Your eye catches the Charles Shipman Payson Building, the most recent expansion of the Portland Museum of Art, planted on the corner of High Street and Congress Square. Designed by Henry N. Cobb of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, this structure was meant to be a powerful place to view art — and it delivers. When it opened in 1983, it arrived after Charles Shipman Payson donated 17 Winslow Homer paintings and ten million dollars to the museum, and the new building introduced over five times more gallery space than the adjacent, historic PMA buildings: the McLellan-Sweat House, the Charles Quincy Clapp House, and the L. D. M. Sweat Memorial Galleries.
Inside you’ll find contemporary paintings and short-term exhibitions created by Maine artists, often circling regional themes similar to those Homers. Cobb wrestled with an awkward urban site: tall brick buildings enclose the other sides of Congress Square, so he gave the Payson a unified, strong, large-scale presence while relating to the smaller, historic buildings on the Spring Street side. Cobb's answer to that awkward site reads plainly from here: the Payson's bold face, the tall brick neighbors, and the smaller historic PMA buildings on the Spring Street side.