207: This Maine museum owns thousands of works of art—and only a fraction of them are on display

The exhibit is comprised of works the museum acquired in the past decade as it made a concerted effort to expand the stories it could tell through art.

March 6, 2024
Rob Caldwell

This article appears in News Center Maine.

PORTLAND, Maine — If you spend a leisurely afternoon at the Portland Museum of Art and walk through every gallery that’s open to the public, you can look at hundreds of works—prints, paintings, sculptures, photos, decorative pieces, and more.

By the time you depart, you probably won’t be thinking about what you’ve missed in the museum’s collection. Turns out, it’s a lot.

The PMA, which has been around for more than a century, has in its collection more than 19,000 objects. At any one time, it has the space to display only two to three percent of them. The museum’s curators spend much of their time going through the collection and thinking about how to present parts of it to the public.

"It’s wonderful to look back and see something that entered the collection in the early 1900s," chief curator Shalini Le Gall said, "and find new ways to give meaning to that today."

The PMA is now presenting an exhibition called + collection. It’s made up of works the museum acquired in the past decade as it made a concerted effort to expand the stories it can tell through art.

Some of the newly acquired art will delight, and some of it will disappoint. The curators have no problem with a range of responses.

"When you get thousands and thousands of visitors, the thing that attracts one person is not necessarily the thing that attracts the person right behind them or even who has walked in with them," Le Gall said. "What’s really exciting is trying to anticipate and really offer something for everyone."

Want to see how some of the more than 18,000 objects in storage are housed and protected from sunlight? Watch our story to learn more. And if you want to see the + collection in person, don’t wait too long. It’s at the PMA through April 28.