Boston Globe: In Portland, plans for a ‘whole new kind of museum’
Portland Museum of Art launches $85 million fund-raising project to expand its footprint and reimagine its presence as a public space in the city’s cultural life
This article appears in The Boston Globe.
By Malcolm Gay
The Portland Museum of Art has embarked on an $85 million project leaders say will fundamentally transform the museum, bolstering its endowment and unifying its downtown campus with a physical expansion that will more than double the museum’s current space.
PMA officials say the planned addition, the museum’s first new building in roughly 40 years, will offer a variety of community amenities. Among them: a ground-floor gathering area, maker spaces, a flexible auditorium, nonprofit office spaces, and a rooftop restaurant, as well as a photography center and expanded galleries.
While the museum had previously been focused on creating more gallery space, PMA director Mark Bessire said the new project draws heavily on needs identified through community conversations during the pandemic and continuing racial justice movement.
“The big thing that came back to us is really increased public space,” he said, adding the new project aims to lace the PMA more fully into Portland’s cultural life. “We got really excited, and then started imagining a whole new kind of museum.”
While the project remains at an early stage — the museum has yet to identify an architect; there’s also a not insignificant fund-raising goal to meet — Bessire envisioned the new building as a sort of “community forum” for the city, perhaps with classrooms, a community gallery, and room for other nonprofits to run programming.
He added that the expansion is necessary now because the museum’s current campus, which comprises historic buildings and the 1980s-era Charles Shipman Payson Building, no longer meets the institution’s needs. The PMA saw double-digit attendance increases in the five years leading up to the pandemic, reaching a record of nearly 177,000 visitors in 2019. Museum officials say those numbers are bound to grow in coming years, and the Payson building already hosts nearly twice its planned capacity.
“We haven’t grown, which is part of our problem,” said Bessire, describing the museum’s physical footprint. “My worry, in some ways, is if we don’t grow our capacity, we’re going to fall back, because we can’t meet the expectations of what a museum needs to be or what our community wants.”
The museum has also received a number of sizable bequests and promised gifts in recent years, including the Richard Estes Collection, Judy Glickman Lauder Photography Collection, and numerous gifts from the Alex Katz Foundation.
Meanwhile, the PMA has also partnered for traveling shows with Atlanta’s High Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum, both of which have significantly more temporary exhibition space than the Portland museum.
“They anticipate 8,000 to 10,000 square feet for a major traveling show, and so we have to trim it or cut it,” said Bessire. He added that new exhibition space would also enable the museum to show large contemporary works while freeing up existing galleries for the permanent collection. “It’s a nice trade-off for us.”
The planned building will go on a neighboring property at 142 Free St. that the PMA purchased in 2019.
The museum has raised roughly $15 million so far. Bessire said he hopes to select an architect by the end of this year and break ground in 2025.
In the News
