The Brooklyn Rail on Portland Arts Week

Visiting an unfamiliar city and trying to get a hold of it means walking the streets and looking up, talking to the locals over food and in front of art in the light of day and over cold beverages in the dark of bars, eating breakfast at vintage spots away from the hotel, and seeking immersion in the arts scene. You need an architectural guidebook, an appetite, sensible shoes, and to not get hit by a tram. Portland’s urban fabric is solid, largely still intact, and compact, with small blocks that are half the size of Manhattan’s allowing for lots of corner frontages and full block buildings that are easily comprehensible. Of course New Yorkers were here, including Henry Villard who brought the railway across the country and through Oregon in the 1880s, and whose own mansion designed by McKim, Mead & White, sits across Madison from the back of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown. Villard commissioned that eminent firm to build the late, lamented Portland Hotel in the civic center in Pioneer Courthouse Square, completed 1890. It was wantonly torn down in 1951 and replaced by a parking lot. Now the site features but one remnant of that vanished Queen Anne style palace: its iron gates, a reduced version of similar ones that still front the Villard Houses in NYC. These are integrated into a plaza—postmodern and good—finished in 1984 and surrounded by freestanding terracotta-covered columns, in a nod to a favorite Portland architectural cladding. At the northwest corner one column is collapsed—part of the design—broken into segments lying fractured on the red brick floor. It is an historicist reference to the earthquake-demolished Temple of Zeus at Olympia in Greece, with its massive marble columns tumbled and drums segmented like a roll of mints dropped on the floor and escaped from their foil sheathing. In this way Portland’s history of ongoing renewal is acknowledged.

The architectural genius of twentieth century Portland, and new to me, was Pietro Belluschi, who designed the nation’s first glass curtain wall building for the Equitable company on SW 6^th Avenue (1944–48). It is a gem, clad in green glass and steel panels with sheer facades like William Van Alen’s Vogar Building on West 57th Street (1924). In the lobby is a funky blobby modernist mural by Belluschi in the Ilya Bolotowsky style. Belluschi’s most refined and historicist building is the original block of the Portland Art Museum (PAM), built in 1932 in schoolhouse red brick with the requisite and venerable travertine dressing and a measured but effective use of ribbon windows with minimal metal framing. Expanded a few times, it is now connected to the museum-owned former Masonic Temple on the corner to its north by a brand new largely glass pavilion designed by Vinci Hamp Architects and Hennebery Eddy Architects. As with Renzo Piano’s similarly connective Gilbert Court at the Morgan Library (2006), this now forms PAM’s main entrance. It is called the Mark Rothko Pavilion as the Latvian-born Abstract Expressionist artist grew up here, and the Rothko Foundation has entered into partnership with PAM to loan it a significant works every year or so for a dedicated gallery on the fourth floor. At present the large and signature picture No. 5 (Untitled) of 1964 commands the space, a dark beauty with a mottled low and wider orange-red rectangle at top with a grand black square below and then a deep violet thick rectangle at the bottom. The room includes a number of other smaller works from PAM’s collection and on loan from the National Gallery in Washington, DC, that provide a chronological survey of Rothko’s career, but they are not needed and could be located elsewhere to enhance the power of No. 5 (Untitled), the main event. Overall, the museum feels newly invigorated and full of beautifully installed displays of Korean and Chinese art with contemporary works consistently and effectively peppering the historical displays. There is a popular show of over two hundred prints and multi-media works by David Hockney leant by local real estate magnate, committed art collector, and Maecenas, Jordan Schnitzer (reviewed in the July 2026 Rail), a Pipilotti Rist installation, a terrific show of the work of local painter and Vietnam Vet, Rick Bartow (1946–2016), who was a member of the Wiyot Tribe and should be better known nationally, and a display of the graphic abstractions of Mary Henry (1913–2009). The museum is the hub for the Portland arts scene and a worthy one; its expansion has given it the opportunity to become more than a regional powerhouse. It just awaits a new director.

 

 

I was in town for the first annual Portland Arts Week, a thematic prequel to late August’s “Converge 45,” Portland’s triennial. Arts week had the theme of “Art x Sports” and featured an open house of galleries one night, two days of symposia at PAM and the Tomorrow Theater across the Willamette River on the east side, a night of performance at PICA (Portland Institute of Contemporary Art), community art projects, and other programming. The theme will change annually—next year it is Art x Food. Sports was a good choice, as Portland is home to the NBA Trailblazers, the newly-minted WNBA Fire, the MLS Timbers, the NWSL Thorns, and a number of other professional teams. All need new or renovated stadiums/arenas and such facilities, if funding can be found, must include art. In addition, there is an effort underway to make Portland the “global epicenter of women’s sports,” according to Lisa Bhathal Merage, an investor in the Fire and Thorns, and Jim Etzel of Sport Oregon. They were on a panel with the magnetic head of Community Philanthropy at PAM, John Goodwin, who is trying to connect the museum to the larger cultural/entertainment sphere: ambitious, and with the proper funding, possible. Talks by Gardy St. Fleur, who advises professional athletes on their collections and community outreach and support of under-the-radar artists, and Sonja Moro who heads Bank of America’s West Coast art services, were illuminating about how the businesses of sports and art are intertwined, and what the multi-trillion-dollar sports industry can do to help advance the arts.

The galleries gamely took on the theme, though it may at times have seemed out of their bailiwicks. At Elizabeth Leach, the gallery with the biggest national profile, and whose eponymous founder spearheaded Arts Week, there was a group show titled “Let’s Play” of artists and estates she has worked with. Local painter Jeremy Okai Davis showed monochromatic and moody acrylic and walnut ink pictures that featured a floating bust of Jesse Owens as a kind of modern colossal head of Constantine and another, Giants, of Negro League ballplayers. There was also his large and fine portrait of his uncle, one of my childhood icons, Walter Davis, in his Phoenix Suns days. MK Guth showed two of her lenticular photographs of staged one-on-one tug of wars—evocations of endless stalemate. At Blue Sky, proprietor Christopher Rauschenberg presented the fifth in a series of showcases of his fifty years of being a gallerist in Portland, covering 2015–25. Malique Pye was on hand to discuss his twinned monographic photographs of rugby players and dancers, making connections between artists and athletes both formal and procedural. St. Fleur had alluded to this in his panel when he discussed the enthusiasm that millionaire athletes showed in visiting artists at their studios in places such as Bushwick—it is clear that the messiness appeals and crosses over in both workplaces. Athletes sweat it out in the gym, on the practice court, across muddy fields, every day developing their game, while artists struggle to master materials and channel imagination in the calculated maelstrom of their studios, in a reflection of Harold Rosenberg’s idea of the canvas as the arena. Both develop a kind of muscle memory, a learned feel for materials and execution. The outrageous drives to the basket that defy gravity by the newest Trailblazer, Ja Morant, are equivalent to Marie Watt’s inventive use of non-fine art materials and sensitive approach to color and texture on a grand scale—both are the products of incessant and unique labor, “the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime,” as Whistler famously said. Or they might be related to Vasari’s concept of facilità, the art that conceals art. The heaving Adams and Ollman Gallery featured a group show punningly titled “Tenez,” populated by fifteen artists, including Washington-based Dan Attoe’s exquisite 7 by 7-inch City Tennis Court Summer Evening (2026) in a back room with Ralph Pugay’s dance-inflected ink drawing Tennis Heroines I (2023) and Joshua Mosley’s oddly hypnotic stop motion animation Jeu de Palme of 2014. There were tennis ball cupcakes. Ace! Next door, the non-profit Stelo Arts + Culture featured an installation titled “Scrimmage” by NYC-based Ronny Quevedo and curated by Theo and Nancy Downes-Le Guin, who first showed him at UPFOR in Portland in 2019. There were athletic court marking on the floor, pictures on the walls, and Colorforms-like multi-color vinyl shapes and arrows so visitors could diagram soccer plays on the windows. I hosted a Rail New Social Environment with Quevedo in 2022 and was delighted one day to see him stroll into the famed Fuller’s Coffee Shop (1947) where I breakfasted each morning—it was the first time we would meet in person. It took Portland to make that happen.

This synergy and community is vividly on display in this town, whether institutionally in the form of PDX Contemporary Art, celebrating its thirtieth year, or individually, in the form of one of the panelists, Shade Pratt, whom I met at yet another delicious Pacific Northwest dinner. A former pro soccer player and present designer for Nike, Pratt, as the creative studio FOLA, paints exuberant murals in town, makes easel paintings, and designs art toys in the KAWS mode. She perfectly illustrates author Katherine Dunn’s idea that all Portlanders have at least three identities, as discussed in Chuck Palahniuk’s essential guide to late-twentieth-century Portland, Fugitives and Refugees (2003). I met a lot of creatives along those lines. Like the muti-media artist and experimental fabricator Peter Gronquist, who shows with Leach and Seattle’s Winston Wächter, invests in restaurants, and regularly batters his body on his skateboard, or former chef Matt Trueherz of Willamette Week who is working to develop a critical writing culture in the region. Or the energetic PICA director, artist, and curator Kristan Kennedy, who is overseeing the forthcoming Time Based Art Festival in town (September 9-13) in partnership with Boom Arts and Reed College. She is keyed into the criticism scene, which ranges from the Oregon ArtsWatch and the independent art magazine Berm, published biannually, to local widely-published critics Stephanie Snyder, Jonathan Raymond, and Lucy Cotter. Kennedy oversaw PICA’s bawdy and well-attended competitive performance art/dance “GOOD GAME” at PICA, featuring a smattering of athletes and a range of artists who may or may not have known much about sports, but who certainly knew how to engage the crowd. As with the previous two nights, drinks and tater tots afterwards at the Low Brow Lounge, a Pearl District dive bar with, naturally, works priced to sell by the art collective Ministry of the Mundane on its dimly-lit walls.

Nowadays when I travel around this country there are things that are missed. When I was a kid with my family in an unfamiliar locale I would get the local newspaper and avidly devour the sports section—writers on the beat of the exotic local MLB or NBA team or super-serious articles about high school sports. If we were on the west coast it was a joy to be able to see every box score of all baseball games the morning after they were played, instead of having to wait a day to see how the Dodgers smacked around the Padres via the box score in The Trenton Times back home: waylaid previously by the dreaded “result too late for this edition.” Now when you travel good luck getting a local paper. Hotels do not offer them. Corner boxes have vanished. Yet another joy fucked by cellphones. You can be in downtown Boise, and no one has any idea where you can get a copy of the Idaho Statesman. The kids working at the doughnut shop give you a blank stare. Or once impressive papers, like Portland’s Oregonian, are sadly diminished, reduced to a few days a week, the online version behind a partial paywall. I found a hard copy, eventually, in the airport on my way out of town. It was a day old and sported one box score from a Mariners game from two days earlier and every sports article but two were from the Associated Press. The “LIFE” section had a below the fold article on Portland Arts Week and Leach and an image of one of the unphotographable MK Guth lenticular photographs. The quotes were pure Leach gold but why not make it the feature article instead leading the section with the AP’s inessential and non-regional “What is the 2026 song of the summer?” And maybe give us a photo of the Portland art scene’s best-known gallerist?

Anyway, airports. When you fly out of PDX you should give yourself a little extra time. Both to wait in the lines at Blue Star Donuts and Stumptown Coffee, and to admire the exquisite woodwork of the ceiling in ZGF Architects’ new terminal, all that timber formed into rivulets and depressions that resemble the negative space surrounding hulls of ships. There is also art, and lots of it, and a decent webpage that directs you around the many concourses to find it. It is a model for how to integrate art into public spaces with clear, informative, and sizable text panels—future sports arenas and stadiums take note. To be fair, LaGuardia and Newark airports have upticked their art games in their shiny new terminals. Shamefully, you still cannot take a single train ride from midtown to any New York area airport, but if you can get there you can now see large works by Quevedo, Rashid Johnson, Fred Wilson, and Sarah Sze. But back to PDX, where there are many permanent pieces—one from 1958 by local WPA modernist Louis Bunce (1907–83) titled, cleverly, Airport Mural, that has been installed out of the way on a side wall as if to acknowledge that its analytic cubist style caused a ruckus when first unveiled. Bunce taught at the PAM Art School that would become Pacific Northwest College of Art, and with his wife, the writer Eda Hult (1910–2000), ran the Kharouba Gallery, which showed edgy work for six halcyon years until it closed in 1955.

 

_{Malia Jensen, While You Were Away, 2026, Plaster of Paris, joint compound, CNC milled polystyrene, acrylic paint, 31 x 35 x 60 inches. Portland International Airport. Photograph by the author.}

 

The best of the PDX art is in materials that grab the eye more than paintings: Marie Watt’s Blanket Stories: Traveler, Shield, Skywalker (2026), a column of stacked reclaimed Western red cedar carved into the forms of folded blankets and actual wool blankets atop a plinth of I-beams; and Dyani White Hawk’s Blessed to Be (2026), a spectacular mosaic executed by the unparalleled Mayer of Munich with a kaleidoscopic panorama of symbols drawn from her own Lakota culture and multiple tribes from the region. The central form echoes Mount Hood. In a glass vitrine on concourse D is a temporary work: Malia Jensen’s playfully invasive While You Were Away (2026). A big bear, sculpted from plaster of Paris, emerges from a dark hole in the wooden floor. Jensen, who shows with Leach and Cristin Tierney, has painted him with acrylics in all different colors and in a slapdash way marked by brushstrokes, drips, dabs, and hatchings. Pink, lime green, baby blue and black. The animal looks as if he has come through a gantlet of pigment-wielding kids to emerge, blinking, up into the chaos of the terminal near gate D7. Behind the shaggy critter is an orange ceramic traffic cone, its peak cracked and battered, made of clay from the Willamina woods where Jensen grew up in the ’70s. It is unfortunate that the work is in a vitrine, because the strangeness of the bear’s eruptive presence is diminished, but the artist relates this to her childhood wonder at dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC, here given a surreal narrative far afield from those static scenes of refulgent ecosystems in museum displays. An airport is no place for surprises, I guess, and the glass gives it the feeling of a cabinet of curiosity.

Taking off east out of PDX through the low layer of cloud that often blankets across and precipitates upon Multnomah County, you burst up into the sunlight and if it is clear and you are lucky and seated on the starboard side of the aircraft you will see Mount Hood and Mount Jefferson and the Three Sisters thrusting above the clouds, reminders of the astonishing natural wonders of the Pacific Northwest. I was lucky.