Portland's Centers for the Arts
arts organization in Portland, Oregon, United States, operating various performing arts venues

Portland's Centers for the Arts (stylized as Portland'5 Centers for the Arts), formerly known as the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (PCPA), is an organization within Metro that runs venues for live theatre, concerts, cinema, small conferences, and similar events in Portland, Oregon, United States.
Established in 1987, the PCPA consists of three separate buildings: the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, Antoinette Hatfield Hall (containing the Newmark, Winningstad and Brunish Theatres), and Keller Auditorium. Metro took over management from the City of Portland in 1989.
Hatfield Hall itself is sometimes erroneously referred to as the Portland Center for the Performing Arts. PCPA is the fifth-largest center for performing arts in the United States, with more than 1,000 performances and one million patrons annually (as of 2007).
PCPA changed its name to "Portland'5 Centers for the Arts" in 2013. The "5" in the brand name is intended to highlight that the organization has five venues, counting separately the three theaters that occupy Antoinette Hatfield Hall.
The PCPA buildings have continued to be owned by the city, and the city plans to take back management in 2027.
Performance Facilities
The center includes five distinct performance facilities with varying capacities:
Newmark Theatre (880 seats)
Dolores Winningstad Theatre (304 seats)
Brunish Theatre (200 seats)
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall (2,776 seats)
Keller Auditorium (2,992 seats)
The Newmark, Winningstad and Brunish Theatres are all located together in the Hatfield Hall building, which is across the street from the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, with the Keller Auditorium a half-mile to the southeast.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Portland's Centers for the Arts” as arts organization in Portland, Oregon, United States, operating various performing arts venues. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7231893. Authority coordinates are 45.517, -122.681. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987, 1989, 2007 and 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “Portland's Centers for the Arts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.