Roughly nine years after unveiling its first plan in 2016 for a major addition and renovation, the Portland Art Museum announced Thursday morning that its grand opening of the completed project will be Nov. 20, and will be celebrated by four days of free public festivities throughout the transformed museum campus.

The $111 million construction project adds almost 100,000 square feet of new or upgraded gallery and public space, centered on the new, 21,881 square foot, glassed-in Mark Rothko Pavilion, which connects the museum’s original Pietro Belluschi building to the south and the Mark Building, a former Masonic Temple, to the north. Brian Libby wrote an extensive overview of the project in 2023 for ArtsWatch.

“The Museum’s transformed campus is a result of a decades-long vision to better serve our community as the cornerstone of Portland’s downtown cultural district,” museum Director Brian Ferriso said in Thursday’s announcement. “As one of the oldest art museums in the country, and the only major art museum between Seattle and San Francisco, PAM is an essential cultural lifeline for our region. The new PAM will create a dynamic destination for the arts, reinvigorating our city and offering expanded opportunities to engage audiences with art from around Oregon, the Pacific Northwest, and the world. We can’t wait for everyone to experience the new PAM this November.”

In addition to adding new gallery space, the Rothko Pavilion will literally provide a window into the museum, including its new Black Art and Experience Gallery, which will be visible from the Pavilion’s walk-through pedestrian and bicycle space. The Pavilion will act as the museum’s entry and as a gathering space, and will direct visitors to the refreshed galleries in the Belluschi and Mark buildings.

Importantly, the construction project also vastly improves access to the museum, adding elevators and ramps, and greatly improves the layout of the galleries, largely eliminating the warren-like layout of the Mark Building and making it easier for visitors to get from gallery to gallery. Other changes include an expansive new outdoor plaza tying the campus together, and improved delivery spaces for art being brought into the museum for special exhibitions. The reopening also will feature display of almost 300 major new acquisitions.

Except for a four-month shutdown during the early months of the Covid pandemic, the museum has kept parts of its collection open throughout construction and continued to present special exhibitions. A few new exhibits will begin before the Nov. 20 grand reopening, among them Global Icons, Local Spotlight: Contemporary Art from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer, opening Sept. 6, and Yoshida Chizuko, the first major retrospective on the modernist Japanese painter and printmaker, opening Sept. 27. In addition, the museum’s new café and store will open in late August.

The museum renovation, designed in partnership by Portland’s Hennebery Eddy Architects and Chicago-based Vinci Hamp Architects, has gone through several modifications over the years. The Rothko Pavilion, for instance, was originally designed to block off the longtime passageway between the Belluschi and Mark buildings that connected Southwest Park Avenue to the east and 10th Avenue to the west. Bicyclists and neighborhood residents objected, and the Pavilion was redesigned to include an open passageway. The Covid pandemic also slowed down work on the project, shutting the museum down for four months in 2020 and causing deep staff cuts because of lost revenue.

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The grand reopening will also herald a rethinking of how to display the museum’s collections, according to the announcement of the reopening date. “The reinstalled galleries will adopt a new approach to exhibiting PAM’s collections, shifting from traditional chronological and geography-based presentations to thematic displays that emphasize place, community, and identity, and tell stories that speak to the interests of Oregon audiences and foster critical dialogue,” the museum’s statement said. “Several collection galleries will reflect a more collaborative, cross-departmental approach to curation that allows visitors to discover new interpretations of and unexpected connections between the works on view.”