The Latest

@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

Running through the Louvre with your three friends (or your love triangle) is a WHOLE VIBE. Watch Odile (Anna Karina), Franz (Sami Frey) and Arthur (Claude Brasseur) do exactly that and more (bar hangs that turn into a choreographed dance, hijinks and murder) in Band of Outsiders (Bande à part), directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Come and watch it with us on ✨ Thursday, April 23 at 7 pm at the Tomorrow Theater (Division St) in partnership with the one and only @pam_cut ✨Tickets are $15 (we still have free tickets available DM to get on the guest list) + get a very special one night only neighborhood scavenger hunt when you check in. See you there 💋 #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #bandofoutsiders #artmuseumsonfilm

Notch for the Heart, by Ben Skiba at Carnation Contemporary, until April 26; Sat-Sun 12-5 p.m. #portlandartscene #artandaboutpdx #sculpture @benskiba @hideandseekgallery #contemporaryceramics @carnationcontemporary #notchfortheheart

Princess & the Pea 👸🏻🫛🩰 with @oregon.ballet.theatre now showing at the @newmark_theatre ✨ This performance offers a fresh take on the classic fairytale with emerald, lime, and chartreuse costumes alongside playful approaches in the dancing. The weekend is the last chance to see it, the perfect Spring evening show to see in our honest opinion 💚 Check OBT website for tickets, you might be able to use the code “LASTCHANCE” for 15% off! #artandaboutpdx #ballet #princessandthepea #supportperformingarts

Who’s That Girl is a collection of abstract, figurative, and feminine works by nine artists from the PNW 📍 Luckygirl Gourmet Gallery (New space + Inaugural Show) 🗓️ April 4-May 15, 2026 #newartgallery #portlandartscene #artandaboutpdx

I am the distance, Aitor Lajarin-Encina & Marius Lehene 📍after/time collective, 735 SW 9th #110, Portland 🗓️ April 10-26, 206 ✨ Opening reception: Friday, April 10, 2026 5-8pm 🕰️Hours: Tues & Thurs, 6-8 p.m. + Sat, 12-5 p.m. Free to the public Separately and collaboratively, a common point of scrutiny for both artists are the complexities inherent to the concept of perspective, in the literal sense and within broader interpretations. The sequential pictorial narrative of I am the distance follows a gradual revelation of existential suspense, a provocation of philosophical rumination amidst a tactile party for the gaze. In a world that grows increasingly image-dense, what is the meaning of existence in the absence of the human gaze? Adual exhibition featuring Colorado-based international artists, Marius Lehene and Aitor Lajarin-Encina. Reflecting global histories of painting and popular image-making practices, Lajarin-Encina’s work echoes a diverse breadth of thematic and stylistic references including Baroque art, constructivism, satirical cartoons, and video games. Similarly, Lehene, too, introduces a convergence of personal cultural and creative influences - Romanian, American, and Indian - that engage in continual dialogue examining transience and discontinuity through interaction among porous layers that simultaneously conceal, reveal, protect, and expose. Encouraging engagement in secondary reflection and epistemological inquiry into our relationships with representation and truth, each vignette presents an opportunity for seamless navigation through spatial layers as the eye moves farther and farther inward — into a boundless cerulean expanse, beyond intricate webs of lace. The image allows for separation from its origin while also revealing the negative space whence it emerges recursively as positive space. #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #arthappening

Say Cheese! 📸a solo exhibition by Ash Stone 📍The Old Church Concert Hall 1422 SW 11th Ave 🗓️ April 1 - May 31, 2026 ✨Opening reception: Wednesday, April 8th from 6-8pm ⏳ Tuesday-Friday 11 AM - 3 PM 🎟️Free to the public

Design Lecture Series w/ Andres Silva 📍Pacific Northwest College of Art — 2026 Spring Events 🗓️🕰️Tuesday, April 7 from 6:30 to 8 pm With over ten years in design and tech, Andres Silva Bello brings a seasoned eye to every project. He currently serves as an Associate Creative Director at R/GA USA, where he’s spent the last seven years leading visual identity for global giants like Nike, Google, and PayPal. His journey began in Buenos Aires, where he spent four years refining his craft before taking his talents to the US stage.

Portland art scene snapshot for April, all wrapped up in our easy to read, beautiful to look at newsletter 🌷 The Latest in exhibitions, workshops, and events happening this month, put together in one place, ensuring you won’t miss a beat of this month’s vibrant creative scene. Our monthly ✨must see art newsletter✨ is free sign up: artandaboutpdx.com/newsletter #artblog #artnewsletter #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene

I Love From Memory, Nate Orton 📍Purple Door Gallery 🗓️March 27-April 26, 2026 ✨Opening Reception, Friday, April 3, 6-9 p.m. ⏳ Hours Thursday- Saturday 2-8pm; Sunday & Wed, 2-6pm 🎟️Free to the public Rooted in observation and transformed through repetition, I Love From Memory is a meditation on time, place, and what lingers. Orton captures otherwise ordinary moments of daily life, drawing out the quiet magic that might go unnoticed. He regularly returns to the locations of his favorite sketches, drawing them again and again—allowing compositions to shift and simplify over time. Working in casein tempera—one of the oldest painting mediums—Orton builds each piece through quick-drying, layered applications. What begins as documentation gradually shifts into something more reflective: a reevaluation of memory and circumstance rather than a direct record of place. As always, @thepurpledoorpdx has a little something special waiting in the back gallery 👀

Meet us at @ccac_pnca @p_n_c_a April First Thursday this evening 🌷✨ 📍Pacific Northwest College of Art 🗓️Thursday, Apr 2 from 5 pm to 8 pm First Thursdays in the North Park Blocks are an opportunity to come together in celebration of art, joy and community. First Thursdays are a vital part of the cultural ecosystem of Portland. 🎨Community Art Build with Basic Rights Oregon! From 5-8 PM join PNCA and Basic Rights Oregon (BRO) for screenprinting, button making and art-making in support of is one of the state’s leading progressive organizations. BRO works to ensure that all lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Oregonians experience equality by building a broad and inclusive politically powerful movement, shifting public opinion and achieving policy victories. 🎨Students of Color Collective Hallway Market, PNCA’s Students of Color Collective invites you to attend our annual exhibition & hallway market! 🛻EXPOSE YOURSELF! - Isopod Collective Uhaul Pop Up, Split into two parts, and two Uhauls, one truck shows member works while the other displays a group cyanotype project. Showing only April 2nd on the corner of NW 8th and Davis as well the parking lot of the 511 building! 👀What’s On View This Month at PNCA🌷 🌀511 Gallery: RAÍZ Y RESISTENCIA - IDEAL PDX 🌀Cauduro Gallery: Guest Curator Tammy Jo Wilson’s exhibition Dedication. 🌈Atrium Gallery: Expressions of Color: Let’s Get Weird - PNCA Students of Color Collective 🌀Commons Gallery: BFA Juried Exhibition 🌀157 Gallery: dogs and clouds and my whole heart - charli beck ✋🏽B10 Gallery: cyanotypes & cyanide - Laila Skye Ashrafi #artandaboutpdx #pnca #firstthursdaypdx #portlandartscene

All the spring blooms and the earth coming out of hibernation is reminding us of the bioplastics and fermentation workshop that was a part of PNCA’s 2025 Symposium: Beyond Boundaries by Meech Boakye🌀🌿🌼 #artandaboutpdx #onviewpdx #portlandartscene meechboyake

Dream: ... Dream: ... Another dream: ..., Linda Hutchins 📍Nine Gallery, 122 NW 8th Ave 🗓️ April 2 - May 2, 2026 ✨Opening reception First Thursday, April 2, from 5-9 pm Saturday, May 2 at 11:00 am (doors 10:30) Hutchins will be joined by filmmaker Steven Doughton and art historian, curator, and critic Sue Taylor for a Reading / Screening / Conversation at the gallery (the final day of the show) 🎟️ Free to the public ℹ️Nine Gallery is located inside Blue Sky Gallery, at 122 NW 8th Avenue, Portland, Oregon 97209. Gallery hours are the same as Blue Sky: Wednesday - Saturday 12-5 pm. Nine Gallery member Linda Hutchins exhibits handwritten dreams from fifty recent nights. Irregular script and scribbled redactions blur the distinction between drawing and writing, continuing the artist’s long-running investigation of the formal and metaphorical possibilities of line as a visual element. By developing her dream recall and sharing her findings, Hutchins daylights the universal experience of dreaming that has largely disappeared from modern life. @lindahutchinsstudio @ninegallerypdx #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #lindahutchins #artistgallery

Born REMEMBERING, Garth Amundson & Pierre Gour 📍Well Well Projects, 8371 N Interstate Ave. #1, Portland ⏳Hours: Sat-Sun 12-5 p.m. 🗓️ April 4 - 26, 2026 ✨Opening reception, First Saturday, April 4, 5-8 pm 🎟️ Free to the public Born REMEMBERING examines memory as an embodied and cumulative force, one that shapes identity, place, and visibility across time. Bringing together collaborative and individual works by Garth Amundson and Pierre Gour, the exhibition explores how personal and collective histories are constructed, preserved, and contested. Addressing themes of loss, queer identity, and social memory, the artist’s work with found, archival, and personal imagery, employing collage, photo-scanning, and installation to sort, sew, and suture fragments of lived experience into new visual narratives. Working independently and together for over four decades, Amundson and Gour merge distinct studio practices into a shared interdisciplinary language. Gour’s research in painting and drawing and Amundson’s focus on photography converge through physical and digital manipulation, producing works that question how memory is recorded and how identities are made visible or erased. Their collaborative project included in the exhibition draws from nearly forty years of vernacular photography, snapshots of everyday life that both conceal and reveal complex personal and cultural histories. These images are bound into cyclical forms that function as calendars, memorials, and devotional objects, referencing Victorian collage and early photographic traditions while emphasizing self as subject. At a moment when human rights and visibility are increasingly challenged on a global scale, Born Remembering insists on the urgency of making the invisible visible. The exhibition positions memory not as a static archive, but as an active, resistant process, one that continually reshapes how lives are seen, remembered, and understood.

Explorations: New Paintings by Michael Spence & Love you More: New Work by Angela Riggs 📍Gallery 114 🗓️April 2 – May 2, 2026 ✨Opening Reception: First Thursday, April 2, 5 – 8 pm Two shows on view at Gallery 114 this month! 🎨🧶 Michael Spence has been an abstract/figurative painter for years. But for this body of work, he decided on a risky new strategy: he would work on each painting in the series until it was finished, then use that picture as a jumping-off point for the next one. Then he would display all the paintings in the series as a sequence. This allows the viewer to follow his cul de sacs, solutions, decision-making and discoveries in the studio alongside him, in real time. Michael says: “These new paintings are for me, an exploration into new nonrepresentational territory. The work is nonetheless influenced by the colors, shapes and emotional experiences I’m inspired by in nature.” Angela says: “Love You More” is a fiber art exhibit inspired by – and created from – the clothes that my grandmother knitted for me when I was a child. The exhibit title comes from a phrase that my grandmother, Mommy Ferne, always said to us: I love you more. Not more than you loved her, or more than someone else loved you, but just - more. More than she ever thought possible, more and more each day.” Mommy Ferne passed in 2023, and I’ve created the art for this exhibit in her honor and in her memory.

🔊Virtual Artist Talk and Q&A with Leonardo Drew on Saturday, April 4 at 2pm 🕑 for Seeing the What: a Pop-Up Art Exhibition by The Lobby @ The Writers’ Block + don’t miss First Thursday, April 2, 5-8 pm 📍The Writer’s Block, 818 NW Flanders St., Portland ⏳ Hours: Thurs-Sat from 12-4 p.m. or by appt 🗓️ Until May 23, 2026 The exhibition takes inspiration from Henry David Thoreau’s observation: “The real question is not what you look at, but what you see.” The show explores perception, interpretation, and the shifting meaning of images through works by Brandon Ballengée, Erica Baum, Joe Brainard, Matt Connors, Leonardo Drew, Lonnie Holley, Robert Indiana, Alex Katz, Vik Muniz, Ronny Quevedo, Deborah Roberts, and Ranjani Shettar. Spanning painting, collage, sculpture, photography, and printmaking, Seeing the What invites viewers to reconsider how meaning is constructed—and how it changes through the act of looking. This partnership reflects The Lobby’s ongoing mission to make significant contemporary art accessible to the Portland community, while also highlighting The Writers’ Block’s vibrant commitment to art and creativity, multidisciplinary programming, participation in First Thursdays, and active role within Portland’s cultural landscape. #thewritersblockpdx #thelobby #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene

Inhabitations, a solo exhibition by Nathan William Lambdin 📍PDX Contemporary Art 🗓️ April 1- 25, 2026 Lambdin’s work is informed by the rich history and ongoing evolution of our built environment. Drawing from a wealth of influences including Light and Space art, minimalist painting, modernist craft traditions, and residential architecture, Lambdin creates dynamic colorful sculptures from wood, fiberboard, and house paint. Inhabitations features series of wall sculptures and free-standing sculptures constructed from layered slats of painted wood. The use of color is a central component, creating spatial and visual effects as you move around the work. From a single vantage point, the stacked layers read as a flat, graphic image but open to something else entirely as one shifts their position, revealing the physical depth and complexity beneath. Nathan William Lambdin is an interdisciplinary artist whose work references a culture of building and making. His practice draws from a culmination of experiences that spans skateboarding culture of the late eighties, art school during the nineties, and professional experience in both graphic design and architecture. #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #contemporarysculpture #color #wallsculpture