How I Got Started: Jordan Schnitzer

When I went to first grade, as an only child, my mother, Arlene Schnitzer, enrolled in the Portland Art School. Her teachers complained to her that there was no contemporary art gallery there. This was the early 1960s. So she opened the Fountain Gallery of Art, to concentrate on artists of the Pacific Northwest and the San Francisco Bay area. As a third-grader, I was looking into a corner and there was a funny cabinet there: I saw that there were these tiny print drawers. I pulled one out and started looking at a beautiful fuchsia print. My mother asked if I wanted to keep it, and I said yes. I had picked out a print by Stanley Hayter, the great British modernist printmaker. 

When I was 14, I bought my first work of art, from my mother. Before I was out of college, I had already blown through all my wall space. In 1987, I saw an exhibition of prints and multiples of the New York School—Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ellsworth Kelly, Helen Frankenthaler. While I wanted to stay committed to the art of our region, this show made me want to also collect post- World War II American art. Shortly after that, I went to Augen Gallery in Portland, which focused on works on paper, and bought a small Frank Stella—a triple-triangle piece—a David Hockney homage to Picasso, one of 10 (I could only afford one then, now I have all 10), and a Garrity Necklace by Jim Dine. The prices were reasonable; I came back the next week and bought a few more. The week after that, I got a catalogue from Sotheby’s, full of Diebenkorns. Oh, my God. 

In the 37 years since, I’ve become obsessive about sharing. I’ve had 180 exhibitions at over 120 museums, at no charge to the institutions. The Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation gives outreach funds to reach lower-income kids as well as seniors. People think art is elite and not for them, so I wanted to put together a collection of prints and multiples and allow people in free of charge, and maybe some would be lucky enough to get the passion for art as I did.