Written by Carrie Hinton, Photo above by PDX Insectarium
A Youth Arts Program in a Dying Mall: Daelyn Allis Lambi usually introduces themself as the director of a youth arts program in a dying mall.
For now, that’s Lloyd Center, although its official closure date is August 8. After that, the program will move somewhere else, but the setting feels almost too fitting to ignore: a half-abandoned Portland landmark, a commercial structure the city has already decided is obsolete, still holding a living, strange, deeply intentional creative world inside it.
daelyn has history there, too. Their PNCA thesis project once lived in a space inside the mall. To them, the place feels detached from reality in a way that is not entirely unpleasant. It makes sense, because daelyn’s work has long circled questions of reality, perception, embodiment, and who gets to decide what is real in the first place.
They are an artist, writer, educator, anarchist, youth worker, and self-described mall brat. They hold an MFA in Visual Studies and an MA in Critical Studies from PNCA, an MA in Community Arts Education from RISD, and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts. In 2015, they founded Marrow PDX, a youth-led radical creative space that ran for five years before closing in 2020 under the weight of the pandemic and the familiar pressures of capitalism.
Now, through ILYOUTH2, ILY2’s youth arts program, daelyn is making space for young people to create, experiment, mess up, change their minds, and become themselves in real time.
Returning to the Body
When asked what feels most alive right now, daelyn does not start with the program, or their art, or the next thing they’re building. They start with the body.
Last August, after nearly two years of debilitating fatigue and brain fog, daelyn received a chronic illness diagnosis. Since then, life has begun to reorganize around strength training, dancing, learning to ride a motorcycle, and deciding where their energy actually belongs.
It is not a neat story of transformation. It is not productivity dressed up as healing. It is more intimate than that. A body with limits. A body with history. A body that was tired for a reason. A body that gets to say no.
For someone whose work is so rooted in creating space for other people to become, shift, try again, and remain unfinished, that return to the body feels connected to everything else. daelyn’s practice, their politics, their youth work, and their relationships all seem to move from the same central belief: nothing has to stay fixed in order to be real.
That includes daelyn themself.
The Feral Little Goblin With Credentials
By external measures, they are deeply qualified. Multiple graduate degrees. Over a decade of youth work. A leadership role built through experience, study, and trust. But internally, they do not describe themself as someone who became a different kind of person once they became a leader.
They are, in their words, still the same person they were in middle school. Just with credentials now.
“I really struggled with being in school, which is a big part of why I'm so involved with young people now.”
Their commitment to young people is not abstract. It comes from knowing what it feels like to be a young person inside systems that do not know what to do with you. It also gives their leadership a particular texture: serious, but not institutional. Educated, but not obedient. Deeply thoughtful, but allergic to the performance of authority.
The degrees may grant legitimacy to other people. But the goblin is part of the point.
Collecting Reality
As an artist, daelyn does not begin with production. They begin with noticing. They collect objects, facts, images, stories, fragments, obsessions. In grad school, that sometimes meant doing research when professors expected them to be making in a more visible way. But for daelyn, research, observing and filing things away are all part of their process.
“It might be like 3 years down the road that I'm like “oh I know this like weird thing that like really feels relevant to what I'm making right now…and then curating them back together whether I'm making a video game or I'm making an animation—just pulling those things back together.”
Their work might become writing, animation, video games, research, or something harder to categorize. The form can shift. The questions stay close.
“The themes that show up in my personal artwork recurringly–and that have since I was a teenager–are me analyzing and questioning ideas of what is reality? Is there kind of like a shared experience of reality? How is reality constructed? Problematizing singular ideas of like: Is this what we're all experiencing?”
Ghosts. Viruses. Insects. Horror. Queer and trans body horror. Information encoded in bodies versus information encoded in computers. The possibility that two people can look at the same thing and experience entirely different worlds.
daelyn’s art lives in that instability. More than confusion, it’s a refusal of singular meaning.
A Different Kind of Gallery Culture
That refusal is also part of what drew them to ILY2.
“I was very clear that my art does not live in galleries—I don't necessarily like galleries as a concept. But I was very interested in the ways that they want to be different than the gallery culture."
They add “There's not some cooler-than-you, kind of cranky person in the corner who's going to tell you what the art is. And then also that it's very care-centered. It matters so much to them that all of the artists that they work with feel cared for.”
For daelyn, that care is not a soft aesthetic. It’s structural. It shapes how people are welcomed, how artists are treated, how young people are trusted, and how much of a person is allowed into the room.
That sentence says a lot about ILY2. It also says a lot about what daelyn is building for young people under the ILY2 umbrella.
Letting Young People Be Unfinished
At ILYOUTH2, names and pronouns are introduced every day. Not as a formality, but as an opening. A kid can use one name today and another tomorrow. A pronoun can be tested. An identity can be tried on without becoming a permanent contract. There is room to experiment without needing to explain the experiment perfectly.
daelyn learned that from young people themselves, especially from the queer, trans, and disabled teens they worked with before ILYOUTH2.
“Watching these kids change their name like six times in the time that I know them and start taking testosterone and then stop taking testosterone and then get top surgery and then start dressing more femme—It just really taught me that my identity doesn't need to be fixed or legible.”
That lesson now moves through the spaces they create. A supportive creative space, to daelyn, is not one where everyone is polished or well-behaved, but one where young people can be imperfect without being punished.
Making Mistakes Without an Audience
That feels especially urgent now, when so much of young life happens under the pressure of documentation.
“Time with screens and time on social media is so tied to surveillance in these ways that it's become so normalized for them that I don't know that they even process it. So much of being a young person is being able to trust yourself and make mistakes.”
Spending so much time online threatens that.
This is where daelyn’s youth work becomes quietly radical. Not because it is loud or slogan-driven, but because it insists on something increasingly rare: young people deserve spaces where they are not always being watched.
They deserve to try something strange. Say the wrong thing. Repair harm. Make bad art. Make great art. Change their mind. Change their name. Become a person in real time without an invisible audience saving every draft.
“I want kids to be able to feel like they can like mess up and that they're going to be able to move beyond that, to be able to be experimental, dynamic, messy humans is what I want for them in the studio, and and I feel like phones and surveillance interrupt doing that on a wider scale.”
Experimental, dynamic, messy humans. That may be the center of the whole thing.
Queerness as Refusal
For daelyn, queerness lives there, too. Not only in identity, but in the refusal to accept inherited structures as inevitable. Relationship hierarchies. Capitalism. Gender legibility. The idea that romance has to sit at the center of a life. The idea that adulthood means obedience to systems that never loved you back.
In their critical studies program, daelyn became interested in the Black feminist concept of refusal. That idea now shapes how they think about queerness, anarchism, youth liberation, and their own relationships. Refusal, for them, is not only about saying no. It is about making space for something else to become possible.
That includes the way they understand intimacy and solitude.
“As an autistic person who needs a lot of time on my own to process to be level and to not be over stimulated, or upset all the time. I need a lot of time alone, which has historically been very hard for my partners.”
Not centering romance is not a lack of intimacy. For daelyn, it’s a more honest architecture for it. A way to honor friendship, solitude, desire, care, and connection without forcing them into inherited rankings.
Their queerness is less about arriving at a final self and more about keeping the question open: does this actually work for me? And if not, what else can we build?
Photo by Harper Photo Co.
The Soft, Weird Texture of a Life
Outside of work, daelyn’s world is full of small, specific joys. They FaceTime their almost-two-year-old nephew, who calls them Zizi. They read queer and trans body horror, including stories about viruses, transformation, desire, and the horror of existing in a body. They go to goth night. They lift weights. They are learning to ride a motorcycle.
And then there is Orion.
Orion is daelyn’s 13-and-a-half-year-old American hairless terrier, a one-eared, two-time cancer survivor with an underbite, a need to be bundled even when it is hot, and the general energy of a puppy who has no intention of acting his age. daelyn got him when he was six weeks old. They have had him through their twenties and into their thirties. He is, simply, their best friend.
The softness matters here. So does the humor. So does the weirdness.
daelyn’s life is not one thing. It is many small worlds held together: the mall, the studio, the dance floor, the body, the dog, the kids, the art, the horror, the research, the refusal, the care.
What Comes Next
Right now, daelyn is not trying to become one final version of themself. They are building toward balance. A life where art, work, relationships, solitude, movement, and care can coexist without one swallowing the others. After years of illness and burnout, that balance is has become a practice.
For the community, the invitation is simple: show up.
Come to a youth art opening. Ask a young artist about their work. Buy a five-dollar piece of art from a teenager and make their day. Attend an all-ages event when they return after summer camp season. Be the kind of adult you wish you had access to when you were younger.
Inside a mall that will not exist much longer, something real is happening.
Young people gather. Art gets made. Names change. Mistakes become survivable. A community forms.
It is not fixed. It is not final.
That is exactly the point.
