Everyone was talking about sports when the city’s most influential gallerist, Elizabeth Leach, began plotting her next art world shakeup late last summer. The Portland Fire were back. The FIFA World Cup was coming to the US. And sports, never mind the historic gulf between the art kids and the jocks, became the obvious theme to inaugurate Portland Arts Week.

Starting with a gallery walk Thursday, July 9, the weeklong festival kicks off a month of sports-themed shows at nearly 20 galleries across the city. The project grew from a map Leach organized with the Oregon Alliance for the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Charting some 65 galleries, bookshops, museums, and arts centers, it shows how thick the city is with arts spaces—especially throughout the “cultural corridor,” along the Park Blocks between Portland State University and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Translating the map into a coordinated set of shows has been no small feat. “We’re running while we dribble two balls down the road,” Leach laughs, before correcting the mixed metaphor—“the court”—and admitting the sporting world is new territory. That’s exactly the point: pushing the gallery milieu into other cultural facets of the city and bringing different creative fields into fine art spaces. “I’m learning how other people see and think about their area of focus,” Leach says, “or about life in general.” Food is the plan for next year, and design for 2028.

Leach calls Portland Arts Week “the inverse” of Converge 45, the citywide arts triennial she founded 10 years ago. Instead of an outside curator developing an exhibition that spans the city, Portland Arts Week lets the galleries come up with their own takes on the theme. Several in town already have a foot in the athletic world. Industry One, run by creative agency and frequent Nike collaborator Industry, and L’Atelier Yaffe, the café and gallery owned by retired Timbers midfielder George Ivan Fochive, have both signed on to host shows.

Leach’s namesake gallery, which first put the city on the international art world’s radar in 1981, is mounting a group show of national and international artists centered on play. Nearby, Adams and Ollman will take tennis as a theme. Both the Oregon Historical Society and the Lan Su Chinese Garden have martial arts exhibits planned. Even OMSI is getting in on the action with an ostensibly science-inflected sports trivia night.

Meanwhile, the Thorns will host a soccer clinic for teens in front of PNCA Saturday, July 11, on the heels of a symposium at the Portland Art Museum (July 9 and 10) that promises to sketch more connections between fine art and athletics. The latter, inspired by a “Sports x Arts Day” at Art Basel Miami last year, will match yet-to-be-announced athletes with artists for panels about art making and collecting.

“Oh, another project,” Leach says. Her own gallery is mounting an ambitious run of shows to celebrate its 45th anniversary this year. “I just can’t seem to stop myself.”