“Installing an exhibition is a bit like moving into a new house,” says Portland Museum of Art (PMA) chief curator Shalini Le Gall. There’s plenty of advance planning, but equally important are the unexpected, in-the-moment decisions that happen in the galleries, when objects large and small (and as widely varied in their material composition and stories) are considered in terms of how they inhabit space together aesthetically, and how they make meaning of their setting and physical proximity. Le Gall’s love of objects and joyful ease of sharing and conversation permeate “+ collection,” the latest PMA exhibition to highlight works that have come into the museum’s collection in the past three years. 

+ collection has the practical function of sharing new works which were mostly acquired as gifts from private collections. The exhibition is also deeply invested in the museum’s longstanding mission of art for all. In the past, PMA has used advisory councils made up of community members who lend their perspective on everything from the ways the collection is presented to the content of wall texts and to the open and ever-evolving question of what a museum should do, and should be, right now. In Le Gall’s words, + collection “unpacks and demystifies the process of collecting” to create an experience for viewers that enlightens how objects come into the museum, how to read a museum label, why people give, and what it means to be good stewards of these gifts.

Some of the exhibition’s new acquisitions were set in motion before Le Gall’s 2020 appointment as chief curator. While acquisitions often take many years from initiation to fulfillment, the process was accelerated for the PMA during the COVID-19 pandemic. From the museum’s recent gift of the Judy Glickman Lauder Collection, + collection presents three gelatin silver prints by the legendary twentieth-
century photographer/photojournalist and multimedia artist Gordon Parks. Eldridge Cleaver and His wife, Kathleen, with Portrait of Huey Newton depicts Leroy Eldridge Cleaver, a founding member of the Black Panthers, with his wife Kathleen, seated with a portrait of Black Panther founder Huey Newton. Parks was commissioned by Life magazine to create a visual and narrative story about the Black Panthers, and he traveled to Algeria in 1970 to photograph and converse with the Cleavers in the home where they were living in exile with their infant son. Parks concluded the Life piece with these resonant words: “I left Cleaver on a wet, wind-swept street. It was strange that his last words were about social justice, the kind that is irrespective of a man’s color. I thought about other brilliant young black men like Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, one self-exiled, two long since gunned down. Social justice, it seems, is much more difficult to come by than martyrdom.”

At 110 by 84 inches, the subject of Luc Tuymans’s Creature (2023) is a larger-than-human presence that seems to be at once appearing, dissolving, and radiating a cool pastel aura. The renowned Belgian contemporary artist often works from found digital images, and the painting’s origin story is a computer glitch that produced an uncannily altered image of a soldier from an unspecified conflict. Tuymans’s interpretation of the image leaves the viewer wrestling with the thing’s intentions. Benign? Inert, subdued, or awakening? Like much of Tuymans’s work, the encounter with Creature lingers. The oil on linen painting was first shown by New York City’s David Zwirner Gallery in The Barn, the third in a trilogy of exhibitions of Tuymans’s large-scale new works. It was gifted to the PMA by the Alex Katz Foundation last year.

Pia Fries’s enormous oil and silkscreen panel Lochtrop, 2005, is a gift of Carla Chammas, Richard Desroche, and Glenn McMillan to the PMA. The panel’s vivid, exuberant brushwork—rendered with untraditional tools like combs and squeegees—has an almost dimensional feel that begs for a closer look. Fries, who is Swiss, earned her master’s degree in 1986 from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany, where she worked with Gerhard Richter.

The PMA’s + collection exhibition features these highlighted works among more than 50 other new acquisitions in photography, printmaking, painting, and sculpture, including new work by Derrick Adams, drawings in delightfully unorthodox materials by Paulina Peavy (smoke), and Kathy Butterly (nail polish), a bronze by Alfred Boucher, and several early, little-known paintings by the German expressionist Margarete Koehler-Bittkow.

+ collection will be on view through April 28, 2024, at the Portland Museum of Art, 7 Congress Square, Portland.