This article is part of the Fine Arts & Exhibits special section on how creativity can inspire in challenging times.
How does a museum come back from the brink?
That question may have been on the mind of Brian Ferriso in 2006, when he took on the job of director of the Portland Art Museum.
On the way to his first week of work at the museum, Ferriso overheard a conversation during which someone tried to identify one of the museum’s buildings to a friend.
Ferriso, who arrived after running the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla., recalled, “They said, ‘I think it’s a museum, but I don’t think anything happens there.’” At the time, the Portland museum had only three full-time curators and one working part-time.
A little anonymous carping was nothing compared to the surprises to come. A couple of weeks into the job, Ferriso was informed that the museum would struggle to make payroll.
The museum had around $20 million in debt, about half of which was because promised pledges had such long time horizons — up to 20 years away — that it was hurting the budget. The other half was unfunded, meaning that there was nothing coming in to plug the holes.
The community view of the museum at the time was, in some quarters, that it was “clubby and insular,” said the artist Marie Watt, a longtime Portland resident who now serves on the board of trustees.
Set on a long and narrow park, the museum’s two structures — its first building, built in 1932, and an adjacent Masonic temple that was purchased in 1994 — were awkwardly connected underground, separated by a plaza with a loading dock on what was a former street.
The issues were noted by the wider community. “They have an incredible collection, and they’ve always been stymied by the space they have to show it,” said Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek. The museum’s permanent collection has 52,000 works.
It took the better part of 20 years, but Ferriso, working with his board, the curators, donors and other backers, pulled off a rescue mission.
In November, the museum will debut a $116 million renovation and expansion, and is announcing this week the raising of another $30 million for the endowment through a capital campaign, bringing it to $90 million total. None of it was financed with long-term debt.
At a time when many museums are struggling with finances, given inflation and visitors who are slow to return post-pandemic, other institutions may be watching Portland’s experience closely.
Successful fund-raising was a part of it, but so was showing more local art and catering more to local tastes and Portland’s style: slow and steady, quirky more than flashy, and attuned to community feedback.
“It’s a once-in-a-generation project,” said Alix Meier Goodman, the chair of the museum’s capital campaign.
The new campus is anchored by a 21,000-square-foot glass structure, the Mark Rothko Pavilion, designed by Hennebery Eddy Architects and VinciHamp Architects.
The new building connects the existing ones, and the revamp extends into both buildings, with nearly 100,000 square feet either added or renovated. The permanent collection galleries have been completely reinstalled.
Rothko (1903–1970) spent his childhood in Portland, and the museum has entered into a partnership with the Rothko family. They lent some of the work in a show, “The Art of Mark Rothko,” which is opening along with the building.
“One thing that’s really transformational is the glass facade and the ability to look inside and see what’s going on, rather than being cloistered,” Watt said of the Rothko Pavilion. Her brightly colored text sculpture in neon, “Shared Horizon (Western Door)” (2022), anchors the Grand Gallery of the pavilion.
Ferriso’s strategy was not to see the building as an end in itself. “The building is designed to meet what we had already put in place,” he said. “It had to catch up to the museum.”
Raising money was, as always, crucial to making it happen — capital campaigns keep museums afloat and moving forward.
The museum received 49 donations of $1 million or more, leading board members to describe the shape of the philanthropy as more of a “jelly bean” than the usual pyramid that is anchored by a few huge gifts. The state of Oregon donated $2 million.
As the project grew, Ferriso was determined not to incur long-term debt, which could have been used to finish the project more quickly.
“Brian was adamant that the project couldn’t go forward that way,” said Goodman, who is also a trustee. “That was his stake in the ground. And that encouraged donors.” She and her family gave $2 million.
Ferriso hired more curators, bringing the total to nine, but also raised money to endow those positions separately. “It sent a message about their importance,” he said. “And when the pandemic hit, there was no laying off of curators.”
Some donors and trustees were focused on the larger context of Portland, where protests of the murder of George Floyd consumed the city in 2020. Since the pandemic it has struggled, particularly with a large and visible unhoused population. Even on a weekday morning, the area around the city’s center, Pioneer Courthouse Square, can be surprisingly quiet.
“There isn’t a lot of pull to come downtown right now, and we need it,” said Mary Boyle, another of the museum’s trustees. Boyle and her husband, Tim Boyle, the Columbia Sportswear chief executive, gave $5 million.
“Portland has had its issues,” she added. “By supporting this project, we’re trying to get the city back to where it should be.”
But if a museum cannot win over regular visitors, the support of elites can only take it so far.
Under Ferriso, the museum began to emphasize exhibitions with a local hook, which has continued with the Rothko family partnership. In 2008, early in his tenure, the Museum presented “Wild Beauty: Photographs of the Columbia River Gorge,” with 300 photographs of the Oregon landscape. It got 80,000 visitors.
“Brian’s been leaning into what makes us unique,” said Mary Weaver Chapin, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings. The revamped museum will debut “Inkling Studio: Printmaking in Portland, 1980-2010,” curated by Chapin, in November.
Oregon has nine federally recognized Indigenous tribes and seven reservations, and the museum has made a point of highlighting Indigenous artists. Watt, the trustee-artist whose neon work is on display in the new pavilion, is an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation.
In 2019, Ferriso hired Kathleen Ash-Milby as the curator of Native American art. She was a co-commissioner of Jeffrey Gibson’s U.S. Pavilion exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2024, and Gibson, who has Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, has also been exhibited at the Portland museum. The newly reinstalled Native American art gallery will feature 40 works by the artist Rick Bartow of the Indigenous Wiyot people of the Northern California coast, who died in 2016.
As for the renovation project, the other locals who had to be won over were not necessarily museumgoers.
The city grid of Portland is based on half-blocks, and the museum’s new pavilion creates a “superblock.” In 2017, some residents expressed opposition to the idea at City Council meetings and elsewhere.
“There were signs and protests,” Ferriso said. “They thought we were disrupting a walkable, biking-oriented city.”
Ferriso added, “This was for the public good, so I was scratching my head a little bit.”
But he and the board acquiesced, and a passageway was added so that people could walk, bike or run right under one part of the pavilion.
That was yet another element that increased the scope and cost of the project, but Ferriso said he had the long-term community participation in mind.
“I could have forced the situation, but I reflected that that would be winning the battle but not the war,” he said.
Ferriso said that at least a few of the opponents were won over to a degree he did not expect. “Some of the former protesters who were holding up signs are now donors,” he said.
Now Ferriso will get a chance to demonstrate his skills in a new and very different city, because Portland is not the only place where museums are eager to get bigger, grow their collections and connect with more visitors.
In August, as he prepared to unveil the capstone of two decades of work in Portland, Ferriso announced that he was leaving in December to become the director of the Dallas Museum of Art, which is itself in the early stages of an expansion project and a capital campaign to fund it.
The renovation debut includes a gesture that has turned out to be a going-away present from the Portland museum’s trustees: The new park-facing plaza was named after him.
“I teared up,” Ferriso said.
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