Portland Art Museum

“How do you balance the Earth from collapsing with the need for technological consumption?”

Elias Sime poses this question through his transformation of e-waste (discarded computer wiring, keyboards, microchips, and motherboards) into compositions that depict landscapes, maps, and architecture. He sources his materials from a market in his home of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The artist describes his work as a “tightrope” between nature and technology.

Composed of colorful wires braided together and attached by small nails to a large bowl, the patterns represent land formations. Small bat-like shapes appear to fly above them. Sime compares the shape of this sculpture to a cave and a megaphone.

📍 See it in Gallery M2, North Wing

—
Elias Sime (Ethiopian, born 1968), “Tightrope: Eyes and Ears of a Bat (1),” 2020. Reclaimed electrical wires on wood; 47 1/4 x 83 1/2 in. Gift of Bill and Leslie Cornog © Elias Sime 2025

This weekend, PAM CUT @ The Whitsell presents

Sat, Oct 10, 2 p.m. | THE SHINING (1980), Stanley Kubrick’s psychological horror. When a winter caretaker is stricken with writer’s block, his family is dragged into a vortex of madness, delusion, and violence.

Sun, Oct 11, 2 p.m. | THE ADDAMS FAMILY (1991) x ScreenPLAY! This dark comedy cult classic follows the Addams family as they are preyed upon by loan sharks, a devious brother, and prying neighbors.

🎨 For ScreenPLAY, enjoy Monster Mash artmaking from 11 a.m.–2 p.m. in the Finley Learning Studio! Drop in to create make-and-take monster creations and help build our collaborative monster family on the studio walls. All materials provided!

Learn more → https://portlandartmuseum.org/event/vintage-spooky/

Simone Leigh transforms an abstraction of female form into a radiant, towering architectural sculpture.

Leigh is inspired by the ritual and vernacular forms of African and African-diasporic art; the bowl shape references a Zulu ceremonial object that conveys status and symbolizes women’s labor.

Her work resurfaces histories of labor and consumption of the Black female body, and the substitution of a specific face with this symbolic form hints at their erasure, anonymity, and obscurity throughout history.

The presence and scale of “Sentinel IV,” however, seems to radiate with ancestral power and looks to the future with an open, protective gaze.

📍 See it in Gallery M5, North Wing

—
Simone Leigh (American, born 1967), “Sentinel IV (Gold),” 2021. Bronze, gold leaf; 128 × 25 × 15 in. Gift of the Miller Meigs Collection, 2024.18.1. Photo: Single File Studio

📚 This fall, Literary Arts expands the Portland Book Festival in collaboration with some of the city’s most influential voices in arts and culture. Literature, music, visual art, and culinary experiences collide for a multi-day celebration centered around books, storytelling, and the many ways stories bring us together.

New music programming includes singer-writer-rapper Dessa with Oregon Symphony, indie rocker Soccer Mommy, and “Sight Reading: Musical Dialects”– world-renowned songwriters translating between dialects in real time.

Discover the lineup, Nov 2–8 → https://pdxbookfest.org/

Just announced! Join PAM CUT @ The Whitsell this November for a new film series that highlights, pays homage to, and considers the portrait genre. Featuring: What’s Up, Doc? (1972) presented by Film School; Ornette: Made In America (1985); Berry Gordy’s The Last Dragon (1985); Amélie (2001), and the ultimate cinematic love letter to the magic of the movies, Cinema Paradiso (1988)—as part of our teens and family programming.

📍 Screenings take place in the Portland Art Museum's Whitsell Auditorium

Discover the series → https://portlandartmuseum.org/event/portraits/

350 million people globally live with color blindness. If you experience red-green color blindness, we have special glasses available to help enhance the colors in artwork during your visit!

Thanks to EnChroma, you can check out a pair at the Admissions Desk for free! We offer both youth and adult sizes, including styles designed to fit over your regular prescription glasses.

GIVEAWAY: Win a pair to take home! We’re also giving away two free pairs of EnChroma glasses. Submit your entry by Monday (Oct 5) at Noon at the link → https://forms.gle/8h1SHh8UUn2318DQ7

—
📷 Photo credit: The Oregonian; EnChroma color blind view of Isaka Shamsud-Din's "Rock of Ages"

This weekend, join PAM CUT @ The Whitsell as we launch a month of haunting classics starting with THE THING and DON'T LOOK NOW, presented with Film School.

Sat, Oct 3, 2 p.m. | THE THING (1982) is John Carpenter’s sci-fi horror classic in which a shape-shifting extraterrestrial invades an isolated Norwegian research camp.

Sun, Oct 4, 2 p.m. | DON'T LOOK NOW (1973) is a psychological horror that redefined the genre and editing, transforming how cinema portrays grief, time, and dread. Stay for a post-film discussion led by Film School.

📍 Screenings take place in the Portland Art Museum's Whitsell Auditorium

Get tickets → https://bit.ly/4z0urKd

This week is October’s Free First Thursday (10 a.m.–7 p.m.)! Drop in for special screenings presented in conjunction with “The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art.”

The free screenings celebrate film and video work by and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people, offering another way to explore the stories, histories, and perspectives at the heart of the exhibition.

2 p.m.
BEDEVIL (1993) is inspired by ghost stories director Tracey Moffat heard as a child from her extended Aboriginal and Irish Australian family. Moffatt constructs a trilogy in which characters are haunted by the past and bewitched by memories, with all three stories set in her highly stylized, hyper-real, and hyper-imaginary Australian landscape. BEDEVIL is the first feature film directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman.

5 p.m.
THE DROVER’S WIFE: THE LEGEND OF MOLLY JOHNSON (2021) is a searing revisionist Western that reimagines a classic piece of colonial literature. In 1893 on an isolated property, a heavily pregnant woman named Molly Johnson and her children struggle to survive the harsh Australian landscape; her husband is gone, droving sheep in the high country. Molly then finds herself confronted by a shackled Aboriginal fugitive named Yadaka. As an unlikely bond begins to form between them, secrets unravel about her true identity. Written by, directed by, and starring Leah Purcell (Goa-Gunggari-Wakka Wakka).

Learn more → https://bit.ly/4yrAg3O

To make his stencils, Watanabe Sadao used three-ply mulberry paper. Treated with persimmon tannin, it was then dried and cured, resulting in a water-resistant, highly durable paper. The same methods were used by his mentor Serizawa Keisuke, as well as generations of textile dyers employing the paste-resist stencil technique (katazome).

Watanabe’s stencils formed the basis of every design. Some are relatively simple, with just a few figures, while others are intricately detailed and complex. Occasionally the artist amended the stencil with a modified line or new shape. Plants and floral designs are often used to link the main elements of the design, giving them their signature, folk-like aesthetic.

📍 "Watanabe Sadao" is now on view in Gallery 108

—
Watanabe Sadao (Japanese, 1913–1996), "The Angel Ascends from the Rising of the Sun," 1967. Color stencil print on momigami paper; katazome-hanga, 35 1/2 × 26 1/4 in. Gift of Anne H. H. and Kenneth B. Pyle, 2022.8.21; "Angel Ascends from the Rising of the Sun," 1967. Stencil; 35 5/8 × 26 1/2 in. Gift of Mr. Tatsuo Watanabe, 2024.35.9 © Watanabe Tatsuo

"I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions...The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them." ―Mark Rothko, born in 1903

📍 Experience "The Art of Mark Rothko" in Gallery 404 through May 30

—
Mark Rothko (American, born Russia, 1903–1970), "No. 5 (Untitled)," 1964. Oil on canvas; 90 × 69 in. Collection of Christopher Rothko, Artworks on canvas by Mark Rothko Copyright © 1998 by Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, L2024.6.2

"No. 16 (?) (Green, White, Yellow on Yellow) 1951," 1951. Oil on canvas; 67 5/8 × 44 5/8 in. Collection of Christopher Rothko, Artworks on canvas by Mark Rothko Copyright © 1998 by Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, L2024.6.1