Talk:Portland Museum (Louisville)

Request edit on 15 June 2021
Hello, I am an employee of the Portland Museum and I wrote up a large-scale edit for this page. Since I don't want to start any conflict of interest I will instead post my work as an edit request, and hope that a kind, independent Wikipedia editor will edit my work as they see fit and add it to the article. My motivations behind editing this page are not found in marketing, but simply wanting to have our museum have a high-quality, well-sourced, and accurate page instead of the sorry state it has been in for a number of years now.

The Portland Museum is a neighborhood history and art museum in Louisville, Kentucky. It details the history of the Portland neighborhood through several permanent exhibits and rotating art galleries.

The museum is comprised of three buildings: Beech Grove, an 19th century Italianate mansion, the former Portland Bridge Baptist Mission Building, connected at Beech Grove’s north side, and the AHOY House, a renovated Victorian property adjacent to the museum.

History
Established in 1978 at Portland’s Roosevelt Elementary school, the museum started as a project by seven of the school’s teachers with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Members of the Portland neighborhood community were initially encouraged to donate family scrapbooks for preservation, and since then the museum’s collection has grown to contain photos, slides, paintings, portraits, and artifacts of all kinds. Upon the school’s closing in 1980 the museum was moved to the Brown School before settling into its current facility in 1983. The oldest part of this facility, the Italianate residence Beech Grove, was built in 1852 and purchase in 1864 by Scottish immigrant William Skene, who with his family lived in the building for 80 years.

Exhibits
Notable permanent exhibits of the museum include profiles on some of the Portland neighborhood’s famous historical residents composed of artifacts and representative mannequins, including “Big Jim” Porter, Increase A. Lapham, and Mary Millicent Miller. Also featured are small scale dioramas, historic photographs, and several original paintings by John James Audubon. In 2014 Portland native and former football star Paul Hornung donated various pieces of sports memorabilia covering his life and career, which today are displayed in the museum.

Since 2019 the museum has featured two rooms acting as dedicated galleries for rotating exhibitions of art.

The museum is also host to Portland neighborhood events, including the annual Portland Art and Heritage Fair, a celebration of the creativity and history of Portland’s current and former residents.

Beech Grove Press
The museum houses within it a printmaking studio, Beech Grove Press, equipped with Chandler & Price presses, cases of foundry type, and bookbinding equipment. With the press the museum prints educational materials and hosts programs where children and adults learn and practice various printing techniques. Through Beech Grove Press the museum has published various history readers for local elementary students and the Kentucky Institute for Creative Kid Stuff, or KICKS, a children’s newspaper focused on Louisville’s learning resources.

AHOY
In 2020 the museum acquired an adjacent Victorian home and has since begun developing it into a children’s “explorable and immersive art experience” called Adventure House of You, or AHOY. Currently the project is publicly slated for completion by Fall of 2022 and will be accessible from the former Portland Bridge Baptist Mission Building through a connector. The project is reportedly inspired by “the gonzo creativity of the City Museum in St. Louis, the repurposed Victorian architecture of the Gilbert House in Oregon, and the immersive magic of Meow Wolf in Santa Fe."