What Remains: 2026 BFA/MFA Exhibition 📍Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU, 1855 SW Broadway ⏳Hours: Tues, Wed, Fri, Sat 11 a.m. - 5 p.m. & Thurs 11 a.m. -7 p.m. 🗓️ May 14 - June 6, 2026 ✨Opening reception: Thursday, May 14, 5pm 🎟️ Free to the public The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University presents What Remains: 2026 BFA/MFA Showcase, an exhibition of work from the 2026 graduates of the BFA in Art Practice and MFA in Contemporary Art Practices Programs of the PSU Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design. ⭐️BFA Candidates: Tyler Arnette, Luciné Asadorian-myers, Amelia Asder, Rui Barajas, Lari Bodi, James Brady, Lindsey Bross, David Brothers-Handwerk, Evie B., Mel Castaneda Sanchez, Shirley Castillo Ku, Allison Chastain, Maisee Collett, Rebecca Jane Demorest, Setaria Depue, Yakelin Echeverria Garcia, Olivia Jean, Lucas Figueiredo, Lily Fisher, Alondra Gomez Barajas, Ember Gulden, Annie Hall, Lola Haynes, van hopper, Iyla Ingalls, Katie Jacobs, Clara Johnson, Rachel Kang, Stacey Korn, Dylany Kvetny, Jovan La Grotta, Anders Larson, Rain Le, Ryleigh MacDonald, Alex Merg, Tricky Moody, Say Wah Paw, Audria Oakes, Rey Platero, Joel Rapp, Andi Ruth, Anya Talbert, and Jun Tellez ⭐️MFA Candidates: Simeen Anjum, Lou Blumberg, Clara Harlow, and Nina Vichayapai @psu_museum_of_art @psu_artanddesign @psustudiomfa @psu_artpractice @psu_arts @psu_printmaking @psupaintdraw @psutextilearts

Soul of the Hyperreal, by Allan Pichardo and Alyssa Pichardo 📍Carnation Contemporary, 8371 N Interstate Ave #3, Portland ⏳Hours: Sat-Sun 12-5 p.m. 🗓️May 2–31, 2026 Experiences once rooted in place, body, and memory are now filtered through screens, algorithms, and digital systems. This shift has created a condition where we increasingly relate to life through technologies that don’t just represent reality, but transform it into something else. A kind of copy that can feel more vivid than the original. Soul of the Hyperreal explores what survives this transformation through interactive installation, video game media, and generative prints. A personal act of mourning is reconstructed as an interactive digital space. A park trail becomes a distant voice, navigated through a rotary phone. Plant life is translated into genetic algorithms that produce new, uncanny forms imprinted onto tactile objects. These works don’t attempt to return to an untouched “real.” Instead, they embrace the mediated version. What remains is still recognizable as ritual and form, but changed. Traces of presence, filtered through the systems we use to remember. Allan Pichardo is a Dominican American new media artist based in Portland, Oregon. His work spans interactive installations, video games, and speculative software, exploring how digital systems shape identity, memory, and truth. Alyssa Pichardo is a textile artist and painter from Olympia, Washington working in Portland, Oregon. Her textile work focuses on sculptural and tailored garment making. #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #altspace #collaboration include & Instagram accounts to tag @carnationcontemporary @mylovemhz @lpmodestudio

Some Funhouse moments for the grid — @picapdx knows how to throw a party 🎉✨🎪🎈🎠🍭

Portland art scene snapshot for May, all wrapped up in our easy to read 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

Don’t Be Clever, Be True: Late Works by David Eckard, Curated by Daniel Duford at PNCA - 511 NW Broadway, until June 27, 2026 ✨Public reception: Thursday, June 4, 5-8 pm This memorial exhibition honors the artistic achievement and community impact of David Eckard, an artist and educator who touched the lives of generations of students, having served as Associate Professor and Head of the Sculpture Department of PNCA from 2000-2025. This title of the exhibition, Don’t Be Clever, Be True, is taken from a note written on the wall of David’s studios in the last years before his death. While Eckard was primarily known for sculpture and performance, works in the exhibition include paintings and 2D constructions completed in the last decade of his life. These works, many never publicly shown, capture the technical prowess, poetic wit, and beautiful strangeness indicative of Eckard’s work.

Seeing the What: A Pop-Up Art Exhibition by The Lobby @ The Writers’ Block @thelobbypdx @thewritersblock.studio n First Thursday May 7th | 5-8pm Live Jazz Music by the Meg Samples Trio (Meg Samples Morrow, Mieke Bruggeman, Mont Chris Hubbard) Titled Seeing the What, 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, David Hockney, 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. 📌Featured work by Deborah Roberts.

Sweet moments all around in ☁️ Soft Connections ☁️ @fiskgallery at @wiedenkennedy — @kentarookawara @niamusiba @yaymarshamack. This show is fun, colorful and oh so easy on the eyes. Got to view it at the #collectorspreview yesterday, show opens to the public tonight.

Boundless/Duration New Work by Phil Harris 📍Gallery 114 🗓️May 7–30, 2026 ✨Opening reception: First Thursday, May 7, 5–8 pm In this exhibition, gallery member Phil Harris pairs two bodies of photographic work: Duration and Boundless. The Duration work started a decade ago, and involves patient, formal documentation of various processes of time and change. Boundless is a more recent, more open-ended and intuitive body of work, asking questions about light, color and form. Both types of work respond to the complexity, wonder and fluid nature of this living world. *There will also be an artist Q&A at the gallery on Saturday, May 23rd, from 10:30am-12pm.* Phil Harris has been a Portland-based photographer since the late Cretaceous. His work has been shown around the US and in Europe, and is in numerous public and private collections. #artandaboutpdx #gallery114 #contemporaryart

Dedication, Artists: Pamela Hadley, Hannah Newman, Yuyang Zhang, Tammy Jo Wilson, Curated by Tammy Jo Wilson Building on the momentum of its inaugural exhibition, CCAC’s Guest Curatorial Program spotlights Portland-based curators, organizations, and artists to present ambitious exhibitions. Dedication is a group exhibition featuring artists whose practices engage the tension between creative work and the structures that sustain and often strain them. The exhibition considers the invisible labor artists contribute to institutions, communities, and professional spaces, and asks how creativity can be sustained amid competing demands. Artists bring essential skills to the world: imagination, critical inquiry, empathy, systems thinking, and visionary problem-solving. Yet these contributions are frequently undervalued in professional contexts and disconnected from the artist’s own creative growth. Dedication reframes artistic practice as both a cultural resource and a site of personal and collective care. Through diverse media and approaches, the artists explore the relationships between technology, ancestry, nature, and contemporary life. Their works draw from ecological systems, inherited knowledge, digital tools, and embodied experience, proposing creativity as a connective force across time and space. Rather than framing dedication as sacrifice alone, the exhibition presents it as a practice of balance and regeneration. Dedication considers: What is lost when creative labor is extracted without care? And what futures emerge when artists are supported as thinkers, makers, and cultural architects? By centering poetic intelligence, material inquiry, and imaginative resilience, Dedication invites audiences to reconsider how artistic labor is valued—and how communities and institutions might cultivate conditions in which artists can truly flourish. This exhibition reclaims artistic practice as a critical and generative way of knowing. Tammy Jo Wilson is a Black artist, curator, speaker, and facilitator dedicated to creating inclusive spaces where art serves as a catalyst for connection, dialogue, and change.

PNCA BFA Thesis students 📍PNCA, 511 NW Broadway, Portland, OR 97209 🗓️April 27 – May 10, 2026 ✨Public Reception: First Thursday, May 7, 5– 8 pm This annual exhibition marks the culmination of creative exploration, critical inquiry, and artistic innovation by the Bachelors candidates at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. The exhibition and reception is free and open to the public. #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #bfa #artshow

Resilience Is Our Nature, by Susan Harrington 📍Waterstone Gallery, 124 NW 9th Ave., Portland ⏳ Hours: Wed-Sat 11 a.m. -5:30 p.m., Sun 11-4 🗓️ May 6 – 31, 2026 ✨Opening reception: First Thursday, May 7th, 5:00-8pm 🎟️ Free to the public New exhibition of oil paintings by Susan Harrington. Focusing on nature, and native and endangered plants threatened by agricultural development, habitat loss, and climate change, Harrington explores the quiet strength required to survive in increasingly hostile environments. Using both contemporary alla prima techniques and the layered luminosity of 17th- and 18th-century oil painting methods, Harrington creates works that balance immediacy with depth. The vitality of wet-into-wet brushwork contrasts with the slow accumulation of transparent glazes. Through these botanical subjects, Harrington draws thoughtful parallels to contemporary life shaped by artificial intelligence, social media, political upheaval, war, and environmental instability. “Resilience Is Our Nature” proposes that endurance is not a rare heroic act, but an intrinsic capacity and that nature teaches us that survival is creative, that adaptation is generative, and that hope is not naïve—it is evolutionary. #artandaboutpdx #portlandartscene #oilpainting #landscape

Robin Kerr, With the Windows Wide Open — Playful, colorful, abstract paintings that delight in the transitory nature of everyday moments James Florschutz, Sounds of Memory — Assemblage sculpture by# with an ever-deepening fascination with memory 📍Laura Vincent Design & Gallery, 824 NW Davis St. 🗓️May 7 - June 13, 2026 ⏳Hours: Tues-Sat, 11 a.m. - 5:30 p.m. ✨First Thursday Opening Reception: May 7, 5-8 pm A Dialogue with the Artists: May 23, 11 am 🎟️ Free to the public Info/artist statements on shows: 🪟🎨Recently, I have become more deliberate about being completely satisfied with each individual element as well as satisfied with the whole, and therefore have been brutal about removing things that don’t work in either evaluation. That seems to be related to avoiding too much shouty-ness. I need each individual element to have enough space to be itself, and still to be able to reach out and communicate with the others. The six pieces in the Singing Upside Down series, are extreme examples of this approach. This collection of work has no specific theme. Rather, each work prompted and influenced the next so a meandering path may be evident, particularly when it comes to palette and repeating motifs. 🎼💭In Sounds of Memory, I explore that wordless zone where words do not write poems and not all titles are made of words. This body of work is the continuation of my fascination with memory. To me, sculpture is not just a means of communication or self-expression but rather a process of discovery and uncovering. Memory has been an enduring topic among visual artists because it exists at the crossroads of perception and imagination. There is a transition, a still space between memory and expectation where creativity lives, and when we listen we can hear change happening. #pdxartist #assemblagesculpture #abstractpaintings #portlandartscene artandaboutpdx

Don’t Be Clever, Be True: Late Works by David Eckard, Curated by Daniel Duford 🗓️May 7 - June 27, 2026 📍PNCA - 511 NW Broadway, Portland, OR 97209 ✨Opening reception: First Thursday, May 7, 5-8 pm 🌀Public reception: Thursday, June 4, 5-8 pm ⏳Monday - Saturday, 10 am - 4 pm This memorial exhibition honors the artistic achievement and community impact of David Eckard, an artist and educator who touched the lives of generations of students, having served as Associate Professor and Head of the Sculpture Department of PNCA from 2000-2025. This title of the exhibition, Don’t Be Clever, Be True, is taken from a note written on the wall of David’s studios in the last years before his death. While Eckard was primarily known for sculpture and performance, works in the exhibition include paintings and 2D constructions completed in the last decade of his life. These works, many never publicly shown, capture the technical prowess, poetic wit, and beautiful strangeness indicative of Eckard’s work. For more information and programming details, please visit PNCA’s Events Calendar 📆

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