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Portland's Centers for the Arts

arts organization in Portland, Oregon, United States, operating various performing arts venues

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ7231893 ↗
Source-derived summary

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.

Editorial summary

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.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1987, 1989, 2007, 2013—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where Portland's, Centers and Arts can be independently traced.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as arts organization in Portland, Oregon, United States, operating various performing arts venues. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.

Evidence profile

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.

Critical limits

Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Portland's Centers for the Arts”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Portland's Centers for the Arts primary sources, Portland's Centers for the Arts archive and Portland's research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Portland's Centers for the Arts”?
  2. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
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Source & attribution

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.