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When he passed away in January at the age of 94, gay activist, artist and spiritualist Eric Marcoux left the Northwest Thurman Street home he built with his husband, Eugene Woodworth (whom he was with for more than 60 years and legally married eight days before Woodworth passed away in 2013) to his Buddhist students. Marcoux also left behind a collection of nearly 500 artworks spanning paintings, pottery and stained glass.
Missy Capone, founder of the creative agency Capone Cousins, announced that Marcoux’s estate will host an in-person and online auction of Marcoux’s work on Oct. 5–7. Capone says there will be works of art available at every price point, starting at $25 and climbing to the respectable thousands. Auction proceeds will benefit numerous causes, including Cascade AIDS Project, Friendly House and the Portland Queer Documentary Film Festival, which will debut Seraphim, a biographical documentary about Marcoux, in mid-November at the Hollywood Theatre.
“Eric is your favorite Pacific Northwest artist’s favorite Pacific Northwest artist,” says Capone, lifting a quote by pop singer Chappell Roan and drag artist Sasha Colby. “He was so modest but a diva.”
Born in Detroit in 1930, Marcoux answered what he felt was a spiritual call and enrolled in Kentucky’s Trappist monastery, The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani, at age 12. He adhered to a nine-year vow of silence. During this time, Marcoux confessed that he was gay, and he was discouraged from renewing his vows. Capone says the version of the story Marcoux’s Buddhist students tell paints him as more of a rabble-rouser, but Marcoux left the monastery after he came out.
Marcoux met Woodworth in a Chicago restaurant months later. At the time, because it was illegal for unmarried men to live together, Marcoux and Woodworth posed as brothers.
“When they moved to Portland, they were still in the closet because they had just been arrested back in Chicago for being gay,” Capone says. “They cut their hair the same, they had a similar look about them, so everyone knew them as the Marcoux Brothers.”
After arriving in Portland, Marcoux and Woodworth involved themselves with Friendly House, a queer-friendly nonprofit community center down the road from their home. Marcoux helped develop Friendly House’s services for senior members of the LGBTQ+ community—services he would come to depend on toward the end of his life.
Capone met Marcoux at Friendly House in 2015 through a program connecting queer elders with volunteers for mutual social connection. She was struggling with her grandmother’s recent passing as Marcoux grieved Woodworth’s.
“It’s really interesting how queer people, especially at Eric’s age, they came out when it was illegal, so most of them don’t have any blood family left,” Capone says.
After being told that Marcoux had trouble connecting with other volunteers, Capone says they connected over their grief, their shared Catholic faith, and their shared love of blue comedy.
“I went to his house, and within the first few minutes he made a dick joke, and then I made one back, and then we were best friends,” Capone says. “I was only supposed to do his dishes and help him with his groceries, but he was grieving and I was grieving. We’d just lost our people. I don’t even know what to call our connection. He felt like my twin, even though he was so much older than me.”
Marcoux studied as an artist through the Portland Art Museum’s Museum Art School—forerunner to the Pacific Northwest College of Art—between 1957–61, where his religious influence remained evident through his multidisciplinary art practice. Capone says that Arlene Schnitzer studied with him at MAS, alongside painter Lucinda Parker and the late artist Michele Russo.
“Eric didn’t care about selling his work. That’s not why he created it,” Capone says. “He kind of hated money. He grew up without it—really modest. His husband was a professional ballet dancer, but when he realized that Eric was going to go into the arts, Eugene was like, ‘I’m going to have to stop dancing professionally and get a real job because Eric needs to create. We need his brain doing this for the collective.’”
In his later years, Marcoux developed a fascination with Tibetan Buddhism’s Kagyu tradition and bridging the gaps between Buddhism and Catholicism, which proved especially crucial for queer people whom organized religion has abandoned or otherwise failed.
“I’ve been mad at religion—literally threw out the baby with the bathwater because I didn’t get to realize a part of myself until later in life because I just never considered that as an option because I was told it was bad,” Capone says. “One of the coolest parts of [Eric] is he takes the good parts of any situation and continues to build on it, and he doesn’t let the parts—even if they fucked him up—he doesn’t let that negate the good that comes from it.”
Despite Marcoux’s prominent art world connections, Capone says that no gallery she spoke with would represent him or exhibit his work due to restrictions she feels are self-imposed. Still, she hopes the auction will generate both revenue for Marcoux’s students to keep his house and interest in his artistic and philanthropic legacies.
“Even though you can’t find a paper trail of a monetary value of how he’s contributed to the Pacific Northwest art scene, through talking to people who were studying at the time, showing at the time, they all respected him so much,” Capone says.
SEE IT: Eric Marcoux Digital Art Auction, caponecousins.pizza, Saturday–Monday, Oct. 5–7.