Portland Art Museum

Founded in late 1892, the Portland Art Museum is the seventh oldest museum in the United States and the oldest in the Pacific Northwest. The Museum is internationally recognized for its permanent collection and ambitious special exhibitions, drawn from the Museum’s holdings and the world’s finest public and private collections.

The Museum’s collection of more than 42,000 objects, displayed in 112,000 square feet of galleries, reflects the history of art from ancient times to today. The collection is distinguished for its holdings of art of the native peoples of North America, English silver, and the graphic arts. An active collecting institution dedicated to preserving great art for the enrichment of future generations, the Museum devotes 90 percent of its gallery space to its permanent collection.

The Museum’s campus of landmark buildings, a cornerstone of Portland’s cultural district, includes the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art, the Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts, and the Northwest Film Center. With a membership of over 23,000 households and serving more than 350,000 visitors annually, the Museum is a premier venue for education in the visual arts.

Exhibits

Perspectives
This summer, the Museum presents a special exhibition of more than 60 works by local BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) photographers made during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Perspectives features work by artists Emery Barnes, Joseph Blake, Linneas Boland-Godbey, Daveed Jacobo, Mariah Harris, and Byron Merritt.

Shades of Light: Korean Art from the Collection
Shades of Light brings together ceramics, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and textiles from the Museum’s permanent collection. Light is the unifying theme across a broad range of Korean creative practices.

APEX: Sharita Towne & A Black Art Ecology of Portland
A “true grandchild of the Great Migration,” Sharita Towne creates installations that are multi-voiced, poetic, and informative. As a transdisciplinary artist, Towne has built a practice steeped in the work of collaboration, cultural organizing, and arts infrastructure building. The exhibition provides a glimpse into Towne’s burgeoning project “A Black Art Ecology of Portland,” an initiative she launched in 2019 to bring together community organizations in support of creating, reclaiming, and redefining spaces for Black art and audiences in Portland.

AUX/MUTE - Album Intro 07:22
This summer, the AUX/MUTE Gallery concludes a yearlong exhibition series with Album Intro 07:22, a showcase of works by artists represented in The Numberz FM’s growing art collection focused on Black and Brown artists. Artists on view include Alice Price, Michelle Lepe, Oluwafemi, Ivan McClellan, Nick Jones, Alicia Pickney, Ben Boutros and Willie Little. The show is the culmination of the station’s journey in the development of not just its collection but also the artists, with some exhibiting for the first time.

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