more formal at times. I’m wondering how you make decisions about that aspect of representation.
Quinn: I think about this a lot. It really depends on the artist. For instance, I was just talking to one of the newer artists yesterday who doesn’t have a bio yet, and she was really excited about writing her own. So it’s gonna be the one she wrote, and it’s gonna look different than all the other ones, and that’s great. But then there are other folks that aren’t really interested in conversations reflecting on their art. I’ve tried to have those conversations sometimes, but that’s just not what some of our artists are thinking about.
So the way I approach it is to try to make it mine. If I’m writing about someone’s art, I won’t try to speak for them. I’ll just say what I see in the art, as an appreciator of it. And if it feels relevant, I’ll talk about process, because sometimes that feels helpful for people to understand the parts of the work that might not be immediately recognizable.
There’s really no clean answer, because ultimately you are representing people, and it’s definitely tricky. But I actually love this problem. I find it really fun to write about our artists, and I know that if what I write feels true to me, and to what I know of the person and to the program, then it usually ends up in a place where I feel really good about it.
Katie: I think it helps that we know our people super well. In other studios, they have maybe a media gallerist or curator, and they really only know the artists that they’re writing about through their art or on a very surface level. We’ve known a lot of our artists for almost a decade, so it feels special to do this sort of process where we get to engage with their work.
On this subject, we’ve recently started to implement ways to encourage participants to feel more like professional artists. We’re trying to do portfolio reviews, with the hope that the more we do this process with everyone, the more comfortable and reflective they can be with their work. Some of the artists, I think, have a bit of trauma from the school systems. Like, once they feel like they’re being interviewed or being sent to the office, it feels like they’re being interrogated. Some artists, when you start asking them questions about their work, they shrink and become sort of frozen, and they can’t even answer the question. It’s an interesting challenge to attempt to disarm that feeling. Often it ends up that I’m just showering people with compliments
Deets: Something I’ve noticed at Elbow Room is how the artists here have a huge range of interests and mediums. I’m wondering how you go about supporting artists with honing in on what piques their individual interest.
Katie: For some people, they’re still figuring it out. For others, it’s really just finding ways to open doors, and they’re already trying new stuff all the time. We try to pay a lot of attention to each person, because everybody’s on a different page. It’s really all over the map.
Quinn: Yeah, I think it also depends on the facilitator that’s working with them. Each of the facilitators here will do it kind of differently. When new people join, I think the first thing that we’re concerned with is integrating them socially more than figuring out what their practice is going to look like if they don’t already have one. For instance, Katie, you do a really good job setting up something fun that everyone can get involved in, like, right now Valentines Day is coming up, and Katie will make Valentine’s cards with everyone. It’s really more of a process of getting newer folks comfortable here, and building rapport and then their practice starts to evolve on its own in some ways.
Most progressive art studios have policies that say that facilitators should be completely hands-off in terms of directing participants’ art. I’ve been thinking about that a lot over the past few years, especially as we get new people. It’s become very apparent to me that, for someone who doesn’t already have a practice, and isn’t conceptualizing themselves as an artist, it can be really cruel to just sit someone in a room and say, “make something.” So we made the conscious decision that, if what someone needs is direction or structure, that it makes sense to offer our artists that kind of support.
Katie: And sometimes it’s good to kind of interrupt the pressure of creating. In other programs, they do a lot of classes with artists, but we really wanted to try to make Elbow Room more of an open studio space for whatever you want to work on. We have visiting artists workshops, which are incredible, and I think are so good for people’s creativity and ideas. But yeah, sometimes people come and their maybe a little overwhelmed, or they’re feeling shy, or not confident in what they want to work on, so I’ll try doing more communal activities, like making birthday cards for people; doing little things that are low stakes so they get the sense that we’re just doing this for fun. It really seems to build their confidence and connect them to each other in meaningful ways. Honestly that’s one of the main things I love doing in regards to this work. To see someone have friends for the first time in their adult life. It feels like a really big deal.
Deets: Oh yeah, I bet! I’ve noticed when I’m here, it seems like some people are just coming here to hang out. Like, there’s no pressure to do anything in particular. You can just be here, and if it’s more comfortable for you to be drawing or something while we hang out, then here’s a bunch of materials.
Katie: Totally. Like, most days Sean’s just wearing a wig and following you around. All of the little shenanigans that happen make everything here feel so fun and just kind of comical. But everyone is also very much working. For instance, you have artists like Sean, who is such a chiller, or Brian Moran, who was sort of grandfathered into the program because he’s such a social person. You might think they’re just here hanging out, but then you step back and you’re like, holy shit, you guys have an entire body of work, and it’s really consistent and cool. It feels almost accidental, but also really impressive. We’re a weird mixture of energies. Like we have the muses- Bokowsky is a muse, Sean’s a muse -and we need their energy because they sort of make the environment work for everyone. Like, Deets, when you had your visiting artist workshop, did you know coming into it that you’d just be talking shit with Tim Kelly the whole time?
Deets: (Laughs) No. But I loved it so much!
Katie: It’s just so cool that this is what we get to do. We have the wildest conversation about anything and everything. And we prank each other all of the time. That’s the stuff I love the most. We kind of become these, like, professional trolls. But the artists are trolling us too. It’s just all so funny.
Quinn: We started the conversation talking about how Elbow Room feels pretty different from other spaces that are similar, and I think there really is something to the idea that, even though other people have joined this community that we’ve made, there’s a core group of people here that were already very much in community with each other, and those relationships predate this program. So Elbow Room, more than anything, it’s about being a form that holds that community.
Katie: And I think that points to what we’re most interested in, to continue to build those kinds of meaningful connections. That’s what we’re doing every day, facilitating connection. And those are always our biggest success stories that I think that a lot of outside guests don’t get to see or understand.
Quinn: I mean, the art can even feel obligatory sometimes. I think we all feel a lot of good energy about the art and we get excited about it, but that’s not really the thing.
Katie: It’s those day-to-day wins. For instance, now when some of our artists finish something they’ve started sharing it with everyone. Like when Robert finishes a piece now he will show it to us, so now everytime he shares something we’re all like, “What!? Robert, this is so good!”
I’ve started noticing other artists doing that on their own, and that feels like such a big win. To watch those connections grow. Honestly, everyday at Elbow Room is a bit of a comedy, a tragedy, and a success story and those little wins, they really become the whole point.
Quinn: Yeah, that’s what the work is.
Elbow Room is a non-profit community art studio and gallery in SE Portland focused on providing material support, mentorship, and meaningful exhibition and collaboration opportunities for artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
We center the individual interests, needs, and goals of the artists we work with, and maintain an inclusive and supportive environment for artists to experiment, collaborate, and explore new modes of communication.
Deets is an interdisciplinary artist based in Portland, Oregon. Lately, they’ve been engaging with the Portland community as a peer support counselor, creating spaces for those who have disabilities and mental health struggles to work creatively to move out of isolation and toward connectedness. Their current work navigates creative entry points for building community through hard times.