An Insider’s Guide to the Portland Art Scene

It doesn’t always work out this way, but when acquainting myself with the art scene of a new city, if possible, I like to hit the bigger art institutions first to educate myself a bit before popping into the smaller commercial and nonprofit galleries.

As a touchstone, start with The Portland Art Museum (PAM), founded in 1892. With 42,000 objects in its stores, it is encyclopedic in scope. But its two most exciting collections are the art and objects from Pacific Northwest and the wholly separate wing devoted to Native American art, with 5,000 prehistoric, historic, and contemporary objects created by more than 200 cultural groups from throughout North America, including Allan Houser, Charles Edenshaw, and Maria Martinez; and contemporary locals, like Lillian Pitt, Joe Feddersen, Pat Courtney Gold, Rick Bartow, and James Lavadour.

Even for a well-traveled art tourist, those two collections feel special (the Native American one is movingly dedicated to the tribes of Oregon). The rest of the collection dutifully hits many globally significant 20th and 21st century highlights and is sometimes rounded out with small, rigorous exhibitions by artists that are part of the broader art world, like the show of digital animations by Jennifer Steinkampf that was on view during my recent visit.

The museum will likely be invigorated with the opening of a planned three-story pavilion that will connect two freestanding buildings and will be named for painter Mark Rothko, who immigrated at age 10 with his family from Latvia to Portland and took his first art classes and received his first solo exhibition in 1933 at PAM. The artist’s children have committed to lending major paintings by their father over the next two decades. Groundbreaking is likely in 2018.

It may look far afield on a map, but don’t miss Disjecta Contemporary Art Center. Though the name evokes a frowny face emoticon, this place is the happy, cool kid in town. Disjecta’s headquarters are in the Kenton neighborhood in North Portland. The low-slung, 6,000-square-foot space—a former bowling alley—is hidden directly behind the kitschy, 31-foot-high, Instagram-friendly statue of fictional lumberjack Paul Bunyan (Babe, the blue ox, is sadly nowhere to be seen).

Disjecta oversees and organizes the Portland Biennial, but its year-round mission is executed by a rotating cast of curators who take up year-long residencies to curate a full season of exhibitions and programs for an entire season. During my visit, a special exhibition in conjunction with Converge 45 included artwork by art stars like Laurie Anderson, Lita Albuquerque, and Ann Hamilton alongside Oregon artists like Tannaz Farsi and James Lavadour.

“People always say ‘I see it at PICA and then I go on to read about it five years later in The New York Times,’” quips Victoria Frey, the pink-haired, eyebrow-pierced executive director of the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), which has, since its founding in 1995, been showcasing work by artists, performers, and poets like Robert Creeley, Laurie Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, Coco Fusco, and more than 600 others in the cultural vanguard.

For more than two decades, it has operated without a dedicated exhibition or performance facility, instead offering Portland peripatetic programming—including visual and performance art—in vacant warehouses and makeshift venues. But starting in October 2017, PICA will have its first permanent home, in a 19,000-square-foot former indoor skate park in Northeast Portland’s Eliot neighborhood. The new space will allow for more than just pop-up visual arts exhibitions for the first time in its long history.

Meanwhile, PICA’s Time Based Art Festival takes place every September (2017 is its 15th year), specializing in performance, video, and other art media that unfold over time. “For people in town then, this is like a party for the city,” Frey says. “Our late night beer gardens are open, where the general public can hang out with artists and curators. It is really magical.”

The first place a local will tell you to go for gallery hopping is Portland’s Pearl District, and that’s good advice. But before you hit the commercial galleries, head to the Lumber Room, open one afternoon a week (the day and hours vary by season) or by appointment.

Collector Sarah Miller Meigs, whose family’s fortune was made in the timber industry, founded this art space in 2010 to showcase rotating thematic exhibits drawn from her stellar private collection of nearly 1,000 modern and contemporary artworks. Featured artists include international stars like Dan Flavin and Eva Hesse, and locals, including the largest collection of work by Portland’s most celebrated contemporary artist, Jessica Jackson Hutchins.

Comprising two narrow floors of exhibition space and a charming outdoor terrace, the lumber room doubles as a pied-à-terre for Meigs and for artists she invites to take up residence now and then. Curator Jeanine Jablonski runs one of the most interesting galleries in town as well.

Next door to the lumber room is Elizabeth Leach Gallery, a white-box gallery with thick wood ceiling beams framing its relatively expansive space. As the only Portland gallery that belongs to the Art Dealers Association, it’s the establishment favorite. Liz Leach, a warm blonde with a quick laugh who came from Los Angeles and New York, founded the gallery in 1981 and is now a doyenne of the local scene (she is also the founding chair of Converge 45). She brings in work by blue chip artists like Richard Diebenkorn and John Baldessari, but mostly to show in the context of mid-career artists from the region, like Malia Jenson, Isaac Leyman, and M.K. Guth.

Just around the corner from the Leach Gallery, the PDX Contemporary Art and the Upfor Gallery share an entrance. PDX shows a joyfully eclectic mix, with a lot of new work by locals as well as some secondary market pieces by art world stars known the world over. PDX reserves a street-facing window as a showcase for artists who don't have gallery representation. Its space, with its black wood floors and pivoting walls, is courtesy of Portland-born architect Brad Cloepfil, who also designed the Seattle Art Museum, Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum, and New York’s renovated Museum of Arts and Design, among others.

Portland-born Theo LeGuin started Upfor Gallery in 2013, with an eye towards exhibiting cutting-edge digital, photographic, and video work by early- to mid-career artists. His special interest is living artists who use those media to examine the culture of media and technology.

A few blocks away but still in the Pearl District, the historic DeSoto Building, most recently serving as a fabric warehouse, was developed specifically to be a hub for the arts. The ground floor of the building now houses galleries, with the upper part of the building devoted to the architects who renovated the 1916 structure.

There’s Charles A. Hartman Fine Art, Augen Gallery, and then The Froelick Gallery, which during my visit had on view a colorful assortment of works by the late Portland artist Rick Bartow and by Yoshihiro Kitai, who teaches printmaking at PNCA. 

Also in the DeSoto, photo buffs won’t want to miss Blue Sky Gallery, co-founded in 1975 as Oregon Center for Photographic Arts by photographer Chris Rauschenberg (yes, son of Robert), a long-haired local whose commitment to the medium runs deep. Since then, Rauschenberg estimates that the nonprofit has mounted nearly 800 shows by 600 photographers. “When we started, we thought we would only show local photographers, but we started getting proposals from all over,” he recalls, “Now of our 24 shows a year, maybe one is a regional photographer and a third are international.”

While perusing the Pearl District, I happened upon one of two outposts of Made Here PDX, an elegant, warm, and funky shop established to showcase and sell the fine craftsmanship of local artisans in ceramics, woodworking, metal smithing, textiles, and other applied arts—all merchandised into charming, accessible vignettes. “It’s no secret that Portland is a hotbed of creative culture,” its founders tout, "We just decided it was time to bring all of these great things together in one place." And naturally, the staff includes many local artists and students. (Tip for weary travelers: they also sell artisanal local beers and chocolates, as well as other foodstuffs and apothecary products.)

Five minutes away by car from the Pearl District is Adams and Ollman, situated in a simple storefront next to a hipster barber shop and a Thai restaurant. The spare one-room exhibition space is a favorite among locals, with its less-is-more vibe.

'“We like to set up dialogues among work that would otherwise not be in the same room together,” says gallerist Amy Adams, smiling in her signature red lipstick.

That means exhibitions that contrast: say, found vernacular sculpture and pre-Columbian Peruvian pottery with work by contemporary artists (like painter Katherine Bradford) or others from the Pacific Northwest like Ellen Lesperance and Jessica Jackson Hutchins. “Our gallery likes exploring the margins,” she says.

Worth the short drive from downtown is Fourteen30 Contemporary, now sited in Goose Hill, one of Portland’s oldest neighborhoods, in a charmingly ramshackle cottage storefront that was built as a bakery in 1891.

Gallery owner Jeanine Jablonski (when she’s not serving as curator for the Lumber Room) mounts shows by international and local artists, including several who play other roles in the art community. Among locals, this includes colorful abstract paintings on linen by Kristan Kennedy, who also serves as artistic director for PICA, and vibrant figurative paintings (among my favorites during four days of non stop art-touring) by Rainen Knecht, whose day job is studio manager to artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins.

The galleries of Portland’s diverse colleges and universities are worth seeing if you time your visit right. The don’t-miss among these is The Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA). PNCA mounts 10 public exhibitions a year and is located in the heart of the city within walking distance of many of the commercial galleries in the Pearl District. The Center took over the now-defunct Museum of Contemporary Crafts and Design. So in addition to revolving exhibitions of work, this is the place to see masterworks in glass, wood, and especially ceramics, by artists like Lucie Rie, Gertrud and Otto Natzler, Finn Lyngaard, and Toshiko Takaezu.

Further afield, there’s Cooley Memorial Gallery at Reed College and The Hoffman Gallery at the Oregon College of Art and Craft  (OCAC) whose building also houses the family-run Nicolletta’s Caffé, with a robust Italian menu for lunch on weekdays and a modest art and design shop with a lovely assortment of jewelry, ceramics, and textiles by local artisans and students. OCAC’s gallery is nestled, in summer time at least, on a lushly verdant campus dotted with wildflowers, with the pleasant sounds of art-making everywhere.

Yale Union, a non-profit cultural hub, hosts exhibitions and events, and when it does, go: it’s the coolest, place in town. Curtis Knapp and his fellow artists who founded and run the place are the guardians of the avant-garde in this part of the world. Their enormous top-floor exhibition space is thoughtfully curated. “Portlanders can be very literal,” muses Amy Adams of the Portland gallery Adams and Ollman. “Yale Union can be subtle and they do a great job; in their impulse to be slight, they hit the nail on the head.”

Yale Union is situated in a block-long commercial laundry facility built in 1908 and now listed on the National Register of Historic Places; its founders acknowledge that the colossal building is alternately an “instrument” for their mission and an “albatross.” Yale Union offers a warren of artist studios for locals.