The Latest

A Solace of Objects - a community collection of what is kept after loss - Curated and produced by Stephanie Sheldon 📍Happy Anyway 3125 SE Belmont 🗓️ April 10- May 10, 2026 ⏳ Hours: Friday, Saturday, Monday 12-5 and Sunday 12-4 🎟️Free to the public In 2023, I created an exhibit of everyday items called “Where Did You Go?”. It was largely about how I felt my mom’s absence most acutely in objects, as it was impossible for me to ignore the shift in their significance after her death. A Solace of Objects was born from the conversations with the people who saw that show and the stories they shared with me about the things they’ve held onto. I wanted to offer a space where others’ sentimental objects could be shared publicly and in a way that allows them to be given the reverence I believe they deserve. It’s no small thing to hold the story of someone who has died, to be a physical thread to a life lost—yet these small objects do just that. My work, whether it’s creative (like this project), collaborative (like decorating and organizing), or commercial (like my retail stores), has always focused largely on physical items and the stories they hold—real or imagined—and the study of our common human behaviors around the buying, selling, keeping, collecting, storing and sorting of them. I’m fascinated by the things with which we surround ourselves - or become surrounded by. I’m endlessly curious about how these items comfort and burden us in equal measure. @wearehappyanyway funded in part by a grant from Regional Arts & Culture Council and the Office of Arts & Culture. @regionalarts @pdxartsculture #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #grief #memory

Silence and Slow Time: Recent Paintings by Ellen Blazich and Kayla Marie Carlson, curated by Rose Lewis 📍 Souvenir, 1233 NE Alberta St. 🗓️ May 1-30, 2026 ⏳ Thursday – Saturday, 12-5pm 🎟️Free to the public In her discussion of John Keats’ famously ekphrastic Ode on a Grecian Urn, the poet Camille Guthrie asks “What happens when we gaze at a work of art? Does it speak to us through time, or are its silence and distance incomprehensible?” Keats raises more questions than he answers about the proper approach to truth and beauty, and his own work may be regarded as incomprehensible by contemporary readers, but the experience he captures, the profound awe of human creativity, is a timeless one. This exhibition features work by painters conjuring this timeless sense, their practice rooted in historical knowledge that speaks to our present time. Ellen Blazich approaches her materials with experimental rigor. Drawing on her background in ceramics, mixing glazes from raw minerals, she completes her palette with homemade paints and oilsticks, crafted using her own variations on age-old technique. Kayla Marie Carlson’s heroic paintings capture the vast, historic sweep of classical mythology in tender, attentive detail. Her expressive landscapes are anchored by stoic depictions of Greek sculpture, their calm, watchful presence regarding the contemporary world with detachment. Artmaking is, at its best, a continuous learning experience, finding new ways to relate to one’s materials, practice, artistic peers, and sources of inspiration. Visitors may find some inspiration of their own in the curated selection of books the artists have placed in the gallery. @ellenblazich @kaylamariecarlson @souvenirartspdx #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #contemporarypainting

First off thanks to everyone who came out for our screening with @pam_cut 🩷🫶🏼💚truly a magical evening getting to watch Bande à part with all of you! Such a dream to partner with PAM CUT and their team. We loved creating a new neighborhood Art & Culture guide for some of our favorite places on Division Street ✨ #artandaboutpdx #pamcut #divisionstreet #scavengerhunt #artandcultureguide

PDX <> LAX 📍Purple Door Gallery, 3557 SE Division St. 🗓️ May 1 – 31, 2026 PDX <> LAX,is a collaborative illustration exhibition featuring works by Zachary Rau and Chris Sasaki. Zachary Rau is a Portland-based illustrator and educator whose work serves as an intimate record of his surroundings, often attuned to the quiet moments that shape daily life. Chris Sasaki is a California-based animation director, writer, and illustrator who has spent the past several years developing an equally intimate documentation of the lives and landscapes of Los Angeles. Brought together through friendship and mutual inspiration, Rau and Sasaki bring distinct visual languages to a shared impulse: to observe, document, and honor the intimate and mundane moments of the people and places they call home. PDX <> LAX becomes a visual conversation between two friends—an exchange of portraiture, place, memory, and attention.

Amy Bay at Nationale 🌼🌹🍃 up until May 15 ~ loved all thr sneaky details like the leaf on the edge of the first painting (probably our favorite) and the soft buttery #monographs #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #amybay #floral

Blue Sky 2005 - 2015: The Fourth Decade 📍Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW 8th Ave., Portland ⏳Hours: Wed-Sat, 12-5 p.m. 🗓️ May 7 - 30, 2026 ✨Opening reception: First Thursday, May 7, 5-9 pm 🎟️ Free to the public Blue Sky is continuing to celebrate our 50 year history with Blue Sky 2005 - 2015: The Fourth Decade. This exhibition highlights photographs by artists who presented at the gallery between 2005 and 2015 as well as recent work from these same artists. All prints (except as noted) are priced at $200 each and are on sale for a limited time. Proceeds go towards sustaining Blue Sky’s programming for the next generation. ✨Image: Raina Matar #artandaboutpdx #blueskygallery #portlandartscene #contemporaryphotography

Kevin Kadar, Recent Landscapes and Seascapes - A memorial survey exhibition 📍 Froelick Gallery, 714 NW Davis St 🗓️ May 6-30, 2026 ✨Special commemoration honoring Kevin’s life: Wed May 6, 6pm & Opening reception First Thursday, May 7, 5-8pm ⏳ Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11 -5:30 🎟️Free to the public! In 2025 Kevin Kadar and I began planning this exhibit and we intended to focus on his recent, fantastic “Bandiagara Escarpment” series. He proposed the title “New Landscapes and Seascapes.” The paintings were inspired by the stunning region located in the Dogon country of Mali, West Africa. The massive escarpment cliffs rise about 1,600 ft, are approximately 90 miles long and have immeasurable cultural significance; they are recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Kevin showed me about two dozen works, and I can’t imagine pinning any of them to only one particular scene, they are a culmination of everything he had experienced in his 70 years. This was the most exuberant and brilliant painting series I’d ever seen him create! His colors and gestures were so full of life, joy and optimism. Kevin was very happy with this new work and eager to keep exploring new territory. Then tragedy struck, Kevin passed away at the end of 2025 after a brief medical battle. This memorial retrospective exhibit will span many years- from a large self portrait Kadar made upon his college graduation in 1976, The Vacuum World paintings, Envelope paintings, figure studies, en plein aire paintings made during travel across Europe and USA, and his most recent paintings. KEVIN KADAR. 1955 to 2025 #portlandartscene #artandaboutpdx #contemporarypainting #kevinkader #butterflies

The Poet’s Lips, Derek Franklin 📍Elizabeth Leach Gallery, 417 NW 9th Ave., Portland ⏳Hours: Tues-Sat, 10:30 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. 🗓️ Date: May 6 - 30, 2026 ✨Opening reception: First Thursday: May 7, 5:30-7:30 pm 🎟️ Free to the public “What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music. His fate is like that of those unfortunates who were slowly tortured by a gentle fire in Philaris’s bull; their cries could not reach the tyrant’s ears to cause him dismay, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’–that is ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.’” -Søren Kierkegaard New paintings and sculptures by Derek Franklin in our second gallery. Continuing his previous investigations into the visual presentation systems of information and ideas, Franklin has moved away from the darker palette of shadows and turned his focus to the light of too much seeing—overexposure, the startled eye, memory caught in a spotlight mid-formation that then dissipates. The paintings are awash in light, wavering between emergence and erasure, where recognition begins to deliquesce at its edges. Franklin’s new works offer and then withhold gratification at different distances, slowing down and rendering uncertain the act of looking. Franklin writes, “I hope to make paintings that are never fully resolute—paintings you can never quite be completely at home with when you are standing in front of them.” The paintings hold oppositions instead of resolving them, seeking potential in the ambiguity between oscillating poles: specificity and the pedestrian, hope and anguish, memory and its forgetting. They sustain attention toward the friction between everyday imagery and the fantasy that an image has the possibility of bearing memory. #DerekFranklin #ElizabethLeachGallery #portlandartscene #artandaboutpdx #contemporarypainting

Art x Hand: 60 Years of Arts at Menucha 📍Artspace Gallery, 380 A Avenue, Suite A, Lake Oswego 🗓️ May 15 — July 17, 2026 ⏳Tuesday–Friday from 10am–5pm ✨Opening reception: Friday, May 15 5:30–7:30pm. Several artists will be in attendance, as will multiple camp participants. This special art exhibit celebrates Creative Arts Community’s 60 years of programming, and features works by CAC instructors, coordinators, and board members spanning those past six decades. Featured artists include Barbara Black, Susie Cowan, Yuji Hiratsuka, Junko Iijima, Mary Josephson, Michael Knutson, Cynthia Lahti, Dennis Meiners, Paul Missal, Sarah Wolf Newlands, Dale Rawls, Lettie Jane Rennekamp, Sandy Roumagoux, Christopher Shotola-Hardt, Melinda Thorsnes, Diane Trapp, Phyllis Trowbridge, and Rick True. Since 1966, the Creative Arts Community has provided unique residential workshops at the Menucha Retreat Center in Corbett, Oregon. In two separate, one-week sessions in August, CAC offer hands-on explorative workshops with a focus on a variety of arts disciplines including painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, jewelry-making, textiles, creative writing, and more. Classes are taught by established artists and craftspeople from all over the Pacific Northwest, Portland specifically. This exhibit celebrates 60 years of inclusionary teaching and sharing. ✨Image shown: Cynthia Lahti, “White Flowers”, 2025, drawing, collage, altered books and sculpture, 12” x 9” #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene

an imagined place (here and now) by Satpreet Kahlon at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. On view until May 23, 2026. Transported to another world in this poignant and personal installation by Kahlon. Also — there is a soundtrack by the artist that plays in the space, that accompanies the work so well. (*unfortunately our videos do not do a good job in capturing it so we had to omit— go see the show!.) ✨

Kim Gronquist: Intimate Monads at SE Cooper Contemporary. On View through June 6. @kimberly_gronquist @secoopercontemporary Beautiful series of intimate ceramic sculptures that look like prehistoric succulents, underwater worlds, honeycombs, vaginas, the inner workings of flowers... The archway outside of the gallery made in collaboration with floral deisnger @colibripdx transports you to view sculptures layered in creamy, opalescent shiny gleaming glazes. #artandaboutpdx #contemporaryceramics #porcelain #sculpture #kimgronquist

Sneak peek of “when once our shadows touched, moving gently on this wide path,” Jenene Nagy at PDX Contemporary Art. On view April 28 – May 23, 2026. So many intricate details glowing on iridescent handmade paper. Definitely worth the visit to gaze ✨🌀 #artandaboutpdx #jenenenagy #print

Jennifer Fernandez, Endurance 📍 The Vestibule 5919 15th Ave NW, Seattle, WA 🗓️ Dates: May 2-31, 2026 ✨Opening reception: Saturday, May 2 from 3-5pm ⏳ Hours: Friday & Saturday 12-5pm 🎟️Free to the public Through sculpture and video, Endurance explores a throughline from the age of exploration to the present-day colonization of Antarctica. Named after Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s sunken ship The Endurance, the show’s title highlights the resilience of the land, ice, and animals that endure despite ongoing environmental degradation in and around Antarctica today. @jfernandez_art @the_vestibule

“an imagined place (here and now) by Satpreet Kahlon 📍Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, 15 NE Hancock Street 🗓️April 4 – May 23, 2026 ⏳Hours Thursdays 2–8 PM, Fridays 12–6 PM, Saturdays 12–4 PM 🎟️Free to the public PICA presents an imagined place (here and now), a multichannel audio and visual installation by the Brooklyn-based artist Satpreet Kahlon. A 2022 Creative Exchange Lab artist, Kahlon’s exhibition will transform PICA’s 10,000-square-foot main space into an immersive exploration of fugitivity, deep space time, geologic memory, and possibility. A newly composed soundscape, both orchestral and intimate, threads through the installation, blending otherworldly registers to collapse distance between planetary time and lived embodied experience. an imagined place (here and now) centers a full-scale replica of 2025 PN7, a quasi-moon that has been following the Earth’s orbit since the 1960s, but only discovered by NASA in 2025. PN7 becomes a jumping off point for the artist to continue her investigation into the memory of nonhuman entities, including light rays and geologic entities (such as mountains), the Earth, and asteroids. Alongside the recreation of PN7, the exhibition includes installation components with immersive audio, reflected video fields, and photograph-based sculptures with images from the artist’s personal archive. A core feature of the sound score references Kahlon’s ongoing engagement with the archiving of Boliyan, held in the exhibition as one strand within a larger structure of memory, relation, and refusal. For Kahlon, collage and assemblage across many mediums and constructs offers an opportunity to reframe images and memory. Existent narratives surrounding the artist’s childhood were misleadingly happy, disguising a childhood dominated by abuse and neglect. Through an imagined place (here and now), Kahlon hopes to tell a truer, more honest story of her life, and in so doing, release herself from a familial orbit of harm. @picapdx #artandaboutpdx #picapdx #portlandartscene #satpreetkahlon

@dangluibizzi at @russoleegallery 🎨 Loved exploring the installation elements and paintings in the main gallery space and admiring all the details in Dan’s #watercolors — on video till May 2. #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #dangluibizzi #contemporarypainting

Come print with us! ✨📕🌈 We made a very extra extra special super cool one of a kind neighborhood specific Art & Culture Guide for Division Street x Scavenger Hunt in conjunction with our upcoming screening of Band of Outsiders at Tomorrow Theater @pamcut on Thursday, April 23 at 7 PM. 🚪Grab one at the door when you check in! 🌈 Printed at @outletpdx 🌟P.S. there are still tickets left, $15 link in our bio or tomorrowtheater.org #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #artandcultureguide #risograph

PNCA MFA Thesis Exhibition Reception 🌀Saturday, April 18 from 5-8 PM 🌀 ✨Public Reception: Sat, April 18 | 5 – 8 PM 🗓️Exhibition Dates: April 18 – May 10, 2026 Exhibition Sites and Hours 📍Building 5 — 2516 NW 29th Ave, Portland, OR 97210 🕰️Open Saturdays and Sundays, 1–5 PM 📍Stelo Arts, 412 NW 8th Avenue, Portland, OR 97202 🕰️Open Thursday – Saturday, 12–5 PM This annual exhibition marks the culmination of creative exploration, critical inquiry, and artistic innovation by the Master of Fine Arts candidates at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The exhibition and reception is free and open to the public. Don’t miss this chance to see and celebrate the work created by the PNCA MFA students!! #artandaboutpdx #pnca #portlandartscene #mfa

@padaoregon 🤝🏼 @artandaboutpdx BLACKFISH GALLERY Jana Demartini - Dancing with Trees / Group Show - The Verdant Hour / Pomegranate Doyle - Circe, Circle, Circus / Justin Auld - Address Label Mandalas, through May 2 Artist Talk - Jana Demartini & Pomegranate Doyle. April 18, 2-4pm GALLERY 114 Angela Riggs - Love You More, through May 2 Michael Spence - Explorations, New Paintings by Michael Spence, through May 2 J. PEPIN ART GALLERY Group Show - Turning Lighter, through May 2 LAURA VINCENT DESIGN & GALLERY Group Exhibition, through May 2 ONE GRAND GALLERY Zhanna Tsytsyn - Where Roots Refuse Borders, through May 8 PDX CONTEMPORARY ART Nathan William Lambdin - Inhabitations, through April 25 RUSSO LEE GALLERY Dan Gluibizzi - The Neighboring World & Betty Merken - Balancing Acts: Recent Paintings and Works on Paper, through May 2 WATERSTONE GALLERY Erika James - Into the Quiet, through May 3 THE BLACK GALLERY Group Show - Window into Solitary, through April 30 BLUE SKY, OREGON CENTER FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS Elliot Ross - A Question of Balance, through May 2 Group Show - Creative Resilience: Critical Mass 2025 Top 50, through May 2

‘The Other Side of Yesterday,’ Nan Curtis 📍Archer Gallery 🗓️March 5 - May 6, 2026 🕰️Gallery hours: Mon - Sat 11am - 5pm ✨Nosh with Nan: T 4/21, T 4/28, T 5/5 from 11am-1pm - Topic driven conversations and light lunch with art food made by the Clark College Culinary Program Closing Reception: Wednesday, May 6th 12-4pm “‘The Other Side of Yesterday’ is a sculptural landscape installation using rocks, waterfalls and moss to illuminate our desire for connection to our natural world as well as to each other. It focuses on tenderness through touch, participation and play to build meaning through our senses. I have been studying natural objects to better understand the material world as an emotional phenomenon, one that is not simply around our bodies but within them. One of the spaces I find the most hope in is the outside, in spaces like the woods, rivers and the mountains. These spaces illustrate the scale of our world and help us align our senses with our surroundings. This exhibition is about inspiration – breathing IN. ‘Mother Rock’ is the focal point of the show and she carries the weight of the world yet is soothing in color and texture. She is a representation of my mother in both my love and grief for her loss. ‘Flowing Water’ represents the freedom one is afforded when they allow loss to exist alongside love. ‘Barrier Moss’ is an object that is confined yet has the potential to grow beyond its own limitations. And ‘The Game of Elements’ is an interactive sculpture that asks one to consider their connection to the Elements – fire air, water and earth. While the game has no distinct outcome, it encourages you to imagine yourself among the natural world - acknowledging our connection to all things around us.” — Nan Curtis #artandboutpdx #archergallery #portlandartscene #nancurtis #sculpture

In the Quiet, Erika James 📍Waterstone Gallery 🗓️April 1 - May 3, 2026 New exhibition of mixed-media encaustic paintings by Erika James. Drawing from her close observation of the natural world, James creates dreamlike landscapes shaped by light, shadow, and fog. The work reflects her attention to small moments — shifting skies, moving water, and the calm found outdoors. Inspired by music and poetry, her paintings balance stillness and contrast, inviting viewers to slow down and notice what is often overlooked. For James, returning to familiar places — the same beach or a hike in the Gorge — never feels repetitive. Each visit reveals something new: clouds changing shape, shadows shifting across the ground, and colors blending at the horizon. During a period of personal change, she turned back toward these quiet observations. The paintings became a form of shelter, a way to step away from the constant noise of news and screens to focus on light, beauty, and attention. #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #waterstonegallery