Portland Art Museum. The Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon, United States, was founded in 1892, making it the oldest art museum on the West Coast and seventh oldest in the US. Upon completion of the most recent renovations, the Portland Art Museum became one of the 25 largest art museums in the US, at a total of 240,000 square feet, with more than 112,000 square feet of gallery space. The permanent collection has more than 42,000 works of art, and at least one major traveling exhibition is usually on show. The Portland Art Museum features a center for Native American art, a center for Northwest art, a center for modern and contemporary art, permanent exhibitions of Asian art, and an outdoor public sculpture garden. The Northwest Film Center is also a component of Portland Art Museum. The mission of the Portland Art Museum is to serve the public by providing access to art of enduring quality, by educating a diverse audience about art and by collecting and preserving a wide range of art for the enrichment of present and future generations. The museum is accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, with accreditation through 2024. Originally incorporated as the Portland Art Association, the museum's roots date to 1892. Late that year seven prominent business and cultural leaders in the city created the association so as to start a high-quality art museum for a city approaching 50,000 residents. Henry Corbett donated $10,000 to the association that funded the museum's first collection, which consisted of one hundred plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures. The individual pieces of the collection were selected by Winslow B. Ayer and his wife during a trip to Europe. They had been advised by curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston prior to the trip on what pieces to select. The collection was originally displayed at the Multnomah County Library located at Southwest Seventh and Stark streets in Downtown. By the time of the Lewis & Clark Exposition held in Portland in 1905, the Portland Art Museum had outgrown its location in the public library and had moved into its own building at SW 5th and Taylor. The first exhibition in the new building featured watercolors and paintings that had come to Portland as part of the 1905 Exposition. Curator Henrietta H. Failing organized the exhibition with New England artist Frank Vincent DuMond. Three years later, in 1908, the museum acquired its first original piece of art, Afternoon Sky, Harney Desert by American impressionist painter Childe Hassam, who frequented Malheur and Harney counties in Eastern Oregon with his friend, C.E.S. Wood. Anna Belle Crocker succeeded Henrietta Failing as curator of the museum in 1909. She would remain at the museum until her retirement in 1936. Crocker became one of the Portland Art Museum's most important early figures. She was also the first head of the Museum Art School, which opened in 1909 and is now the Pacific Northwest College of Art. In late 1913, the museum hosted one of its most important early exhibitions. The exhibition featured artwork that had been on display earlier that year at the famous 1913 New York Armory Show, which introduced American audiences to modern art. The exhibition included works by Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Manet, Renoir, and the controversial Nude Descending a Staircase by Marcel Duchamp. The museum continued to grow during the years following World War I. In the 1920s, the museum hosted two memorable exhibitions organized by Sally Lewis, the daughter of a prominent Portland family. Lewis had befriended many well-known artists on trips to New York and Europe. In 1923, Lewis organized an exhibition at the museum that included 44 paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Andre Derain and American modernists, such as Maurice Prendergast, Charles Burchfield, and Max Weber. She was also one of 22 patrons who purchased Derain's Tree for the museum's permanent collection. The success of her first exhibition led to her second, more daring endeavor a year later that juxtaposed paintings, drawings, and sculptures from Europe with African masks. Among the sculptures was Brancuși's A Muse, which Lewis owned and donated to the museum in 1959. The museum's final location opened to the public on November 18, 1932, at the corner of SW Park Avenue and Jefferson Street. The building, designed by noted Portland architect Pietro Belluschi, is situated along downtown Portland's South Park Blocks and remains a landmark in the city's Cultural District. It was constructed with a lead gift of $100,000 from Winslow B. Ayer, the same patron who selected the museum's collection of plaster casts 40 years earlier. For this reason, the original portion of today's larger main building is referred to as the Ayer Wing.
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