Tag: exhibition

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Write Around PAM: Ansel Adams

Image description: Grass and Burned Stump, Sierra Nevada, California, Ansel Adams, gelatin silver print. A black and white, vertical photograph of a close-up view of a burned tree stump with grass growing at its base. Most of the photo features the highly textured burned tree bark. Deep cracks run vertically down the trunk and off to a thick root that extends to the left. The bark breaks down into uneven, corrugated segments between the vertical cracks, giving the trunk a wrinkled appearance. Sparse blades of grass grow at the base about a third of the way up the photo and are highlighted against the dark shadow on the trunk.
Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984) Grass and Burned Stump, Sierra Nevada, California, 1935, Photograph, gelatin silver print 2018.2440 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Lane Collection, © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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

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Community Connect Discover

Markham Elementary and Ansel Adams

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

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Community Discover Learn

Postcards to the Earth: PPS HeART of Portland Exhibition and Showcase 2021

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

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Community Discover Learn

Write Around PAM: Laura McPhee

Image description: Midsummer, (Lupine and Fireweed), Laura McPhee, inkjet print. A landscape-oriented photograph of charred tree trunks densely packed with few branches amid a forest floor abundant with greenery and purple lupine spires. The upper two-thirds of the photo contains blackened tree trunks against a gray sky. The trunks can be seen receding well into the distance. The bottom third of the work shows bright green foliage and clumps of spiky purple lupine blooms in the sunshine. The trees in the foreground show crenellated, burnt, black bark. A tree on the right has lost parts of its bark and has its pale beige wood exposed.
Laura McPhee Midsummer (Lupine and Fireweed), 2008 Photograph, inkjet print Courtesy of the artist. © Laura McPhee. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

 “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

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Community Discover Learn

Write Around PAM: Catherine Opie

Image description: Untitled #1 (Yosemite Valley), Catherine Opie, pigment print. A portrait oriented, color photograph of a distant waterfall and mountain range framed by evergreen trees. The photograph is out of focus, giving it a painterly quality. At center is a waterfall emanating from a mountain ridge near the top of the image. The colors are faded beiges and white. Evergreen trees flank both sides of the waterfall. Beginning at top right and continuing on a slant to near center bottom, a block of dark evergreen trees creates a deep V shape framing the waterfall and continuing in a wispy fashion on the left edge of the photo. A pale blue sky completes the composition.
Catherine Opie , Untitled #1 (Yosemite Valley), 2015 Photograph, pigment print 2018.2220, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Stephen D. and Susan W. Paine Acquisition Fund for 20th century and Contemporary Art, © Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York and Hong Kong. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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

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Community Discover Learn

Write Around PAM: Ansel Adams

[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.]
Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984), Sand Dunes, Sunrise, Death Valley National Monument, California, Negative date: about 1948, Photograph, gelatin silver print, 2018.2686, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Lane Collection, © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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

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Community Discover Learn

Write Around PAM: Ansel Adams

The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, Ansel Adams, gelatin silver print. A landscape photograph showing the jagged peaks of the Grand Teton mountain range as a backdrop to the sharply curved Snake River in the foreground. The mountains begin a third of the way down from the top and stretch across the width of the photo. Snow-covered, jagged peaks overlap against a dramatic sky of clouds with sun breaking through. Below the mountains, low rolling hills meet the S curved river seen emerging from the vegetation at the center right. The river crosses diagonally to the left and switches back to the right at the bottom of the work. Steep scrub covered hills rise from the river edge at left. Low lying trees and vegetation fill in the right of the photo, while evergreen trees are seen at the bottom in the foreground.
Ansel Adams, The Tetons and Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1942 Photograph, gelatin silver print. 2018.2733. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Lane Collection. © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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

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Daily Art Moment: David Emitt Adams

From the Conversations with History series, David Emmitt Adams. A sculpture composed of three main rusted metal objects, one containing a photo of a desert scene. A weathered, rusted tin can rests on its side on top of a crushed, dented metal container with a handle and a smaller piece of rusty trapezoid shaped metal. The end of the can has a black and white photo of two large cactus plants amid other vegetation in a desert setting. Below it sits the trapezoid shaped metal piece, rusted, the top of it crushed. Its original purpose is not identifiable. To the left is a larger metal piece, bigger than the other two pieces put together. It appears folded in half on itself, a sharp fold jutting towards the left with jagged edges. It has a handle with a grip bar and a small valve attached to its side with rivets. The metal pieces are rusty reddish brown and have a rough looking surface. Spots of orange rust speckle the body. The printed end of the can appears smoother and shows a bit of reflected light off its ridged surface.

“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

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Dawson W. Carr, Ph.D., Retires as the Portland Art Museum’s Janet and Richard Geary Curator of European Art

Curator Dawson Carr discussing Volcano! Mount St. Helens in Art at an event of the Museum's European and American Art Council in February 2020. Photo courtesy of the Council.

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

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The View Forward: 2021-22 Exhibitions & Programs

Ansel Adams (American, 1902–1984), Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park about 1937, Photograph, gelatin silver print, 2018.2722, *Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Lane Collection, *© The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, *Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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