The state’s official Bigfoot shrine rests 45 minutes southeast of the city at the North American Bigfoot Center, but this love letter to goth friends the world over pays the big guy his respects right here in Northwest Portland. The small space is filled to bursting with bizarre, upsetting art and oddities—including a 10-foot rendering of the ’Squatch himself. Fans of the macabre are welcome seven days per week.

Formerly known as the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center, this museum is pointedly placed in a segment of the city that was on its way to becoming a thriving Japantown, pre–World War II internment. Featuring interactive exhibits, like the jail cell where Japanese American attorney Minoru Yasui was held for breaking curfew during internment, and guided tours of the waterfront’s Japanese American Historical Plaza, it’s small but mighty, with a well-curated gift shop.

The beloved Belmont video store is known for its extensive inventory, but mere movie renters may not grasp the extent of its memorabilia archive. In glass cases and amid DVD shelves, Movie Madness displays a stunning array of props, costumes, and ephemera from major films: one of Julie Andrews’s dresses from The Sound of Music, the prop soap from the Fight Club poster, a severed ear from Blue Velvet. Go in swearing you’re just there to admire the fabrics from West Side Story, come out with a copy of There Will Be Blood and a tallboy for good measure.

You know OMSI. You love OMSI. You’ve tried and failed to beat the Pac-Man game that illustrates how alcohol affects the body’s reaction time. The trusty Oregon Museum of Science and Industry has been serving Portland-area families since 1944, and its now-iconic waterfront space—opened in 1992 and complete with a planetarium, movie theater, and tourable US Navy submarine—makes every trip feel like a certified event.

The Jewish Museum began as a nomadic effort in 1989, taking up residence at the Central Library, Montgomery Park, and a storefront in the Pearl District, among others, until it opened its permanent home in 2017 just off the North Park Blocks, which it expanded in 2023. After a 2014 merger with the Center for Holocaust Education, the museum expanded its mission and now marries world-class art exhibitions (the likes of Rembrandt, Dalí, and Helen Frankenthaler) with educational programs and regular talks and events.

The Portland Art Museum has been the state’s most substantial visual arts venue since it opened in 1892. That wasn’t saying much in the nineteenth century, but with its new Mark Rothko Pavilion (officially opening November 20), which connects and smooths out over a century of slightly awkward expansions, PAM is now a certifiably world-class art museum, not least because a bike path now runs through its heart. In terms of programming, global traveling exhibits (Beatlemania, Africa Fashion) supplement a substantial permanent collection of regional and international works, including a historic example from Monet’s Water Lilies series.  

The Chinatown Museum—opened in 2018 and located just up the street from the Lan Su Chinese Garden—offers a robust glimpse at our once-thriving Chinatown, which was among the largest in the country into the mid–twentieth century. Featuring local history exhibitions, a slate of panels and storytelling events, and regular musical performances, it’s one of the brightest spots in Old Town.

Depending on your tastes, the Portland Puppet Museum is either fiendishly adorable or the stuff of nightmares. Launched in Sellwood in 2012 by marionette professional Steven Overton, the Puppet Museum features a collection more than 2,000 strong, spanning styles, sizes, and all corners of the uncanny valley. Labors of love don’t come more full-throttle than this.

Located in its namesake neon-clad vacuum store near the mouth of the Burnside Bridge, this ode to clean carpets showcases vacuum models from the late nineteenth century through the twenty-first from a permanent collection of more than 300. A 2017 remodel added an explanatory timeline, which we’re into. The use of “museum” here is a bit dubious (it fills up a single wall), but it’s a great way to acquire a weird vacuum-centric party trick while replacing that decades-old Hoover. 

Started by Jim Stewart in 2000, this compact museum houses strange, beautiful, surreal found-object sculptures, all celebrating “the Zymoglyphic Period.” What is the Zymoglyphic Period? Per Stewart: “I made it up.” A meticulous, poignant ode to an era that never was, the project is situated upstairs in Stewart’s home near Mount Tabor, and available to aspiring Zymoglyphologists the second and fourth Sunday of each month from 11am to 3pm.