An Expansion and Renovation Brings New Life to the Portland Art Museum

When the Portland Art Museum presented the city’s first retrospective exhibition of paintings by Mark Rothko in 2012, many local viewers were unaware that the artist grew up in Portland, where he attended the Portland Art Museum School and was awarded his first museum exhibition. With Rothko now officially reclaimed as a hometown hero, and with the tacit approval of his heirs, the museum has now enshrined the artist as a signature for its new $116 million campus.  

The project involved integrating two neighboring buildings, adding almost 100,000 square feet of public and gallery space, and uniting the structures with a 21,000-square-foot, multilayered glass pavilion named for Rothko. Although the renovations were almost entirely privately funded, donors decided to credit the celebrated artist, who began his career in Portland, rather than financial contributors. Optimistic supporters of the museum see the new facility as potentially reinvigorating the cultural center of the city, which is slowly recovering from a post-Covid economic malaise.

The Portland Art Museum’s main building was designed in 1932 by young Portland architect Pietro Belluschi, who enlisted an endorsement for his modernist plan from Frank Lloyd Wright after trustees expressed a preference for a Georgian-style building. The building was designed to face Portland’s south park blocks, a greenbelt edging the city’s downtown core. Today it retains its understated elegance, with a brick and travertine exterior that plays especially well with seasonal foliage across the street.

The second structure, also facing the park, is the 1927 Mark Building, a chunky former Masonic Temple that the museum acquired in 1994. In 2005 spaces were renovated on the south side of the Mark building to create galleries for the museum’s modern and contemporary art. Visitors could access the Mark building’s galleries, however, only through a logistically obscure passageway extending underground from the Belluschi building.

In 2006 Brian Ferriso became director of the museum, and during the past 20 years, he has systematically restored the museum’s historically precarious financial health. In addition to raising funds for the Rothko pavilion and gallery renovations, his capital campaign raised $32 million for the endowment—now $90 million—without incurring any long-term debt. Ferriso also recruited Portland’s Hennebery Eddy Architects and Chicago-based Vinci Hamp Architects as designers for the $16,000 expanded campus, one of the most generous capital investments in the arts in the history of Oregon.

Contributing to his fundraising success was the acuity of his observations about visitor demographics—too many potential viewers, he discovered, regarded the museum complex as an uninviting fortress. In response, he convinced potential donors that a transparent Rothko Pavilion could be a physical expression of openness, accessible on the ground level to cyclists and pedestrians, and serving as a glowing beacon for the arts downtown when illuminated at night.

The pedestrian pathway begins in a new courtyard on the scruffier west side of the Pavilion furnished with outdoor tables for a new cafe and views of the museum’s lobby and gift shop, all framed by a spikey gilded bronze Sun sculpture by Ugo Rondinone—“already a fave for selfies,” according to Ferrino. The pathway was redesigned after the neighborhood residents vigorously lobbied against a plan that would have limited all-hours access to the plaza between the two buildings and the streets on both sides of the museum. The controversy was resolved by revising the Pavilion to include a glass tunnel open 24 hours a day to pedestrians and bicycles.     

Walking through this space at ground level, visitors can see the artworks on view in the new Black Art and Experiences galleries in the Mark building, where an installation by Portland artist Lisa Jarrett is on view together with Mickalene Thomas’s multimedia compositions. These new galleries are supported by the 1803 Fund, an ambitious citywide initiative to re-engage Portland’s Black community.

The museum began collecting Native American art in 1918 and now houses over 3,500 historical and contemporary objects, including work by Allan Houser, Charles Edenshaw, and Maria Martinez, as well as Northwest contemporary artists Lillian Pitt, Joe Federson, Wendy Red Star, James Lavadour, Sara Siestreem, and Marie Watt, who now serves as an artist-trustee. During his tenure, Ferriso increased the number of the museum’s curatorial positions from three to nine, with most of the positions endowed in perpetuity. Among them is the curator of Native American art, a position held by Kathleen Ash-Milby, who served as commissioner and curator for Jeffrey Gibson’s exhibition at the US Pavilion in the 2024 Venice Biennale. Plans are being developed for a major redesign and reinstallation of the Native American permanent collection galleries.

“My plan is to involve contemporary Native artists in rethinking possibilities for display,” Milby said. “We really don’t need another white box with a march through time—and there are so many new possibilities with color and lighting we can consider.”

On view now are exhibitions on two floors, one showcasing contemporary and historic Native art in photography, sculpture, fashion and basketry and the other in galleries devoted to Northwest artists. In that latter space, Ash-Milby is displaying over 40 paintings and mixed-media sculptures by Rick Bartow, a member of the Mad River band of the Wiyot Tribe whose work revisited icons related to his heritage, then remade them as semi-abstractions. The galleries have been designed with enlarged openings facing long circulation routes that enabling visual access just by walking along the path.

Clarity of orientation was a primary objective in the design of the new gallery spaces as well as the Pavilion, which includes exhibition spaces on two floors and outdoor balconies on both sides of the structure. The interior palette is almost austere: the glass panels are softly etched, art display walls have minimal detailing, gallery floors throughout the space are white oak. The Rothko connection is explicitly restated in an intimate exhibition of several Rothko paintings in the Mark galleries, an agreement for future loans from the family, and an exhibition “Abstraction Since Mark Rothko” surveying color-field paintings from the 1970s. Several of these paintings came from critic Clement Greenberg’s private collection, which the museum purchased in 2000. The collection included several exemplary canvases by artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, which are featured in the exhibition, but also a number of less-impressive paintings that call into question Greenberg’s celebrated visual expertise.

The museum has recently added some 300 new contemporary art acquisitions to its collection, including work by Jeffrey Gibson, Simone Leigh, Wendy Red Star, Pedro Reyes, Carrie Mae Weems, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Some of these artists will be exhibited in a new exhibition space known as Crumpacker Center for New Art, a 2,700-square-foot former library space converted into the museum’s largest gallery.

Installed in the Crumpacker to coincide with the museum’s grand opening at the end of November is Pipilotti Rist’s 4^th Floor to Mildness, an installation originally created for the fourth floor of the New Museum in New York. Here, two screens displaying human bodies and aquatic shapes floating underwater hang from the ceiling; they’re meant to be viewed from raft-like beds stretched out on the floor. The experience may be aligned with museum’s new enthusiasm for “cultural snacking,” in which individual appreciation of an artistic experience is unguided by a master narrative. The idea is foundational for the museum’s most recent offshoot, the PAM CUT Center for an Untold Tomorrow.

In 2023 the museum facilitated the acquisition and remodeling of the Tomorrow Theater, a former porn venue in Southeast Portland, which the museum said was conceived as a “home for cultural snackers that blends art, technology and cinematic storytelling in all its forms.” Directed by Amy Dodson, the museum’s inaugural curator of film and new media, the Center specializes in “cinema unbound,” one-night events, performances, interactive storytelling, gaming, local artists’ workshops, and occasional evenings with well-known directors such as, most recently, Guillermo del Toro.

The venue replaced former Film Study Center exhibits in an auditorium situated within the space that baffled so many visitors looking for bathrooms and the correct elevator access to galleries in the Mark building. This area has now been remodeled to serve as a new multimedia gallery for PAM CUT, opening with an installation of Marco Barnbilla’s stunningly theatrical 3D loops through Hollywood spectacle, Heaven’s Gate and Anthology.

Not everything is entirely changed at the Portland Art Museum—though even accepted masterworks at the museum are being presented in a new light. Visitors with more traditional tastes can still find favorite Impressionist, American, and European artworks, however these pieces have been reinstalled in thematic displays, rather than chronological ones. The Asian art galleries in the Belluschi building remain elegant and timeless, too.

Yet Ferriso may have more changes planned. His ambitions—ones shared by many of his colleagues—are to guide the museum into serving a more diverse and wider range of communities. How this institution will accomplish those goals remains unknown, especially since Ferriso will soon depart to begin leading the Dallas Museum of Art. But the new Portland Art Museum at least suggests he is talented at revamping institutions, which may explain why his first big job in his new post will be a similar task: a campaign to expand and reorient the programming of the Dallas Museum’s celebrated Edward Larrabe Barnes–designed building.