The story
The Portland Art Museum opened in 1892, which makes it the oldest art museum in the Pacific Northwest, older than most of the modern city around it. For its first decades it lived in borrowed rooms downtown. Its real home came in the 1930s, when a young Italian-born architect named Pietro Belluschi designed a low, windowless brick building on the South Park Blocks, an early landmark of Northwest modernism.
What sets the collection apart is close to home. Its holdings of Native American art, and of art from the Northwest itself, are among the strongest reasons to visit, alongside European painting, Asian galleries and a deep collection of prints. A separate hall, carved out of an old Masonic temple next door, now holds the modern and contemporary work.
The museum sits on tree-lined blocks in the centre of the city, still occupying the building Belluschi drew before he left for a career that reshaped the American office tower.
