“When I first walked in—my God—I just felt, what Frankenstein monster have I created here?” said the Portland, Oregon-based collector and philanthropist Jordan Schnitzer. “It’s still overwhelming.”
It was mid-February and Schnitzer was giving a tour of his collection, which, frankly, was gobsmacking. when left on my own to wander, it provoked spontaneous laughter—it felt almost unreal, almost farcical in its scale: an entire 50,000-square-foot warehouse filled with art. “The way the warehouse works,” Schnitzer explained, “they adopted a ‘floating bin system,’ this is the way Target, Walmart, anybody works to optimize the storage. The computer tells you what’s open. So, if you take something out, a week or two later, it may say, put it back in 33 instead of 28. We probably have Warhol in 125 places.”
Jordan Schnitzer leads a tour through the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation’s collection space in Portland, Oregon. Courtesy of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.
Later as I perused the shelves, six plastic-wrapped Warhol works labeled “Sex Parts” were stacked neatly in a berth. A few aisles away was a stack of the Pop artist’s “Shadows” and “Ladies & Gentlemen” series.
Schnitzer is one of North America’s foremost print collectors (he’s certainly earned the sobriquet “Prince of Prints”), and most of the vast sea is multiples, but there are other treasures like Joseph Beuys sculptures and a 2007 Richard Prince paper nurse’s hat scattered throughout. What we are seeing is only half of the warehouse; a firewall is shielding the other section. At the entrance, a gallery space presents rotating exhibitions—currently “What’s Not to Love,” a group portraiture show.
Installation view of “What’s Not to Love,” a group portraiture exhibition at the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. Courtesy of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.
Also on our intimate tour is a small group of high school students that the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation had bussed in from the tiny town of Aurora about 35 minutes south. The district’s entire arts budget had been slashed. “We see this across the country,” Schnitzer said. “What I’ve preached everywhere is the art museums have to reach out and go to the schools and/or bring the schools to us because I don’t see these budgets getting better in most of these states. It’s heartbreaking.”
“Art and culture, dance, music—they’re the highest things we do in society,” Schnitzer told the students. “Without those, the community is just a bunch of buildings and whatever. This is what touches us inside in ways that are conscious and unconscious. Appreciate beauty.”
He added: “Art and nature are the last bastion where no one can tell you what’s right or wrong.”
Building a Cultural Legacy
Schnitzer’s imprint on Portland’s and the Pacific Northwest’s cultural landscape is both visible and institutional. His name anchors the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Washington State University, and Portland State University, where the Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design is set to become one of the largest academic buildings on campus when it opens this fall. The Jordan Schnitzer Japanese Arts Learning Center is an integral hub at the breath-taking Portland Japanese Garden. The son of local philanthropists Arlene and Harold Schnitzer—she a prominent gallerist, he a real estate developer and civic benefactor—he has extended a family legacy of arts patronage.
Jordan Schnitzer Japanese Arts Learning Center, part of the Cultural Village at the Portland Japanese Garden, designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates; photo by Gary Belinsky. Courtesy of Portland Japanese Garden.
“I have no sense of ownership, but a great sense of stewardship,” Schnitzer said about the collection. The nonprofit Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, founded in 1997, functions as a lending collection, organizing exhibitions and placing works from his 22,000-plus holdings at museums. In 2024, a gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art established the title of Jordan Schnitzer Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints, currently held by Jennifer Farrell. This fall, selections from his collection will be shown internationally in “Judy Chicago – On Print,” opening this September at the Queen Sonja Art Stable in Oslo, Norway.
Installation view of “David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation,” Portland Art Museum. Courtesy of the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation.
Running now through July 27 at the Portland Art Museum is “David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.”
“The overall theme is perspectives and joy,” Schnitzer said. The show is striking for its breadth; it hardly reads as the product of a single collection so much as a survey of an artist in constant motion. You get the expected touchstones—sunlit pools, portraits, still lifes of domestic interiors—but also the curveballs: iPad drawings and his later digital experiments.
Jordan Schnitzer views “David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.” Courtesy of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation.
Those digital explorations, particularly from the 2010s, with works like The Cardplayers (2015), are key to that evolution. Working with large-scale photographic compositions, Hockney began to rethink how images are constructed—layering views, collapsing time, and loosening the rules of perspective. The show becomes a primer on the full spectrum of his practice: from the intimacy of his early queer line drawings to the clarity of the pools and portraits, and into these more elastic, perceptual works that continue to test how we see.
“The early erotic prints are not what Hockney’s best known for—they’re not the across-the-board crowd pleaser,” said Molly Steiger, Senior Vice President, International Prints at Sotheby’s. “But of course, Jordan has them because they are an important part of who Hockney is. It is very Jordan to have the entire scope of an artist’s printmaking.”
David Hockney, An Image of Celia (1984). © David Hockney / Tyler Graphics Ltd. Photo: Richard Schmidt.
Steiger has collaborated closely with Schnitzer since the mid-90s. “He really goes deep,” she told me. “He does not stop until he has basically everything in that artist’s body of work. He’s a completist, but in a really special way because it’s not just about the greatest hits of an artist, it’s about their entire career. But he’s very eclectic because as much as he collects artists that everyone’s heard of, he also collects Pacific Northwest artists and women artists. He doesn’t just gravitate towards the big flashy names.”
Steiger added, “He stands out as a client but more as a person, his energy. He’s elevated printmaking in the consciousness of the art world. I can’t think of anyone else who’s done that.”
Fairgoers view Hank Willis Thomas’s It’s Yours at the IFPDA Print Fair. Courtesy of BFA.
A Presence at IFPDA
On April 9, Schnitzer was on hand for the VIP opening of the IFPDA print fair in New York. He is a major supporter of the fair and past sponsor of its lecture series and awards program. This year he commissioned Hank Willis Thomas’s It’s Yours, a nine-by-20-foot retroreflective map that shifts depending on how it’s viewed. Using UV and screen-printed vinyl on custom-cut panels, Thomas merges personal and historical imagery to explore how perspective shapes understanding, collapsing geography into a meditation on identity, diaspora, and collective action. It’s a feel good epic of family bonding and united protest.
Hank Willis Thomas with collector Jordan Schnitzer and curator Sharon Coplan, an expert in prints and multiples, at an event in front of one of Thomas’s vibrant, map-based works. Photo: BFA.
“It’s a map of the world that when you look at it under the right conditions,” Thomas explained, “you see people embracing, walking together, marching together, hugging their families.”
The ideas resonated with Schnitzer, who is a major Thomas collector, as well. “The world is up in flames in so many places, breaking our hearts,” he said. “Just like the astronauts this week, I remember 50 years ago when the Apollo went up. They sent a picture of the Earth and they said, Hey everybody. It’s a small planet. Let’s all get along. I think this emphasizes, it’s one planet and why are we all at odds with each other so often?”
Hank Willis Thomas, It’s Yours, a retroreflective world map composed of layered imagery, on view at the IFPDA Print Fair in New York. Photo: BFA
He continued, “You first look at it and you see the outline of all the continents, and you get up close and you see a thousand pictures of all sorts of average people. Just people. And that’s what the world’s full of. All of us that just want to raise our families, have a job, and we see such tragedy going on. His work is breathtaking. It captures your eye.” Schnitzer took the special UV flashlight and revealed a smiling image of him and his two young sons camouflaged within the work.
Schnitzer was headed back to the aisles. The prints were calling him. “We’ve already bought an awful lot of stuff,” Schnitzer said of the fair. “I think this is one of the best ever. What’s always wonderful about works on paper, they’re relatively affordable and that way you get high-end artist work at affordable prices to start a collection. And to live with.”
