Past Exhibitions
Special Exhibitions
China Design Now:
OCT 10, 2009 – JAN 17, 2010Explore the recent explosion of critically compelling design and architecture projects created in China, contextualizing the impact of rapid economic development on these projects in three of the country’s major cities—Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.
Raphael: The Woman with the Veil:
OCT 24, 2009 – JAN 3, 2010Don’t miss the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view Raphael’s renowned painting La Velata (The Woman with the Veil), opening October 24.
Virtual Worlds: M.C. Escher and Paradox
JUN 6, 2009 – SEP 13, 2009Printmaker Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch, 1898-1972) created visual puzzles in which logic and absurdity coexist. This exhibition traces the development of the artist’s work from his early stylized depictions of landscape and architecture to his later use of repeated geometric patterns.
PNCA at 100:
JUN 6, 2009 – SEP 13, 2009PNCA at 100 will celebrate the centennial of the Museum Art School, now Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Marking Portland: The Art of Tattoo:
JUN 20, 2009 – SEP 13, 2009Experience the art of tattoo – through time and across cultures – with Museum-wide kiosks showcasing tattoo-related art from the permanent collections and interactive, multimedia presentations featuring Portland-area tattoos and their stories.
La volupté du goût: French Painting in the Age of Madame de Pompadour:
FEB 7, 2009 – MAY 17, 2009Experience some of the most sumptuous paintings ever made when the Portland Art Museum and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tours, bring La volupté du goût: French Painting in the Age of Madame de Pompadour to Portland for its exclusive U.S. presentation.
Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge, 1867-1957:
OCT 4, 2008 – JAN 11, 2009From rock formations to waterfalls, vast curves and bends to massive mountain views, the Columbia River Gorge’s beauty has been an inspiration to professional and amateur photographers alike for nearly 150 years. The images in Wild Beauty, a 90-year photographic survey of the Columbia River Gorge, comprise some of the most striking and poignant pictures taken of the area from 1867 to 1957.
Contemporary Northwest Art Awards:
JUN 14, 2008 – SEP 14, 2008Experience the diversity of contemporary art thriving in the Northwest. Presenting new work by the award recipients — Dan Attoe, Cat Clifford, Jeffry Mitchell, Whiting Tennis, and Marie Watt — this inaugural exhibition is at the core of the summer program.
Klaus Moje:
MAY 31, 2008 – SEP 7, 2008For more than 50 years, Klaus Moje has pushed the boundaries of the capabilities of glass. This 30–year retrospective traces Moje’s artistic progression and features the debut of The Portland Panels: Choreographed Geometry.
Chuck Close Prints: Process and Collaboration
OCT 6, 2007 – JAN 6, 2008Renowned painter and master printmaker, Chuck Close, challenges the accepted boundaries of traditional printmaking in his investigation into the principles of perception.
Camouflage:
AUG 4, 2007 – NOV 4, 2007This fall, the Portland Art Museum presents Camouflage, an exhibition of eight paintings that explores artists’ use of pattern in the post-World War II era.
Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
JUN 2, 2007 – SEP 16, 2007This must-see exhibition, the ultimate collection of 17th-century Dutch masterpieces, makes its only West Coast appearance at the Portland Art Museum.
Manuel Neri: The Figure In Relief
MAR 31, 2007 – JUL 29, 2007Through 10 bronze sculptures with oil-based pigments, this exhibition offers an exploration of Neri’s ideas about the figure in sculptural space and within the relief format.
Dorothy Yezerski: Mediterranean Views
FEB 14, 2007 – JUN 3, 2007Portland artist Dorothy Yezerski (1921-2003) spent the better part of her artistic career captivated by the historical sites of Italy and Greece, which she conveyed with a unique aerial perspective through colorful, abstract compositions.
Minimalism/Postminimalism: Selections from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family Foundation
MAR 31, 2007 – MAY 13, 2007Drawing upon a long tradition in Modernism of abstract geometric art, Minimalist artists created objects of extreme spareness, leading the viewer to focus on color, shape, proportion, materials, and his or her own experience of the artwork.
The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt
NOV 5, 2006 – MAR 4, 2007The Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt features the largest selection of antiquities ever loaned by Egypt for exhibition in North America. The exhibition includes objects that have never been on public display and many that have never been seen outside of Egypt.
Oregon Biennial 2006:
JUL 29, 2006 – OCT 8, 2006Celebrating the present moment in Oregon’s art scene, the 2006 Oregon Biennial affirms the Museum’s commitment to Oregon artists and ongoing support of their work.
Great Painters in Brescia From the Renaissance to the 18th Century:
APR 29, 2006 – SEP 17, 2006Great Painters in Brescia introduces the city of Brescia, Italy as a site of major artistic endeavors over three centuries. The town of Brescia, situated in the region of Lombardy, lies on the border in between Lombardy and the Veneto. Brescia was one of the remarkable centers of art starting in the Renaissance and continuing through the 18th century. This is apparent from the rich holdings of its museums including the Santa Giulia City Museum and the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo created in 1908 with the collections formed by Count Leopoldo Martinengo and Count Paolo Tosio. Although the accomplishments of Brescian masters have long been appreciated in England, only a few examples are present in American museum collections. The exhibition from the museums of Brescia organized by Linea d'Ombra presents an overview of the development of the art of painting in this north Italian city over three centuries.Hilda Morris:
APR 15, 2006 – JUL 16, 2006Hilda Morris (1911 - 1991) was at the center of the Northwest's avant-garde for much of her career, producing a large body of innovative, influential bronze sculpture. Now, in this definitive survey exhibition of more than 50 of her sculptures, drawings, and paintings are on view.
Morris and her husband, the Abstract Expressionist painter Carl Morris, settled in Portland, Oregon in 1941. Except for extended trips to New York, she worked in Portland until 1969, introducing rigorous thinking about abstraction to the Pacific Northwest incorporating the rhythms of dance, music and mathematics, emphasizing the organization of organic structure. However, due to a complex set of circumstances, including distance from art-world centers and her own independence of mind-as well as changing trends and directions in art, Morris's work, and indeed, her career, have been obscured.
This exhibition examines this significant artist's innovations anew, along with her search for hidden relationships and metaphorical correspondences in the material world.
From Anxiety to Ecstasy: Themes in German Expressionist Prints
MAR 18, 2006 – JUN 11, 2006Flourishing from around 1905 to 1933, the German Expressionist movement captured the emotional and psychological toll of living in the modern world. Exploring both the negative underside of life as well as positive paradigms for change, this exhibition of over 60 works focuses on the themes of social criticism, nudes, performers, portraits, exotic influences, and the "Other." Predominately drawn from the rich holdings of the permanent collection, this is the first exhibition to feature the Museum's outstanding array of German graphic art from this period in more than ten years. Highlights include works by Kathe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Ernst Kirchner, Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
Exhibition Series
Word and Image/Word as Image:
AUG 22, 2009 – NOV 29, 2009Featuring works by artists from Albrecht Dürer to Ed Ruscha, this exhibition examines the relationship between word and image in prints over the course of more than 500 years, from the Renaissance to today.
APEX: Joseph Park:
JUL 18, 2009 – NOV 15, 2009Inspired by film noir and animation in his early work, Seattle-based artist Joseph Park’s recent paintings comprise a complex visual structure built upon reflections and foreboding narrative situations from a range of photographic sources.
Sanford Biggers:
MAY 16, 2009 – AUG 30, 2009New York-based artist Sanford Biggers is recognized for complex, richly evocative installations centered on themes of identity and history. This installation, titled Blossom, is a mixed media work incorporating a massive tree, found piano, and Biggers' compositional reworking of Billie Holiday's 1939 jazz anthem Strange Fruit.
Sensitive Vision: The Prints of Beth Van Hoesen:
MAY 2, 2009 – AUG 16, 2009This retrospective of prints by San Francisco artist Beth Van Hoesen features approximately 70 prints drawn from the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum.
APEX: Chris Jordan:
MAR 7, 2009 – JUL 12, 2009Through Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait, a large-format series of digital collages comprised of repeatedly patterned photographic images, Seattle-based artist Chris Jordan visualizes statistics that are easy to overlook.
Rachel Whiteread:
JAN 17, 2009 – MAY 3, 2009Having exhibited at the 47th Venice Biennale and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Rachel Whiteread is one of Britain’s most celebrated women sculptors working on the international stage.
Mixografia: Innovation and Collaboration:
JAN 10, 2009 – APR 26, 2009Mixografia was founded in 1968 in Mexico City by Luis and Lea Remba as a fine print workshop for collaboration on print editions. Celebrated Mexican artist Rufino Tamayo’s desire for more volume and texture in his prints inspired Luis Remba to invent a process that permitted the printing of images in relief with fine surface detail.APEX: MK Guth:
NOV 1, 2008 – MAR 1, 2009Multidisciplinary artist MK Guth explores the concepts of personal and collective identity as understood through myth, fairytales, and heroic figures.
Making Merry: The Circus and Carnival in Graphic Art:
OCT 11, 2008 – JAN 4, 2009From poetic drama or outrageous humor to awesome physical feats that stretch the imagination, carnivals and circuses dazzle audiences with their varied performances by clowns, acrobats, beasts, and beauties. Often viewed as a metaphor for the human condition and the absurdity of life, carnivals and circuses have intrigued artists for centuries.
Jonathan Lasker:
OCT 4, 2008 – JAN 11, 2009Jonathan Lasker is one of a handful of painters to emerge at the end of the 1970s who brought forward a provocatively reinvented abstraction at a moment when painting was considered bankrupt. Neither a New Image painter nor Neo-Expressionist, Lasker harnessed compositional exactitude and certain tropes of abstraction with a richly physical paint handling to make a highly individualized post-modern painting.
APEX: Marc Dombrosky
JUN 28, 2008 – OCT 26, 2008Experience Tacoma artist Marc Dombrosky's unique investigation into language, community, and place.
Celebrating Prints: Recent Acquisitions
JUN 21, 2008 – OCT 5, 2008View a selection of prints acquired during the last five years by artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt van Rijn, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Sol LeWitt, and Kara Walker.
Ed Ruscha:
JUN 14, 2008 – SEP 21, 2008Featuring two large triptychs, Azteca and Azteca in Decline, this exhibition explores Ed Ruscha's virtuosic trompe l’oeil technique and fascination with then and now, before and after.
New on the Wall: Recent Photo Acquisitions
FEB 23, 2008 – JUN 15, 2008Explore the Museum's latest photography acquisitions in a thought–provoking exhibition that illustrates the diverse photographic concerns and activities of more than 50 artists.
APEX: Jenene Nagy
FEB 16, 2008 – JUN 22, 2008See the latest site–specific installation by Portland artist Jenene Nagy, who questions the need to invent idealized spaces with imaginative landscapes that blur the boundaries between built and natural environments.
Richard Deacon
JAN 26, 2008 – JUN 1, 2008Portland Art Museum will present a new monumental sculpture by internationally celebrated British artist Richard Deacon.
In Winter, Silk Linings: The Kimono in Print
NOV 17, 2007 – FEB 17, 2008Japan’s national costume, the kimono, is more than a garment. Explore the significance of kimono ensembles in the Museum’s distinguished collection of woodblock prints.
APEX: Ann Gale
OCT 13, 2007 – FEB 10, 2008Psychologically charged, Gale’s fragmented, tension-filled portraits capture many hours of shifting light and changing emotion in one concentrated moment.
Ursula von Rydingsvard
SEP 1, 2007 – DEC 30, 2007Ursula von Rydingsvard’s massive carved cedar sculpture, Pod Pach?, is in a continuous state of motion as it lifts and settles in a gesture that suggests a human back bending.
Graphic Force, Humanist Vision: Leonard Baskin Works on Paper
AUG 18, 2007 – NOV 11, 2007A major figure in 20th–century American art, Leonard Baskin’s overarching concern was the expression of the power and depth of the human condition at its most primal.
Events Calendar
