For months, Portland artist Eva Wrzesinski set up at Blanchet House's free café in Old Town, pencil in hand, offering guests something rare in their day: the chance to be seen as themselves, not as a statistic. She came away with dozens of portraits, each paired with a guest's own words about their life, their struggles, and what matters to them.
Blanchet House, which runs a free café serving people experiencing homelessness in Old Town Portland, says Wrzesinski spent seven months visiting the café, drawing portraits of 22 guests as part of a project called “At Our Table.” KGW, however, reported the artist created 23 portraits over the same seven-month stretch — a discrepancy the two accounts don't resolve. Either way, the project's goal was consistent: present people facing poverty, homelessness, mental health challenges and addiction as unique individuals, according to Blanchet House.
Wrzesinski offered the free portraits to guests during lunch service, listening as they shared stories about their lives, their struggles, and the issues that weighed on them most, per KGW. Blanchet House staff interviewed guests while she sketched them in pencil, and she later returned to her studio to add color digitally. Each guest who sat for a portrait was offered a copy of both the pencil sketch and the finished color version, the organization says.
Faces Behind the Numbers
The subjects ranged in age from 2 to 66, spanning toddlers to retirees who have all passed through the same café doors. One portrait, according to KGW, depicted a couple who met while seeking services at Blanchet House; the pair asked Wrzesinski for a family portrait that included their dog. Another guest, identified by KGW only as Tony, challenged the artist to finish his portrait in just 10 minutes.
Wrzesinski said her goal was to humanize people experiencing homelessness, addiction and food insecurity, per the station's report. Julie Showers, Blanchet House's communications director, told KGW that people often assume everyone experiencing homelessness shares the same story — and that the portraits are meant to push back on that assumption by giving viewers a different perspective.
A Grant-Funded Gallery Moment
The project received a $5,000 grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, Blanchet House says, funding that made “At Our Table” possible. That grant arrived alongside a broader wave of local arts investment: Oregon ArtsWatch reported that the Regional Arts & Culture Council and the City of Portland announced $1,220,000 in grants to 179 individual artists and 95 arts and cultural groups, with Blanchet House named among the recipients for a project centered on portraits and stories of unhoused community members.
Blanchet House listed a public gallery open house for Thursday from 2 to 4 p.m. at its building at 310 NW Glisan St. in Portland, where visitors were invited to view the portraits alongside a short project video, according to the organization. Showers said the portraits put a face to the homelessness crisis, a sentiment that echoes the project's broader aim of replacing abstraction with individual stories.
A Crisis Measured in Thousands
The portraits land against a backdrop of rising need across the region. The 2025 Tri-County Point-in-Time Count recorded 12,034 people experiencing homelessness in Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties on a single night in January 2025, a reported 61% increase from the 2023 count, according to Multnomah County's point-in-time report. Within Multnomah County's street-count survey, 267 people reported sleeping in the Downtown, Old Town and Pearl District area — the same neighborhood where Blanchet House serves meals.
The county report cautions that changes in data sources and data quality limit how year-to-year changes should be interpreted, including the expanded use of by-name-list data in Multnomah County. That caveat doesn't diminish the scale of need reflected in the count, but it does complicate any simple comparison to prior years.
Not Wrzesinski's First Project With Blanchet House
This isn't the first time Wrzesinski has lent her art to Blanchet House's mission. In 2024, she illustrated a children's book called “Toby Finds a Home,” written by Showers and her mother for kids ages 3 to 7, according to Axios. That earlier collaboration suggests a throughline in Wrzesinski's work with the organization: using art to make homelessness legible to people who might otherwise look away.
