Printmaker, teacher, curator: Dean Gordon Gilkey’s lifelong devotion to the arts

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Gordon Gilkey demonstrating a printmaking technique in 1951 |Credit: OSU Special Collections & Archives Research Center (SCARC) 

By Jessica Krueger, CLA Student Writer - November 14, 2025

Gordon Gilkey’s retirement, by his estimation, lasted only two weeks. 

It was the late 1970s and Gilkey was in his mid-sixties. A devoted art teacher and tireless college administrator, Gilkey had spent his last thirty years at Oregon State University—first as a professor and head of the art department, then as dean of the College of Liberal Arts from 1964 to 1977. 

It was Gilkey, in fact, who had led efforts to establish the CLA in the first place. When Oregon State hired Gilkey in 1947, it offered no degree programs in the humanities and fine arts. OSU’s focus was on agriculture and the “hard sciences.” Gilkey strongly believed in the value of a liberal arts education, and over the course of many years, convinced the university's administration of its importance. It is in part thanks to Gilkey that OSU offers such a diverse range of degree programs today.

Indeed, Gilkey had never been one to sit still—especially when art was involved. 

After graduating in 1936 from the University of Oregon with a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking, Gilkey was hired as the official artist for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Over a two-year period, Gilkey worked diligently to etch sixty or so plates. Each was unique and  captured some aspect of the fair’s construction, exhibitions, or grand visions for the future. 

Because multiples are made of each original print etching, Gilkey believed that printmaking was a more democratic medium than other fine arts. 

In post-World War II Europe, Gilkey worked alongside the “Monuments Men” as he led efforts to gather and preserve German war art. In his spare time, he taught Holocaust survivors and prisoners of war how to draw.

In 1965, Gilkey organized support for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. Recognizing that the state of Oregon would need its own agency to receive funds from the endowments, Gilkey later helped to establish the Oregon Arts Commission. Today, OSU’s Valley Library features artwork which the commission helped to  select and acquire through its Oregon’s Percent for Art in Public Places program. 

By the time Gilkey left OSU in 1978, he had accumulated an enormous collection of art. An experienced printmaker himself, much of the art was Gilkey’s own work. But most of the pieces had been gathered over years of travel and through exchanges with friends, students, and other artists. 

For years, Gilkey had kept his collection in the basement of his house in Corvallis. He invited students and locals to see it, but otherwise the art remained tucked away in steel cases. Now that he was retired, Gilkey wanted to find a proper home for his art collection, a place where the public could see and enjoy it. 

“(Art) helps enrich people’s lives,” Gilkey said. “It allows for their own personal expression, and then the products of their expression enriches (other) people’s lives.”

So Gilkey wrapped up his last class at OSU and within two weeks had moved to Portland, art collection in tow. He donated most of his art to the Portland Art Museum and took a lifetime appointment there as curator of prints and drawings. In 1993, the museum inaugurated the Vivian and Gordon Gilkey Graphic Arts Collection, named in honor of him and his wife of fifty-seven years. 

Until the mid-1990s, the Portland Art Museum was tied with the Pacific Northwest College of Art (then the Museum Art School) and so Gilkey got involved there too, as part-time professor and resident printmaker. Today, the PNCA offers the Gilkey Center for Printmaking in support of students interested in the medium. 

Asked about his personal philosophy in 1998, Gilkey replied: “Well, I keep learning. I learn more about people, I learn more about art as I travel, as I read. And as I work with my students, work with my colleagues, I learn more about art. And I have developed (a broad) taste in art from all periods, and in all media. 

“So I try to impart that to my students: Keep an open mind, be able to judge your own work, and don’t be too critical of other people’s work. They have a right for their own expression.”

Gilkey continued to make prints, teach art at the PNCA, and work for the Portland Art Museum into his late eighties. He passed away in 2000, but the barriers he broke and paths he paved for the creation and sharing of artwork continue on.

This is the third and last installment in a series which discusses the life of Gordon Gilkey (1912-2000), a well-known printmaker and the first dean of Oregon State University’s College of Liberal Arts. Born and raised in Lane County, Oregon, Gilkey graduated from the University of Oregon in 1936 with a Master of Fine Arts. After his work with the German Wartime Art Project in post-World War II Europe, Gilkey returned to Oregon where his service to the arts continued. He had tremendous impact on OSU, local and national art scenes, and museums across the U.S. In 1998, oral historian James Strassmaier sat down with Gilkey to document his legacy for the Oregon Historical Society. Read part 1 and part 2 of Gilkey's story.