Much has been said about the art scene in Portland.
Ask around, and you’re bound to hear opinions ranging from “we’re a city dotted with gallery spaces … and stuffed to the brim with maker markets,” as wrote Conner Reed for Portland Monthly in 2021, to “those hicks don’t have any culture,” as wrote Reddit user @WrinkledRandyTravis.
But when it comes down to it, Portland’s history as the Pacific Northwest’s understated “art hub” is illustrious.
Major milestones in the city’s art identity date back to as early as 1875, when The First Congregational Church Art Gallery began displaying oil paintings, marble sculptures, and other “Natural Curiosities,” according to the Oregon Historical Society (OHS).
Before the turn of the century, seven leaders from Portland’s business and cultural institutions founded the Portland Art Association (PAA), which later became the Portland Art Museum.
In 1961, Arlene Schnitzer—whose name you probably recognize, even if you aren’t already embedded in Portland’s art world—took up the torch by founding the Fountain Gallery alongside her mother Helen Director and friend Edna Brigham, a move designed to elevate Portland’s art status in the wider national art community.
The Oregonian journalist D.K. Row once called the Fountain “Portland’s first serious art gallery.”
Of course, the Fountain Gallery wasn’t Portland’s first gallery; but Arlene and her husband Harold Schnitzer were some of the first to throw substantial financial and institutional support behind up-and-coming artists in the city.
Over the following decades, Arlene Schnitzer’s efforts to identify and invest in local artists rightly earned her a reputation as an esteemed collector, dealer, and advocate of the arts.
“I want the young, serious, good artist coming up to know that there is a place here he can show,” Arlene is quoted saying in the exhibition’s catalog.
“I want him to stay in this community.
I want it to be a vital community, and a community can’t be vital without the arts.”
To celebrate these efforts, the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, Harold and Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, The Schnitzer Collection, and OHS recently produced three installments of an exhibition, collectively titled A Fountain of Creativity: Oregon’s 20th Century Artists and the Legacy of Arlene Schnitzer.
While the first and second installments were hosted by OHS, surveying art in the Pacific Northwest before Arlene Schnitzer opened the Fountain Gallery, as well as the time period the gallery operated (1961-1986), the third installment was hosted by The Schnitzer Collection and featured contemporary artists whose careers Arlene helped to establish.
According to OHS, all three installments feature works from the private collections of both Jordan and Arlene Schnitzer, many of which were on public display for the first time.
Though the first installment closed in early January and the third closed in April, the second is on view at the OHS through May 4, 2025.
Sandwiched between amply descriptive wall text, each grouping of artists across A Fountain of Creativity’s three iterations were curated to proceed chronologically.
While the show focuses largely on sculptures, paintings, and the occasional ceramic artwork, walking through each exhibition clarifies just how robust a collection the Schnitzers have compiled over the years.
Standout artists like Robert Colescott, the California-born painter and Portland State University (PSU) professor who became the Fountain Gallery’s first represented artist, earned wall-sized biographies with descriptions from Arlene, such as, “He wasn’t a good painter, he was a great painter.”
In fact, Colescott’s Sunday Afternoon with Joaquin Murietta (1979) was one of the first works visitors to The Schnitzer Collection’s exhibit encountered.
A critical deviation from Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), Colescott deploys a similar impressionist style to replace the nude white woman in the painting’s foreground with a black woman and the two gentlemen beside her with Mexican caballeros, reimagining the famous scene in the American west and altering both the race and classes of the figures depicted.
Though Colescott left Portland for artist residencies and teaching positions in Cairo, Paris, and eventually the American southwest, A Fountain of Creativity’s wall text clarified that Arlene championed Colescott’s work throughout his career, which culminated with representation at the 1997 Venice Biennale and a major retrospective at the New Museum in New York.
Between rooms, OHS also supplied timelines plotting out the Fountain’s 25-year history, as well as those of concurrent art organizations and institutions, such as the Oregon Arts Commission and the Museum Art School (which later became the Pacific Northwest College of Art).
These historical notes helped clarify the context in which the Fountain Gallery operated, while also helping to illustrate the myriad ways Arlene was invested in Portland’s art community beyond her work at the Fountain.
In all, the triad of exhibitions was tightly curated and affectionately retrospective.
“Walking through these exhibitions feels like home,” The Schnitzer Collection’s Education Coordinator, Peggy Schauffler, told me one rainy afternoon.
“As a kid, I didn’t necessarily know these artists’ names, but I knew their work—and it all left a deep impression on me.”
I had a similar experience walking through A Fountain of Creativity.
I remember seeing Lucinda Parker’s dramatic acrylic landscapes as a kid, for example.
I also recognized Mel Katz’s work immediately, as many of his geometric aluminum sculptures have found their way into Portland’s public art collection.
Once I saw Katz’s Open Pedestal (2006) situated alongside artists working in similar forms of abstraction like Therman Statom and Michele Russo, I realized this was the same Mel Katz whose work overlooks PAM’s sculpture garden and graces civic spaces throughout the Pacific Northwest.
In many ways, his bold and colorful works form the backbone of Portland’s public art.
As Katz himself was a co-founder of Portland Center for the Visual Arts and celebrated professor at PSU, his legacy in the region’s art community is immense.
Standing before George Johanson’s sprawling wood-carving portraits of the Portland landscape—Great Port City (2001), for example—I felt proud to come from a city so uniquely beautiful.
Shirley Gittelsohn’s vibrant landscape, Tualatin Valley 1975 (1975), also lulled me to stop and stare for a while.
I wondered if I might not be able to see my house, if I stared long enough.
Altogether, A Fountain of Creativity helped make Portland’s history as a city preoccupied with art make sense.
However, one question I was left asking was: Is this the whole story?
Can the collection of a single tastemaker really capture the art history of an entire city?
After all, Mel Katz also worked closely with Laura Russo, who spent her career championing local and regional artists in the region alongside Schnitzer.
Founded after the Fountain Gallery closed its doors in 1986, the Russo Lee Gallery supported many of the same artists as the Fountain Gallery.
Joe Streckert drew a similar conclusion in the Portland Mercury after OHS opened A Fountain of Creativity’s first installment in the Fall of 2024, writing that “Focusing on a single major gallery is all well and good, but the Fountain was never the whole of the Portland or Oregon arts scene.”
In fairness, A Fountain of Creativity did not expressly set out to survey an exhaustive history of artists who lived and worked in the Northwest.
While its subtitle does suggest it surveys “Oregon’s 20th Century Artists,” it presumably does so within the context of “The Legacy of Arlene Schnitzer.”
To be clear, there were numerous artists who lived and worked in Portland during the Fountain Gallery’s run that did not find their way into the Schnitzer’s collection.
Many artists in the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s, ‘70s, and early ‘80s, for example.
Among them are artist, educator, and activist Isaka Shamsud-Din, as well as influential Northwest photographers Harrison Branch and Shedrick Williames.
Of course, the story of any city’s art history is complex.
In the decade before the Fountain Gallery’s opening show, Black artists thrived in Portland.
For example, in 1942, Portland-based artist Thelma Johnson Streat’s Rabbit Man was the first work of art by a Black woman procured by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Just after Schnitzer established the Fountain Gallery, the Portland Development Commission declared the nearby neighborhood of Albina—which was home to nearly 80 percent of Portland’s Black population—lost to “advanced blight.”
Over the next decade, many residents of Portland’s eastside neighborhoods found themselves forcefully relocated, as the city carved through their neighborhood with an expanded highway system and hospital project, according to The New York Times.
There are always stories behind stories.
A city’s failures, however, are just as important to recognize as its successes.
While A Fountain of Creativity did not capture the whole story of Oregon’s 20th century artists, it did tell an important part of that story and celebrate the legacy of one of Portland’s most adored patrons, Arlene Schnitzer, the impact of whose advocacy and philanthropy still echoes today.
image source from：https://www.orartswatch.org/artistic-wellspring-trio-of-exhibits-celebrates-arlene-schnitzers-contributions/
