Robert “Bob” Henry Peirce was born in California in 1924, and grew up in Massachusetts. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, until he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1942. He served with a medical battalion in France during World War II. He later earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in medieval history at Harvard University. In 1956, he returned to Portland and became a librarian at the Portland Art Museum and the Museum Art School (now the Pacific Northwest College of Art). He was a member of the Mazamas, the Mt. Hood Ski Patrol, and Oregon Mountain Rescue, and in 1979, he began climbing mountains in Nepal. He also served on the Scenic Waterway Advisory Committee, to which he was appointed by Governor Tom McCall. Peirce died in 2017.

Sources: Vital records on Ancestry.com; Find a Grave memorial page for Robert H. Peirce, accessed May 7, 2024, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/185694721/robert_h-peirce

The origins of the Portland Art Museum (PAM) date to 1892, when residents of Portland, Oregon, organized the Portland Art Association with the goal of collecting and supporting the study of art. The association opened a museum in the Portland city library building on SW 7th (now Broadway) between Stark and Oak streets in 1895; a decade later, in 1905, the museum moved to its own building at SW 5th and Taylor. In 1909, the art association also opened a school, which would later be named the Museum Art School, in the museum building. In the early 1930s, both the museum and the school moved to the South Park Blocks, where the art association had acquired new space for the school and commissioned architect Pietro Belluschi to design a larger museum building, which opened in 1932.

The museum and the school continued to grow over subsequent decades, and the Portland Art Association also became the parent organization of the Northwest Film Study Center, which was founded in 1971 and incorporated into the museum in 1978. Due to the increasing complexity and financial burdens of the organization, the Portland Art Assocation began to revisit its mission and structure. It was renamed the Oregon Art Institute in 1989, and efforts were undertaken to separate the museum from the school, which had become the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in 1981. In 1992, the Oregon Art Institute was renamed the Portland Art Museum, and two years later, PNCA became a separate nonprofit, which later moved to Portland's Pearl District. The film center remained part of the museum, and in 2022 was renamed PAM CUT: Center for an Untold Tomorrow.

Sources: “Portland Art Association,” by Sarah Munro, Oregon Encyclopedia, https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/portland_art_association/; “Portland Art Museum,” by Roger Hull, Oregon Encyclopedia, https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/portland_art_museum/