Portland Art Museum Enjoys a Rebirth

When John Buchanan arrived at the Portland Art Museum in 1994 to become its new executive director, he found important, beautiful works of art everywhere--in drawers, file cabinets, closets.

No new gallery space had been added to the museum since 1939, and 70% of its 32,000-piece collection was in storage.

Last summer, the cramped museum opened its newly renovated third wing, and the results were dramatic.

With more than 60,000 square feet of new space, the museum now features three floors dedicated to the new Center for Native American Art and the Center for Northwest Art. It also includes new galleries for special exhibitions and permanent collections, an outdoor sculpture garden, classrooms and an auditorium for lectures and films.

Exhibits on Kandinsky and the Russian avant-garde and American landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church wrapped up last month and were quickly followed by a collection of treasures of the Ottoman Empire.

The new space also has allowed Buchanan to take much of the art that was tucked away in storage--including the museum’s contemporary pieces and impressive collection of English silver--and finally install the works in permanent galleries.

“It’s a very exciting thing,” he says. “Because of the diversity of our resources and assets, we really are a resource not just in Portland but on the West Coast axis. We finally have allowed the museum to really express itself.”

The Portland Art Museum, founded in 1892 by timber barons who wanted to emulate the cultured life of their East Coast cousins, is the oldest art museum in the Pacific Northwest. Yet it has struggled over the years.

The museum was in bad shape when Phil Bogue, a retired businessman and university administrator, was asked to be its interim chief executive officer in 1992. Membership was flat at 5,000, the staff was demoralized, the comptroller was having trouble paying the museum’s bills and the board of trustees was inactive.

“Essentially, the museum had been moribund for years; it hadn’t done much of anything. The director had left and nobody knew where things would go from there,” Bogue says.

A new, more active board of trustees was put in place, and Bogue completed the purchase of the old Masonic Temple building next door to the museum--giving it 191,000 square feet in which to expand in the future.

The next step in the museum’s evolution came when the board wooed Buchanan and his wife, development director Lucy Buchanan, who brought a vigor, excitement and energy with them.

“They’re a very effective team,” Bogue says. “Their synergy is like two plus two equals five. Together they’re amazing.”

Buchanan attributes the museum’s lackluster reputation in the past partly to its location: a beautiful, laid-back city with residents historically more interested in outdoor activities at the nearby mountains and ocean than in spending time indoors on the arts.

But in the last 10 years, the Portland area has experienced a booming economy and an explosion in growth, with new residents from cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco expecting a high-quality arts environment.

“The city has come of age. It wants to be a big city,” Buchanan says. “Some of the earmarks of a great city are, ‘How great is the symphony? How great is the university? How great is the library? How great is the art museum?’ ”

Since 1994, membership has increased from 5,000 to 20,000, attendance has tripled over the last five years and the last time the museum was in debt was in 1996. Its two-year Project for the Millennium has raised $50 million--$20 million for the expansion, modernization and cleanup of its buildings and the rest for its endowment, which now totals $40 million compared to $8.5 million in 1996.

And in the last five years, the museum has run three blockbuster shows: “The Imperial Tombs of China,” “The Splendors of Ancient Egypt” and “Stroganoff: The Palace and Collections of a Russian Noble Family.”

The new Hoffman wing was formerly home to the Pacific Northwest College of Art, which has relocated. The wing’s centerpiece is the museum’s collections of Northwest art and Native American art.

Occupying three floors, the exhibits include prehistoric, historic and contemporary pieces from tribes across North America, along with material from Central America and pre-Columbian pieces from South America. The collection of art from Northwest, Arctic and sub-Arctic tribes is particularly strong.

The Center for Northwest Art allows the museum to feature art from its own region and trace the history of art-making in the area--from Impressionist depictions of Mount Hood to colorful, abstract works from the 1990s.