Portland Art Museum & Northwest Film Center at home.
The Northwest Film Center has announced that filmmakers Masami Kawai and Reed Harkness have been awarded the Oregon Media Arts Fellowship for 2021. The Oregon Media Arts Fellowship is an award given every other year for filmmakers who have shown a commitment to the moving image arts and pushing their practice with new and engaging… Read more
How can we bring new understanding, new light to something we already know so well? Catherine Opie’s Untitled #1 (Yosemite Valley) offers us a place to start. Opie’s photography gives us new ways of seeing iconic landscapes. We invite you to spend some time today writing with this photograph and discovering what comes up for… Read more
Plateau basketry traditions encompass several techniques including coiling which we see with this delightful Cowlitz basket. The vibrant design of this sturdy and well-balanced basket is a wonderful example of the decorative use of imbrication. This process transformed a basket of plain appearance (as seen on the inside) with the addition of different colors of… Read more
![[Image description: Arbre (Tree), Minami Keiko, 11 7/16 x 11 7/16 inches, color etching and aquatint on paper. A square print depicting a highly stylized landscape featuring a large tree, a cloud, and a partial sun. The large tree begins at center bottom, its thick trunk rising and splitting into a wide V shape. The black bark is depicted as short vertical dashes grouped and layered at the trunk’s sides to convey depth. In the space left by the V-shaped branches are three oversized leaves placed side by side. The one in the middle has a pointed top while the other two have rounded tops. They are larger than the tree’s trunk and are composed of a multitude of smaller etched leaves over vertical dashes. Enveloping the large leaves and the upper branches is a muted green shape resembling a circle with the top edge depressed into itself. The circle contains more vertical black dashes. A line drawing of a bird is perched on the top right of the green shape. Above, a thin cloud composed of horizontal dashes appears. Just off center at upper left, a half circle resembling a partial sun is composed of concentric dashes. The background is a pale gray and resembles woven fabric.]](https://nwfc.pam.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Minami-Keiko.jpg)
Minami Keiko’s etchings offer the magic of fairy tale-like, narrative settings. Her fine touches on the printing plate and understated colors result in delicate, sometimes whimsical scenes. For me, she is often sweet without being cloying. Yet some prints hint at a deeper and more mysterious sense of ennui, loneliness, or alienation. Minami was orphaned… Read more
![[Image description: Ansel Adams, Sand Dunes, Death Valley National Monument, California, gelatin silver print. A black and white, portrait-oriented photograph of steep sand dunes shown in high contrast shadow and light. The ridge of the main dune begins at upper left, crosses to the upper right then zig zags down to the lower edge of the photo. The steep sides contrast in tone. The right side of the dune is bathed in light and appears as pale gray, while the left slope of the dune is split between being almost black at its upper portion then changing to a medium gray as the dune catches more sunshine. In the background a black, horizontal dune appears, stretching from left to right contrasting with the highlights of the main dunes’ ridge. At upper right in the background, a distant dune appears as a medium gray tone.]](https://nwfc.pam.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SC69764_WEB.jpg)
This work by Ansel Adams captures the seemingly solid, yet always fluid, energy of sand dunes. Shifting under foot, blowing in wind, never looking the same day to day, and yet steadily there. This “sand dune” energy feels like it mirrors our ever-shifting realities as we continue to grapple with changes at school, work, and… Read more
On this episode, Brian Ferriso, The Portland Art Museum’s Executive Director and Chief Curator, has a conversation about directing a museum during a time of civil unrest, a climate crisis, and a global pandemic with his counterpart at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, Normandy, Sylvain Amic. This episode is part of a series brought to you… Read more
In an effort to increase communication and transparency around equity and inclusion work at the Portland Art Museum and Northwest Film Center, the Equity Team will be sharing semi-regular updates here on the blog. We are committed to bringing the entire organization along on the path of racial equity learning and change. We acknowledge, however, that… Read more
![[Image description: Bottle and Jars, Peri Schwartz, sheet: 22 x 30 1/8 inches, color spit bite etching on paper. A landscape-oriented work depicting a grouping of over a dozen bottles and jars seen lined up on a shelf or ledge against a cream background. Jars of various heights are filled with different colored contents ranging from rust, terracotta, pale green, slate blue, burgundy and clear. There are at least three bottles interspersed among the jars. Two are at the left end of the row and contain rust and burgundy contents. A slate blue filled bottle features at the right of the display. The lids and caps on the vessels are depicted as flat black lines or black squares. The bottles and jars sit on a shelf or ledge that reflects their shapes and colors making them appear taller and elongated. The fore edge of the shelf is highlighted with the rectangular front facing part depicted as a long horizontal rectangle in deep gray. Just below this starting at far left is the handwritten series number “19/30”, at center is the work’s title “Bottles and Jars III” and at far right the artist’s signature and year, “Peri Schwartz 2015”.]](https://nwfc.pam.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Peri-Schwartz.jpg)
I was saddened to learn of the death of artist Peri Schwartz on May 7. I first met Ms. Schwartz in 2016, and was captivated by her paintings and prints that focused on the studio life. She took the humble material around her—stretched canvases, paint brushes, and jars of paint and ink—as the starting point… Read more
How do you feel when you look at this photograph of the Grand Tetons and the Snake River? Today and over the coming months, our Write Around PAM prompts will take inspiration from the Ansel Adams in Our Time exhibition currently on view at the museum. Adams took breathtaking landscape photographs of the American West,… Read more
Education was a central component of Ansel Adams’s photographic practice. He established the fine art photography program at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1946, the first of its kind in the country. Six years prior, in 1940, he started teaching photography workshops. These group educational experiences, often held in Yosemite National Park, became yearly… Read more