The new Silver Family Youth and Community Gallery showcases student arts learning at all ages and celebrates partnerships with educators, schools, and community organizations. The inaugural exhibition—the space in which to place you—emerges from the Venice Biennale Educator Cohort Project, a multi-year collaboration among artist Jeffrey Gibson, 10 educators led by Portland Art Museum and SITE Santa Fe, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. The project re-envisions how Native American art and cultures are taught nationwide, spotlighting contemporary art and featuring new educator resources, to be shared for free on the Smithsonian’s Native Knowledge 360 digital platform and the Jeffrey Gibson 2024 Venice Biennale website in the spring of 2026. The exhibition at PAM presents work by Oregon and New Mexico students from first grade through college responding to Gibson’s ideas through color and expressive mark-making, fonts and lettering, and identity and self-representation.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a joyous mural created by Oregon high school students. During spring 2025, North Eugene High School teacher Julia Blue Arm presented her advanced art students with a challenge: collaboratively design and create a large mural that would make young people feel welcome, included, and represented at the Museum. To prepare, students considered how the brilliant murals of Jeffrey Gibson’s 2024 Venice Biennale exhibition, the space in which to place me, transformed the U.S. pavilion from a staid, neoclassical structure into a vibrant and inclusive contemporary space that centered Indigenous art practices. They also reflected on their own experiences as children visiting museums. They generated ideas about what message they wanted to convey and mapped how they would translate that message into images, colors, and design. The artwork presented here–the space in which to place you–invites young people to linger and look closely, to experience the wonder of Oregon’s native plants and animals (plus a few fantastical friends), and, above all, to see themselves in the transformed Portland Art Museum.
