Skip to main content“I’m really obsessed with comedy,” says Diana Kim, owner of the sardonically christened downtown Portland boutique shop Stand Up Comedy, which is not a nightclub. “I also really just love the relationship that the comedy audience has with the creator; one can’t really exist without the other.”
It’s an interesting line to draw, particularly downtown, where, for several years, roiling changes have kept the neighborhood in a consistent state of flux. Yet for a decade, Stand Up Comedy has thrived in its ultra-conspicuous Morgan Building location.
Fashion as wearable fine art is a simple premise, but it’s one that Kim’s shop embodies wholeheartedly. She loved fashion and style as a child, but Kim was embarrassed by her interests at first, thinking them superficial and silly. She grew out of that phase, working her way into a six-year stay as curator of Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center. Kim envisioned a shop where she could “sell the unsellable,” which people around her didn’t always understand.
“I remember talking to some of my bosses, my peers about it at the time, and they were very supportive, but also I could tell they were laughing at me [behind] my back a little bit because it was such an idiotic idea,” she says.
Stand Up Comedy previously lived in what is often called the “Feminist Mini Mall” on East Burnside. After years helping define the contemporary vibe of Lower Burn (or LoBu, if you’re a dewy transplant), Stand Up Comedy moved into a former Marx Jewelers shop space in 2014. But there’s still one question Kim gets more than any other.
“Definitely the most phone calls we get are ‘who’s on tonight?’” she confesses. “I’m trying to figure out some recording device—these calls are hilarious.”
We caught up with Kim to unpack the intersections of commercialism and consumerism.
WW: What does Stand Up Comedy’s curation process look like?
Diana Kim: I am so interested in the wider cultural conversations. So many of the artists whose work I’m interested in, their inspiration seems to come from other mediums. It’s this bigger, circular, global cultural conversation. That’s what I want to talk about through the store because many of the designers that I’m interested in clearly are not taking their cues from other designers. They were looking at film, landscape design, architecture, things like that. I think that’s related to how people think about their own personal style and how to incorporate it into their own lifestyle. What makes up a life? What makes up a style?
From the street, Stand Up Comedy presents a bit like a modern art gallery, rather than a straight-up boutique. How intentional was that?
It’s one of the only really untouched retail spaces in downtown Portland. It has not changed since 1912 when the building was erected. These are the same casements originally that the Marx family put in here. They’re quite useless when you think about how people think of retail now. You can’t really display clothes in them but it’s a spectacular front for us. We were really looking for a space that told us what to do with it.
How did Stand Up Comedy’s window display curation inform your current showing at 80WSE Gallery at NYU?
We commissioned six artists that have been really foundational to the way that we think and work here at Stand Up Comedy, and they’ve been important to our development. The directive was, let’s either reconceive work that you’ve shown here previously or make something new that is reflective of your own process and how you relate to the store. Each one is like a little vignette, but there’s significance to each one of those presentations. I struggled quite a bit with how much to really talk about those details. Because I think for a lot of people, the expectation was, oh, this show is about Stand Up Comedy. It should be about the store. But the store is not just clothes. It’s a foundational grouping of ideas that have expanded concentrically.
How has the shop fared downtown in our times of tumult?
I think downtown continues to be the absolute heart and soul of retail in Portland. There’s a shop that sells 10,000 different kinds of pepper across the street, banks that have no branches anywhere except for right here. That’s what we wanted to be. We didn’t want to be in a real bustling retail district where we get completely lost and absorbed into everyone’s idea of shopping culture. I will tell you, it’s hard. But it’s always been a bit of a destination spot. People that want to will always find us. That’s what I got to keep believing in and pushing against. A lot of the store is about resisting a lot of these forces that are taking us into places that we don’t want to go. And so that struggle is part of what keeps it raw and keeps feeling like we’re doing something here.
SEE IT: Stand Up Comedy, 511 SW Broadway, 503-233-3382, standupcomedytoo.com. 11 am–6 pm Wednesday–Monday.