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Portland produces and imports far more A-grade art than its few elite collectors can consume. A town that had one art gallery in the 1960s and merely a handful in the late ’80s has easily 40 today, most concentrated in the Pearl District, a neighborhood in the northwest quadrant that two decades ago was a slumping industrial quarter. Once a month from about 6 to 9 p.m. the First Thursday Art Walk draws thousands of pedestrians to this approximately 40-square-block shopping and dining mecca. It’s worth walking past the orderly rows of freshly sold-out condominium buildings until you reach two recently completed gems of landscape design, Jamison Square and Tanner Springs Park. The works of landscape architects Peter Walker and Herbert Dreiseitl, respectively, they are located adjacent each other on N.W. 10th Avenue between Johnson and Northrup streets.

Creative pluralism and plenty reign throughout Portland’s art scenes, not only in the Pearl. Several years ago the success of First Thursday spawned a Last Thursday promenade of crafts, ethnic art and

art cars on N.E. Alberta Street and a First Friday art walk through the just-burgeoning boutique and gallery scene in the city’s Central Eastside. On weekends, shoppers clog the antiques stores on S.E. 13th Avenue and at the intersection of S.E. Bybee and Milwaukie, both in Sellwood, a low-rise neighborhood on the city’s southeast side where the public library branch keeps its Miller’s price guides behind the desk. As you explore the city, art will follow you in cafés, bars, eyeglass shops and toy boutiques—anywhere with walls, really, including the Hotel Lucia and the Heathman Hotel, both downtown, where rooms feature prints and paintings by regional artists such as Fay Jones and George Johansen.

Portland is a city rife with visual art, beginning with the venerable Portland Art Museum. Founded in 1892 and occupying a quiet couple of blocks facing downtown’s stately, tree-lined South Park Blocks, PAM recently completed a transformational $125 million capital campaign under the leadership of husband-and-wife team John and Lucy Buchanan. (John Buchanan since has taken the post of director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.) The newest wing on the museum’s main building, Pietro Belluschi’s 1932 modernist jewel, features a concise display of regional art—including the mid-century abstractions of Northwest School painters such as Carl Morris and Mark Tobey—and one of the country’s largest and most diverse Native American art collections. The museum’s capital campaign culminated last October with the christening of the adjacent Mark Building, a renovated Masonic temple that houses the new Jubitz Center for Modern and Contemporary Art. Its 28,000 square feet of galleries for the first time puts on permanent display much of the museum’s modern and contemporary holdings, notably the Clement Greenberg Collection, a group of mid-century abstract paintings acquired six years ago from the critic’s widow; the five-floor center is crowned with a gallery hosting rotating exhibitions of recent art.

Through July 16 you can visit PAM’s retrospective of Carl Morris’ wife, Hilda Morris, whose musically, mathematically and organically inspired paintings, drawings and sculpture made her one of the Northwest’s greatest and most under-sung artists. Print aficionados will enjoy “From Anxiety to Ecstasy: Themes in German Expressionist Prints” (March 18–June 11), which draws on the 25,000-strong print and photography collection in the museum’s Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Center for Graphic Arts; view additional selections by appointment by calling (503) 276-4310.

Portland’s other art museum, the demure, 69-year-old Contemporary Crafts Museum and Gallery, sits off the beaten path in the hillside Corbett neighborhood. Its humbly elegant Northwest modern headquarters houses an extensive collection of works in ceramic, metal, wood, glass and fiber by artists such as Peter Voulkos and Howard Kottler. Now may be your last chance to visit the historic facility before the museum relocates to the more accessible Pearl district next spring. And now that you’re in the west hills and in a crafty mood, hop over to the Oregon College of Art and Craft, a woodsy, summer camp–like compound where the Hoffman Gallery features rotating exhibitions and the OCAC cafe serves an excellent Sunday brunch.

In fact, Portland’s academic galleries are among its greatest cultural treasures. The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, a kunsthalle that just turned 25, rivals regional museums for its cleverly curated exhibitions of regional art. The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College treats historic as well as contemporary themes that aren’t necessarily tied to the region; currently on view is the second of a two-part exhibition of very recent works from the Ovitz Collection. The Philip Feldman Gallery and Project Space at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art at Lewis & Clark College are also well worth exploring.

Haven’t had enough? Just because Portland is becoming a cultural sophisticate, you needn’t—and shouldn’t—contain your travels within the urban growth boundary. Nature still presents the region’s greatest aesthetic diversions and objects of contemplation. Go to Powell’s City of Books—perhaps the most sublime book store in the world—grab a monograph on one of Oregon’s great interpreters of the landscape (possibilities include Charles Heaney, Robert Adams and Michael Brophy) and read it on a cliff overlooking the mighty Columbia Gorge, in a lodge nestled in the snowy slopes of Mt. Hood, or at a cabin within listening distance of the crashing Pacific Ocean. Now you’re getting the picture.