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418 Northwest 8th Avenue
Portland, OR 97209
(503) 724-0684
Adams and Ollman exhibits and promotes both contemporary art and historical works by self-taught artists of the 20th century. The gallery’s exhibitions radically expand the discourse around contemporary art by bringing together diverse artistic practices—from self-taught masterworks and material culture to contemporary works in various media. Our programming reflects a deep commitment to fostering inclusivity and supporting the work of women and historically underrepresented artists.⁣
Founded in 2013 in Portland, Oregon, by Amy Adams, the gallery has presented over 100 group and solo exhibitions, introducing many artists to West Coast audiences. Our artists have been the focus of solo or two-artist exhibitions at prestigious institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA; the John Michael Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; the Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, SE. Forthcoming exhibitions include the ICA LA, Los Angeles, CA; the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA; and the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT.⁣

Artists Represented:
Jose Bonell
Katherine Bradford

Mariel Capanna

Vaginal Davis

Joy Feasley

Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Kinke Kooi

Jennifer Levonian
Rob Lyon

Ryan McLaughlin

Marlon Mullen

Joan Nelson

Todd Norsten

Conny Purtill

Will Rawls

Paul Swenbeck

Lynne Woods Turner

Stefanie Victor
Works Available By:
Jose Bonell
Katherine Bradford

Mariel Capanna

James Castle
Vaginal Davis

Joy Feasley

Jessica Jackson Hutchins

Kinke Kooi

Jennifer Levonian
Rob Lyon

Ryan McLaughlin

Marlon Mullen

Joan Nelson

Todd Norsten

Conny Purtill

Will Rawls

Paul Swenbeck

Bill Traylor
Lynne Woods Turner

Stefanie Victor

 

 
Installation View Stefanie Victor: New Works Adams and Ollman Portland, OR June 20–August 16, 2025 Photo: Area Array
Installation view: Conny Purtill’s The Ground, February 12-March 26, 2022, Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR. Photo: Area Array.
Installation view: Joan Nelson: New Works, Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR, April 6–May 18, 2024. Photo: Area Array.
Installation view: Kenji Ide: American Friend, Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR, January 20–February 17, 2024. Photo: Area Array.
Installation view: The Fullness of the Seeming Void, Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR, February 24–March 30, 2024. Photo: Area Array.
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Current Exhibitions

Peggy Chiang

Peggy Chiang: barn burner



September 13, 2025 - October 25, 2025
Brooklyn-based artist Peggy Chiang (b. 1989, San Francisco, CA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) will have her first solo exhibition on the West Coast, opening at Adams and Ollman in September. Titled barn burner, the mixed media sculptural installation includes works that explore themes of the American West—oil, stock, rationality, and units of measurement. Like her past works, Chiang begins with an image—here, a saddle—and engineers it into an uncanny likeness of the real-life object. Around this central piece, Chiang expands a non-linear narrative with a series of precarious mobiles constructed from old measuring weights and cast iron meat hooks that, with the slightest touch, could tip the scale. Oil, wire hangers, bandsaw blades, shirt collars, roll-up gates, and bone—the artist's materials list suggests a violence that is omnipresent in American identity and engenders a resonance that echoes out from the four walls of the gallery into the architecture, structures, and systems that make up modern life.

Mariel Capanna

Mariel Capanna: Commonplace



September 13, 2025 - October 25, 2025
Adams and Ollman is pleased to announce Commonplace, a solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist Mariel Capanna. Opening on Saturday, September 13, the exhibition explores limitations of memory, time and distance through a series of small-scale, speculative landscape paintings. Commonplace is on view through October 25, 2025, and is Capanna's third exhibition with the gallery. For this new body of work, Capanna compiles and watches vintage 8mm home movies of family vacations and road trips anonymously uploaded to YouTube. Known for the time constraints that guide her painting process and determine her compositions, the artist watches these digitized reels and races to paint what she sees. "I start each painting with no real sense of where it will land," said Capanna of her process. "My only expectation is that each painting will feel vaguely like a landscape. I guide the painting gently in that direction, allowing myself to stumble upon a horizon line, and then maintain it." Each painting is made with a distinct palette that she mixes ahead of time. "I glean these palettes from daily life," she explains. "One was gathered from an afternoon outside with [my son] Horace—t-shirt, shorts, helmet, scooter, sneakers, socks, grass, gravel. One was borrowed from an album cover; one is from a postcard that I received; a few are plucked from paintings that were on my mind." Marked by dense accumulations of vibrant color, impasto paint and gestural marks, each work contains allusions to the images and notations that represent the iconography of the American road trip: streams, seas, fences, patches of grass, flowering bushes, sun hats, palm fronds, meadows, mountains, sand banks and birthday cakes. Within each canvas, shifting views glimpsed through multiple car windows and camera lenses are condensed into the picture plane, allowing the long road, seasonal changes, wide-ranging activities and encounters and myriad places to collapse into a single image. The visual structure of each panel is dense with clunky, chunky marks extending to the edge. What we see is part of a continuum—only some of the picture. Past and present, here and there, presence and absence collapse into one cacophonous surface. Mariel Capanna (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA) received a BFA and Certificate of Fine Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA, and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT. She has been an artist in residence at the Guapamacátaro Art and Ecology Residency, Michoacan, MX; the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; and the Tacony Library and Arts Building, Philadelphia, PA. Capanna is the recipient of the Robert Schoelkopf Memorial Traveling Fellowship and an Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. From 2021-2023, Capanna was the Mellon Post-MFA Fellow in Studio Art at Williams College, Williamstown, MA, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA, and a Fresco Instructor at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME. Capanna's solo exhibition, Giornata, is currently on view at the Clark Institute, Williamstown, MA, and in 2026, Capanna will be the subject of a MATRIX exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT.

 
Upcoming Exhibition

Ralph Pugay

Ralph Pugay: ShangriLIEF



November 8, 2025 - December 20, 2025
Ralph Pugay (b. 1983, Cavite, Philippines; lives and works in Portland, OR) returns to Adams and Ollman with ShangriLIEF, an immersive drawing installation that transforms the gallery walls into a constellation of imagined makeshift temples. Painted directly onto the walls, large-scale backdrops evoke fractured utopias—part memory, part myth—while layered networks of drawings on paper affixed to the walls pulse with tender absurdity. Pugay's practice—rooted in culturally hybridized, queer, and internet-native perspectives—collapses popular phenomena, historical trauma, and mundane observation into nonlinear fables.