Portland Art Museum

The Portland Art museum is our first Museum Partner. We visited in the Spring of 2008, and helped them develop several <a href="portland-art-museum-oregon.html">podcasts</a>. Our visit was funded by the Kress Foundation.

Contributors from the Portland Art Museum

Kate Burns is the Education Specialist at the Portland Art Museum. Before moving to the West Coast, she received her B.A. in Art History from SUNY New Paltz while volunteering for the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art. After graduating, Kate worked for Dia:Beacon, a museum that houses the Dia Art Foundation's permanent collection of art from the 1960s to the present. She is extremely interested in discovering new ways to share art and art history through the use of technology and is very excited to be a part of smarthistory.

Amy Gray works in the education department of the Portland Art Museum. She holds a B.A. in Art History from the University of Oregon. She worked as a reporter for Eugene’s NPR affiliate station 89.7 KLCC, before moving to Portland. She enjoys writing creative nonfiction and takes classes at PNCA in painting and from the Northwest Film Center in documentary filmmaking.

Dr. Maribeth Graybill has served as the Curator of Asian Art at the Portland Art Museum since 2007. She joined the museum after working for six years as the Senior Curator of Asian Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. A former Getty Research and Fulbright scholar, she has held numerous teaching positions at universities in both the United States and Japan, including Swarthmore College, the University of California-Berkeley, and Keiô University in Tokyo. She has authored or edited numerous publications including Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field (2003) and Days of Discipline and Grace: Treasures from the Imperial Buddhist Convents of Kyoto (1998). She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Michigan, and is active the Association for Asian Studies, the College Art Association, and the Japanese Art History Society.

Bruce Guenther has served as both the Chief Curator and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Portland Art Museum since 2000. During his tenure he has overseen the construction and expansion of Museum’s Jubitz Center for Modern & Contemporary Art. He has inaugurated several exhibition programs, including the creation of the Miller Meigs contemporary art series which has exhibited leading international artists such as Rachel Whiteread, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Damien Hirst, and Kehinde Wiley, among others. Prior to joining the museum he served as Chief Curator of the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California as well as Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Gerri Hayes has been a docent at the Portland Art Museum since 2006, Ms. Hayes is a former educator and pyschologist. She is a highly gifted museum teacher with a great sensitivty to her audience, and is very interested in furthering her practice as a gallery teacher.

Dr. Christina Olsen has been Director of Education and Public Programs at the Portland Art Museum since August 2008. Before coming to Portland she was Program Officer at the Getty Foundation where she oversaw all institutional grants in support of research and interpretation for museums and archives, and launched the Foundation’s new Online Scholarly Cataloguing Initiative and publication “LA Art Online: Learning from the Getty’s electronic Cataloguing Initiative.” She worked for eight years as Manager of Interactive Programs at the Getty Museum, and has written and published on a wide range of topics, from issues of technology, interpretation, and learning in art museums; to domestic imagery in Quattrocento Florence. Christina Olsen received her PhD in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania.

Stephanie Parrish is the Manager of Docent Programs and Gallery Teaching at the Portland Art Museum. Over the course of her museum career, she has held education and curatorial positions at the Kemper Art Museum (Washington University in St. Louis), the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the National Museum of American Art/National Portrait Gallery (Smithsonian Institution). In addition, she served as an adjunct instructor of art history at Portland Community College and Oregon State University. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in art history from New York University and Washington University in St. Louis.

Jillian Punska is the Artist and Family Programs Specialist at the Portland Art Museum. Jillian studied studio art and art history at Smith College and is a graduate of Smith’s Summer Institute for Art Museum Studies. Before arriving at the Portland Art Museum, Jillian spent time working as a museum interpretive guide, as a studio assistant and as an instructor for a variety of art making workshops.

Floyd Sklaver has been a docent at the Portland Art Museum for five years. An entrepreneur for almost 20 years, Floyd is an "amateur" art historian in the truest sense of that word, in that he does it for love.

Dr. Anna Strankman has served as the Curator of Native American Art at the Portland Art Museum since 2008. She joined the museum after serving as the Curatorial Assistant of Native American Art at the Seattle Art Museum where she contributed to the research and development of Northwest Coast, Mesoamerican, and Andean exhibitions. In addition, she has held positions at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture (University of Washington, Seattle) and the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institution). She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Washington and the University of California-Berkeley.