Art All Day, All Night : Owner of Coin-Operated Gallery Went From Law School to the Offbeat

The 24-Hour Church of Elvis is here, sharing space with “the world’s cheapest psychic” and a machine dispensing an eclectic collection of tacky prizes at a quarter a pop.

Put a quarter in the slot, and a computer-generated voice greets you:

“Hello, welcome to Where’s the Art!!, the world’s first 24-hour coin-operated art gallery. What would you like?”

Art?

Stuffed into three storefront windows in downtown Portland, Where’s the Art!! is a repository of spinning, talking and singing artifacts from American pop culture. Glitter, garlands and fluorescent colors abound.

There are the Elvis Presley shrine and the Amazing New See-Through Prize-o-Matic Dispenser, dispensing little gag prizes of uncertain value.

“I like to kind of shock people a little bit,” said owner-inventor Stephanie Pierce.

That helps explain why her certificate of admission to the New York Bar hangs above her toilet.

Pierce graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1980 and worked as a corporate lawyer for American Telephone & Telegraph Co. in New York for three years.

“People think they can dismiss me as a lunatic, a member of the far-out fringe, but then they are really so impressed by the fact that I went to law school,” Pierce said.

Working on legal accounting issues just was not for her.

After she handed in her letter of resignation, she said, her boss, George Finkelstein, said, “Stephanie, I’ll see you . . . on the sidewalk begging for quarters. Good luck.”

Finkelstein was on target. Pierce often drums up business on the sidewalk outside her store. She cajoles people who look but do not drop quarters in the slots.

When the quarter plinks into one of the coin slots, the computer talks.

You can choose psychic counseling from Dr. Justin D. Nikov-Time, sacraments in the Church of Elvis, fun with the Kid Window or a parody of the game show “Let’s Make a Deal.”

All sorts of people come by this sidewalk arcade: college students, tourists, street people, businessmen on lunch breaks. Some just look. Others stop and put in quarters. They all laugh.

“That’s one of the things I like the best--making people laugh,” Pierce said.

Talk about participatory art. The gallery “marries” couples in the Church of Elvis, replete with plastic rings and Elvis singing “Love Me Tender.” It conducts question-and-answer sessions with the “psychic counselor” and pushes people to “dance with the stars” right there on the pavement.

Doing a past-life regression, the computer psychic might say, “You were a fish. You were a bird. You were Shirley MacLaine. You were Shirley MacLaine. You were Shirley MacLaine. You were Shirley MacLaine.”

After answering all the questions by pushing colored buttons, the “patient” receives a prize: perhaps a 3-D Psychic Calendar or the Handy Horoscope, which might include a prediction of an impending restaurant deal with Reggie Jackson. Pierce makes most of the prizes herself.

Living in one window are a male mannequin with a paint-by-numbers picture of a raccoon and a female mannequin wearing a sign that says, “Don’t Hate Me Because I’m Beautiful.” Attached to her bizarre helmet is a vacuum hose that runs up from a contraption called the Bowling Channel Brain Stimulator.

This is art, Pierce said, but not what is found in traditional galleries. “That’s why I call it Where’s the Art!! It’s not a question, it’s a demand,” she said.

Pierce, 38, revels in her place outside the art Establishment. But she did apply, three times, to Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. The art samples she submitted included sketches of a Dreaminator, a machine that would allow people to record their dreams and play them back.

Pierce was rejected, but she said that is all right because not going to art school kept her on her own track.

“I used to hide my strangeness all the time,” Pierce said. “It was really a struggle. I was trying so hard to be normal. Now I feel like I’m myself.”

Pierce traded in her business suits for leopard-print pants, shorts, tie-dye shirts and wild hair.

She is host of a public access cable television show, also named “Where’s the Art!!” The program, which she calls a show-and-tell for artists and musicians, is open to anyone and just about anything.

She has been making unusual pieces since childhood. She and her brother and sister made little “machines,” including one that was an early version of her current prize dispenser.

Pierce said she made $42,000 a year as a lawyer and piled up tips as a waitress. Now she struggles to keep her store afloat. Her financial situation has improved dramatically since she began selling “Where’s the Art!!” T-shirts. Until then, she was five months behind on the rent.

Business may improve further when Pierce expands to mail-order delivery of the T-shirts and possibly some of the prizes.

She said she makes about $600 a month in quarters. She has to put up with frequent leaks in her store and dunning for her delinquent student loan payments.

Pierce works 12 to 15 hours a day. “But it doesn’t feel like work,” she said. “I’m my own boss. I don’t make much money but it doesn’t matter. It’s a life style.”