Born in what is now Latvia, Mark Rothko was 10 when his family emigrated to Oregon. He took his first art classes at the Portland Art Museum’s school, went to Yale on scholarship, dropped out after his sophomore year, and headed to New York City. Portland has been claiming him ever since. The museum’s new entrance pavilion is named for Rothko. And the exhibition currently on view—eight paintings on loan from his children Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel—traces the arc from Rothko’s early figurative works through his Surrealist experiments of the 1940s to the large-scale color field paintings that brought him world renown. —Elena Clavarino