Ahead of you is the oldest art museum on the Pacific Coast. The Portland Art Museum was founded in 1892, just thirty-three years after Oregon statehood, by a group of citizens who believed that a serious city required a serious museum. Its permanent collection now includes more than forty-two thousand works spanning five thousand years, with particular strengths in Native American art — one of the finest collections of Northwest Coast Indigenous art anywhere — and in European masters, Asian antiquities, and modern American painting.
The building on Park Avenue was designed by Pietro Belluschi, the Portland-based architect who became one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century American modernism. Belluschi is also responsible for many of the mid-century buildings that define Portland's architectural character. The South Park Blocks that run in front of the museum form a linear park that has connected the cultural institutions of downtown Portland since the 1850s.
The museum's neighbor to the north is the Oregon Historical Society, and across the park is Portland State University. On summer evenings the blocks are filled with food carts, farmers markets, and the kind of civic life that a linear park can sustain in ways that a conventional plaza cannot.