Last Sunday, we invited you to spend some time writing with Laura McPhee’s Midsummer (Lupine and Fireweed), which offered a scene of blooming wildflowers at the foot of charred tree trunks. Today, let’s spend some time with this photograph by Ansel Adams, which McPhee cites as an inspiration for her work. Notice how a closer… Read more
Tag: exhibition
Erica Huber teaches art to Kindergarten through fifth-grade students at Markham Elementary in Southwest Portland. Like teachers everywhere, she had to reinvent her teaching practice this year for distance learning. She packaged art supplies for students to use at home and recorded videos of herself for lessons that students could take asynchronously. Huber sought ways… Read more
This month, the Portland Art Museum is celebrating the extraordinary work of Portland Public Schools students and teachers with an Ansel Adams-inspired installation in the Museum gift store windows. The installation is part of the annual K-12 student arts showcase, The HeART of Portland, scaled down for a school year in which most students spent… Read more
“Photographing in the burned forest was one of the great, joyful experiences of my life,” Laura McPhee has said, “finding that catastrophe to be so beautiful,… so stunningly unexpected.” In McPhee’s Midsummer (Lupine and Fireweed), landscape provides a metaphor for loss and the regenerative power of natural cycles. This week, we invite you to contemplate… 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
![[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
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
“As long as people have been in the American West, they have found its barren desert landscapes to be ideal for dumping detritus. Today, the notion of land untouched by humans is so foreign it might as well be make-believe. For pieces in the series Conversations With History, I collect discarded metal objects from massive… Read more
The Portland Art Museum and its community are expressing their deep gratitude to Dawson W. Carr, Ph.D., as he retires this month as The Janet and Richard Geary Curator of European Art. Dr. Carr’s final day at the Museum is April 30. Dr. Carr joined the Museum in 2013 as the Museum’s first full-time curator… Read more
The Portland Art Museum and Northwest Film Center Announce Exhibition and Program Schedule for 2021 and Beyond Back-to-back special exhibitions include Ansel Adams in Our Time | Queen Nefertari: Eternal Egypt | Private Lives: Home and Family in the Art of the Nabis, 1889-1900 | Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism Venice VR returns… Read more