portland art museum

portland art museum

Exploring the Evolution of the Portland Art Museum: A Comprehensive Study

1. Introduction to the Portland Art Museum

Changes in the environment in which art museums operate are complex and multifaceted. These surface in a museum’s strategic planning process. Strategic planning may give direction to change; aspects to consider were pointed out by Senge. The historical fabric in which an art museum is embedded can provide possible reasons for its continued evolution. Founders often endowed the contemporary community with time-assimilating and valuable experiences that were solidly social or economically based. Over time, the focus of the museum and the design of the structure respond to the continuing community need for connections to and expressions of life around art.

Art museums in many communities are experiencing periods of change, and the Portland Art Museum is no exception. Many forces are leading to these times of evolution, including severe economic cycles, changes in support from public sources, changes in audience profiles, changes in display technology, and changes in the meaning of the museum-object-audience experience. Given these changes, questions need to be raised and responses made. The main questions that guide such a response can emerge from explorations into the history of the museum, cumulative exhibitions, and based responses, and applying them to a specific community and museum.

2. Historical Development and Key Milestones

To understand the museum and its placement within the city and its park setting, one must also explore the founders’ and patrons’ commitment to the place as the triumph of beauty over function. The ties of the museum to the park have, in the past, been so deliberately maintained, it is difficult to comprehend in the 1990s how integral structure and function have been designed, especially as one enters the still active yet little pretentious, relatively small museum. The collection manifests a rich hold on northern art and design, capturing the rich architectural resources celebrated in Oregon’s First 100 farewell to the 1982 centennial celebrations. The story of the successful, rapidly developed museum, that in 1895 and before became a club, places the museum within the mythic heroic volunteer effort and a sense of philanthropic compulsion as expressed in those endowed culture with the power that shaped the art museum, a dependency that is always the foundation.

The Portland Art Museum first opened its doors in steamy July 1892, making it one of the oldest and largest art institutions in the Pacific Northwest. Since its inception, the museum has repeatedly undergone architectural, organizational, and programmatic transformations in response to the needs of the community, growth in its collection, changes in the field of art, and civic leadership. Expansion, however, has always been mindful of the connection of the Portland Art Museum building to its beautiful, lush urban park setting located in the heart of downtown. Throughout its history, the building and collection have been actively shaped and supported through the personal generosity of its founders, patrons, and volunteers and the resources of residents and businesses in the area. Asa Candler remarked at the 1921 dedication of the original building, a year after the Chicago Art Institute had opened its doors in a grand, newly designed structure: “This little museum in Portland is a gem. It is the loveliest thing in Oregon and one of the finest in the United States.”

3. Collections and Exhibitions: A Closer Look

In 1955, the Museum brought to Portland the Treasury of the Russian Orthodox Church of Leningrad. During the spring of 1958, loaned works from the Museum of Modern Art in New York formed the Art Club’s major exhibit. In the fall of 1958 came a collection of contemporary drawings by such leading sculptors as Giacometti, Lipchitz, and Moore. In the summer of 1960, a group of paintings from the Louvre arrived in Portland. The record of these special exhibitions demonstrates the trend of museum concentration. While temporary exhibits are becoming more significant in the Museum program, the permanent collection is less frequently seen by a growing urban population.

In 1931, at the dedication of this building, then Museum Studio Building, director Hawthorne talked of the galleries that “would have a much wider publicity program, that we will continue to borrow good things that we cannot hope to buy, that we can never cover more than six thousand years of international art.” Today, the Portland Art Museum is moving steadily in this direction with its concentration on special exhibitions. At this writing, the Museum sponsors one to three such exhibits a year.

In recent years, the term “fine” has been added to the museum naming process and the place of “art” has been prominent. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Institute of Fine Arts Museum in Detroit are a few examples of specific use of the “fine arts” term. The Portland Art Museum is the largest art museum in the Pacific Northwest. During its evolution, as we shall see in the shipping chapters, it was not always exclusively characteristically an artist’s museum. In its early years, it was a museum of general art and sciences, and its early exhibitions included a broad spectrum of work. The Art Club hung annual members’ shows in the early years of the institution, and the Art Association’s permanent collection has always been an eclectic one.

Generally, museums have been defined as institutions that collect, preserve, and interpret material evidence. Indeed, it is the mission of many museums to display objects representing a wide range of human experience. Different types of art museums have different focuses, and the place given to works of art in the mission of each museum affects the museum’s composition and design.

4. Community Engagement and Impact

The museum has grown in scope and public value and holds a strategic position as a long-established and central community institution. As such, the museum rigorously documents the impact of the programs with a focus on equity, patron quality of experience, and breadth of community engagement. The museum conducts an annual survey of 1,500-2,000 cultural users in the community. If not visiting the museum, what cultural organization would patrons have visited instead? How is Portland Art Museum involved or perceived as impactful in the surrounding community? 745 respondents were surveyed from Washington County, Clackamas County, Multnomah County (non-Portland), Clark County (WA), and Multnomah County (Portland residents). The greater Portland region recently hit the 2.4 million population mark.

At the time of the museum’s founding, Portland’s population was made up of people of diverse national origins: Native Americans, English, French, Canadian, Irish, Croatian, Finnish, German, Chinese, Dutch, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Scottish, Russian, Scandinavian, Swiss, and Welsh. The collective citizens of Portland brought to their community an international understanding and appreciation for the cultural values and heritages prevalent in Old World countries, and they recognized the importance of transmitting an appreciation of their combined heritages to the younger generation. The importance of this type of formal educational activity, beyond providing economic opportunities, has been part of the museum’s activities since its founding. Of importance, Portland Art Museum provided an important part of Oregon’s informal learning system, supporting important formal institutions including libraries and schools, while also helping to grow informal cultural knowledge about other countries in what was a very global city.

5. Future Directions and Opportunities

The current preliminary study has given some thought to the demand and supply of art and has assembled a list of the PAM’s exhibitions to examine how the Museum has weighed filling all of these near disparate roles. Art deco designers had been criticized for copying older motifs without adding anything truly new, for imitating instead of being creative, in short for reducing the supply of creativity. The museum, including its library and internal archival materials, might have some items of merit. Library usage examination tends to show a high level of student interest in architecture. Clues about the museum’s permanent collection might be obtained from a comparison of thesis topics over the institutional history of the related American and Canadian Art History programs. The archival material itself would provide evidence regarding censorship or modification of controversial themes before, between, or after exhibitions, particularly for the controversial Mexican arts, due to changing Mexican-American U.S. relations. Digital trial exhibits might demonstrate student interest and how participating students conceive of the flowerings of art in a select few counties over centuries; the Library’s patrons, exhibitions with stereopticon slide machines; or with stereophonic phonographs. Such creativity might be quantified if one uses a variety of measures like the cultural context of a painter’s or artifact’s thought processes. This information might also provide insight to a future question, how might the museum’s art history MA program better incorporate diverse right-brain versus the more traditional math/science oriented left-brain students. The College’s commitment to freedom from gender based limitations might also be examined with PAM’s actions and offerings.

I am planning on briefly continuing this study by applying similar techniques to the Denver Art Museum. Post World War II, Denver has grown into one of the nation’s largest cities with a major museum of art, and is also a fifteen-hour train ride over Colorado’s scenic Rockies from Portland. I may further investigate the further history of the Museum, focusing again on changing themes of PAM’s collections and weighing significant behind the scenes individuals from the complementary specialist libraries housed in the museum. Regarding future directions, the current study needs to continue on and off campus, to gain additional insights based on creativity, works in progress, and actual completed projects. Journals of pertinent societies, art history periodicals, museum internal records, newspaper articles and interviews would be sources of data. The scenic setting of the Museum might limit some research angles.

Although the methodology used was limited, initial GIS mapping provided some insights into the museum’s physical and built environment. In the cases of the LA/OC and Denver Museums of Art, a more comprehensive study should be conducted to determine if there is indeed some relationship between the geographic and cultural settings. These studies could provide insight for museums planning on expanding, whether adding satellite campuses or constructing new major facilities.