Emilly Prado

Emilly Prado is a writer, award-winning journalist and consultant living in Portland. Read More

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Visitors look at Madonna and Child with Two Angels (1495) by Francesco Granacci at the Portland Art Museum.

Portland Art Museum

The oldest art museum in the Northwest delights visitors with its permanent collection, sculpture garden and frequent major exhibitions.

Updated July 3, 2025 5 min read Downtown

Emilly Prado

Emilly Prado is a writer, award-winning journalist and consultant living in Portland. Read More

The Portland Art Museum (PAM) has been a hub for artistic celebration and culture since its 1892 founding and continues to evolve.

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Portland Art Museum History and Campus

Today, the Portland Art Museum spans 2.5 sweeping city blocks spread among two primary buildings. Visitors of all ages can wander through the innovative gallery displays, stocking up on artsy goods at the gift shop, or perhaps resting on sleek benches with sketchbooks in hand. As one of the largest museums on the West Coast, PAM eagerly welcomes its visitors — more than 350,000 annually — but in the beginning, the scale was smaller. The first collection, an estimated 100 plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures, was displayed in the museum’s original location: a section of a public library several blocks from the current campus.

As the collections, public interest, and patronage alike grew, the PAM campus continued to expand and remains an iconic destination amid the idyllic South Park Blocks (a gorgeous tree-lined green space that served as Portland’s first public park in the mid-1800s.) By 1978, the Northwest Film Study Center (recently renamed PAM Center for an Untold Tomorrow) was incorporated into the museum. The Mark Building, a former Masonic Temple, was added in 2005 to house numerous administrative and curatorial offices, event spaces, the Crumpacker Family Library, which boasts around 33,000 volumes, and the Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art.

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Credit: Catalina Gaitan

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Credit: Jamie Francis

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In 2023, a major renovation project began to modernize the grounds, increase accessibility, and expand the campus to include several new features, including the Rothko Pavilion. Although the museum’s permanent collections are closed for renovations for the duration, exciting rotating exhibitions will remain open through the project completion date of mid-2025.

Planning Your Visit

Exhibitions

Please note: the permanent collections will be inaccessible due to construction until mid-2025, but rotating exhibitions will be open to the public.

The Portland Art Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Please confirm hours and closures on the Portland Art Museum website before visiting.

Permanent Collection

The Portland Art Museum’s permanent collections are shaped by several geographic areas, mediums and communities spanning two millennia and include paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints, drawings, objects, and more. The permanent collections, browseable online, are categorized into American art, Asian art, European art, graphic arts, modern and contemporary art, Native American art, Northwest art, photography, and silver.

The multi-story Native American art collection, housed in the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Center for Native American Art within PAM, has a sizable collection of more than 3500 artworks created by at least 200 tribal communities from the Americas. In late 2015, the museum also added the Center for Contemporary Native Art gallery to showcase the breadth of art by renowned modern-day Native American artists such as James Lavadour, Allan Houser, Maria Martinez, Wendy Red Star, and Marie Watt. During the 2024-2025 construction, PAM curator Cathleen Ash Milby will work with native communities to reimagine PAM’s galleries and exhibition spaces for Native American art. When the museum reopens in 2025, visitors can enjoy PAM’s Native art collection via special exhibitions while the museum wraps up a permanent gallery space in collaboration with Native tribes.

Rotating Exhibitions

Credit: Jason Hill by better.

At PAM, several special exhibitions are presented to the public, rotating throughout the year. Major touring retrospectives like Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism and Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe join groundbreaking collaborations with local community artists at the museum. These include Black Artists of Oregon (2024), curated by multi-disciplinary artist and journalist Intisar Abioto and the AUX/MUTE Gallery located at PAM CUT (which is presented by Oregon’s only Black-led radio station, The Numberz FM.)

Exhibitions on view in 2024 include Throughlines: Connections in the Collection, which uniquely pairs artworks across themes as opposed to cultural region and time, Monet to Matisse: French Moderns and Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm.

PAM CUT

The Portland Art Museum’s Center for an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT) was unveiled in 2022 but was born from a rich five-decade history as the Northwest Film Center. The new name formally marks the museum’s creative pivot, expanding its scope beyond solely short and feature films to include multimedia arts such as virtual reality and artificial intelligence. 

While PAM CUT’s headquarters undergo construction to expand viewing spaces and concessions through mid-2025, including the Whitsell Auditorium, visitors can still enjoy screenings and multimedia experiences offsite at the newly launched Tomorrow Theater, which opened in 2023 in Southeast Portland’s Division neighborhood.

Explore the Arts

Within the Portland Art Museum and beyond, to local institues supporting living artists.

Oregon Contemporary

In North Portland find visual art installations and performance art to collaborations with bands, chefs and mixologists, with international curators and partnerships with Oregon art makers, Oregon Contemporary is the cutting edge of visual arts.

The Portland Book Festival

Portland Book Festival (formerly “Wordstock”) returns every November with an impressive (and extensive) lineup of local and national authors.

Time-Based Art (TBA) Festival

Portland’s Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) returns every September with boundary-pushing performances, visual art and projects that defy categorization.

Portland Art Museum Events and Activities

The Portland Art Museum hosts ongoing programming, including tours, in-gallery curator conversations, family- and educator-centered talks, interactive classes and workshops, and more. The free Bloomberg Connects app provides a digital guide to PAM, while the online calendar lists upcoming artist talks and events.

The Portland Art Museum also serves as the primary venue for the annual Portland Book Festival. In addition to panels, signings and author conversations, the pop-up author reading series features writers reading in front of artworks throughout the galleries. Be sure to check the online calendar before going as some events may be on hiatus during construction.