Visiting the Art Museum: A Journey Toward Participation is a book about the visitor experience. It is written as a companion for visitors to and inside the art museum. The volume engages readers in transforming a common experience, the museum visit, into a sophisticated epistemological inquiry. The study of the visitor experience through an epistemological approach consists of the untangling of the academic disciplines that study and inform each step of this experience: urban studies, architecture, design, art history, art education, and nonprofit management. This journey follows a transformative bottom-up trajectory from experiential to epistemological, and, finally, reveals itself as empowering. The book unfolds as an edited volume, with chapters by different authors who are enthusiastic scholars in each discipline and addresses undergraduate students as citizens, master’s students as professionals, and scholars as teachers and researchers. Each reader will discover a kaleidoscopic world made of ideas, values, and possibilities for participation. 

1. The Visitor Going to
Portland Art Museum

2. Portland, OR: A Cultural District
Portland’s cultural district is located in the Portland downtown area.
It contains an agglomeration of cultural institutions, including
regional cultural attractions such as the Portland Art Museum
(PAM), the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Antoinette Hatfield Hall
(which houses the Brunish Theatre, Newark Theatre, and
Winningstad Theatre), and the Oregon Historical Society and History
Museum. The district also incorporates the South Park Blocks, one of
Portland’s oldest and most popular parks. The park creates a
connection between PAM, the public realm, and open spaces and
displays several works of public art. The blocks surrounding the
cultural district host a diverse residential population and specialty
retailers with strong traditions (Downtown Retail Council and
Portland Development Commission, 1999). The district is a dynamic
crossroads of public transportation that facilitates movements of
residents and visitors. In 2020, a new concept for a connected
cultural district was released by the Portland Bureau of
Transportation to expand the park area and redesign access to major
routes, transit services, and accessible parking (PBOT, 2020).

3. Main and Mark Building:
A Hybrid Structure
The Portland Art Museum features a hybrid structure
that brings together two buildings created at
different times. The main building was designed by
Pietro Belluschi and opened to the public in 1932.
Originally built as a masonic temple, the Mark
Building, just next door, was purchased in 1994.
Renovated in 2005, the building now hosts the PAM’s
modern and contemporary galleries. It also houses
the museum library and storage. The two buildings
are connected through a tunnel underground, which
is also used as exhibit space (Portland Art Museum,
n.d.-b).

4. Paradise: An Artistic Practice
and Immersive Interface
In the Paradise exhibition, the artist collaborative Fallen
Fruit explored Oregon’s paradisiacal backyard through the
lens of Portland Art Museum’s permanent collection
(Portland Art Museum, n.d.-d). Fallen Fruit, which includes
artists David Allen Burns and Austin Young, creates site-
specific projects using fruit to examine concepts of place
and history and issues of representation. The artist
collaborative also produces serialized public projects and
site-specific installations that invite the public to experience
the world as a fruitful place. In Paradise, Fallen Fruit
created an eye-popping immersive art installation using
selected pieces from the PAM’s permanent collections to
thematically explore concepts of paradise, sublime
landscape, and the greater Northwest.

5. The Clay Figure: A Deeper
Engagement
The Clay Figure, part of the Tourniquet Series (2009), is an artwork
by Virgil Ortiz in PAM’s permanent collection. It is a small statue 15
inches tall made of white clay slip, red clay slip, and black (wild
spinach) paint on Cochiti red clay. Through a deeper engagement
with the artwork, like playing with a mirror of changing sizes, the
visitor can focus on the details of the object, learn its history, and
observe its location in PAM. Cochiti Pueblo is a Native American
community in New Mexico with a long tradition of producing art
made of clay. Virgil Ortiz is a Pueblo artist, born in 1969, well know
for his pottery and fashion design, including traditional Cochiti and
experimental figurative pottery. He affectionately calls this statue the
“Sassy lady” and explains how he was inspired to create it by
observing the fashion on display in nightclubs. This approach
continues the tradition of artists from Cochiti pueblo who create
artworks out of clay as a means of social commentary (Portland Art
Museum and Northwest Film Center, 2021). The Clay Figure is
presented in a small stand-alone display cabinet in the middle of one
of the Native American Galleries of PAM.

6. Object Stories: A Socially
Responsive Program
Object Stories is a program at PAM of creating rotating
exhibits that are based on storytelling and objects chosen
by community members (Portland Art Museum, n.d.-c).
For each exhibit, community members participate in a
storytelling workshop and then collaborate with the
museum to create exhibits and programs around objects
important in their lives. PAM created this program of
storytelling with objects to interrupt the traditional
authoritative museum voice and create a platform where
Portland and the Pacific Northwest’s many communities
can directly address issues affecting their lives. Object
Stories aims to make PAM a safe and responsive space
open for dialogue, conversation, and the exchange of
ideas.

7. Board of Trustees:
Inclusive Governance
As of February 2022, the board of trustees of PAM
includes 55 volunteers. Among the trustees are
representatives of Nike (a multinational renown
corporation based in Portland) a few local companies
and banks, and several foundations. The museum’s
increasingly inclusive governance is represented by the
fact that most trustees are community leaders from
different groups in the city, demonstrating the
museum’s efforts to build relationships with residents.
Moreover, a few artists are also part of the board of
trustees, showing the inclusion of creative professionals
as decision-makers for the activities of the museum
(Portland Art Museum, n.d.-a).