Upcoming
For the 2026 Converge 45 Triennial, New York-based artist Trisha Baga presents MORE, a monumental immersive installation at PICA that weaves together the rise of consumer AI and the artist’s own journey into parenthood. Guest Curated by Lumi Tan.
Learn moreThe Walks is an app with a collection of audio walks by Rimini Protokoll. Each walk is a short audio experience that covers specific locations in your city and invites you to rediscover and interact with your environment.
Learn moreA downloadable day-by-day schedule for TBA:26.
Learn moreAn unknown cataclysm has caused all manner of surplus data and unassigned variables to leak into The Alembic Hotel. Explore the dilapidated brutalist monolith and meet the denizens as they gather packets, create cults, and invent a language to talk to God.
Learn moreIf telecommunications defined the 20th century, the phone booth was its most iconic structure. Which brings us to the hole at hand: TELBOW. How did it arrive, and where does it lead?
Learn moreOur Bar Garden is back—and this time, it’s a block party! We are closing down Hancock Street and bringing back your favorite hangout spot. Join us every day and night of the festival in the TBA:26 Bar Garden for shared beverages and meals that bring artists, crew, and community together.
Learn moreLearn more about accessibility at TBA:26. PICA is committed to accessibility as a value, ethic, and opportunity for learning, growth, and change. As we strive to create greater access to all of our programs and events, including the TBA Festival, we welcome feedback and dialogue from audiences and artists about their experiences and suggestions for improvement. To submit feedback, please contact us at boxoffice@pica.org or call (503) 224-PICA (7422).
Learn moreJoin us for the opening night of TBA at Elbow Room’s GOOD DANG WEEKNIGHT!—a bingo night and live music show/fundraiser to benefit Elbow Room, a nonprofit community art studio and gallery space focused on providing artistic mentorship, material support, and meaningful exhibition opportunities to artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Portland, OR.
Learn moreJoin PICA’s fall Creative Exchange Lab artists Sahar al-Sawaf, Melanie Flood, Kole Galbraith, Lalo Perez, Jess Perlitz, and Isabella Saavedra as they discuss their work, ideas, processes, and more. PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab, known as CXL, is an artist residency that brings together a cohort of artists working in varying disciplines.
Learn moreMemento Mori in the Dreamatorium is a 55-minute demonstration of Michelle Ellsworth’s best thinking on how to prepare for death, including one’s own and one’s dear one’s.
Learn moreThis final installment in Allie Hankins’ performance series, By My Own Hand, queers autobiography through examinations of manipulation, featuring dancers Linda Austin, claire barrera, keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Through strategies of deconstruction, distillation, resurrection, and re-membering, INVISIBLE TOUCH invites audiences into an architecture of alteration—a shifting field of entanglement and transformation—to confront notions of finality, authorship, and perception of self.
Learn moreThis is a work in progress of an interdisciplinary performance project that examines Sarai’s experiences of love as they are formed through risk, trust, memory, and cultural inheritance. Drawing from lived encounters and personal histories, this piece considers how intimacy can manifest in unconventional, high-stakes, and spiritually resonant forms. Situated at the intersection of dance, live action, and visual documentation, the project reflects on love as a series of embodied negotiations shaped by vulnerability, autonomy, and relational exchange.
Learn moreTBA artist Symara Sarai and Portland-based artist keyon gaskin will discuss Sarai’s work-in-progress performance. Both artists share an interest in interdisciplinary performance, unconventional forms, risk, and relational exchange.
Learn moreJoin us for a screening and conversation with Bebe Miller and Zoe Scofield. See work from their archives, hear about their processes, how their work was made, and what they think about it now. This is an opportunity to experience their pieces not otherwise available!
Learn moreCreated by the artist Ant Hampton, who is also co-director of the Time Based Editions series. Shifting back and forth along a line between Lausanne, Switzerland and Izmir, Turkey, this 77 min experience pieces together value and meaning from the very human ruins of aspiration, history, and language.
Learn moreIn The Goldberg Variations, Canadian performance artist Clayton Lee freely references and entangles queer diasporic sexuality and aesthetics with classical music by Johann Sebastian Bach and with references to professional wrestler Bill Goldberg. Using deadpan humor, generosity, and a low-vibrating mischievousness to facilitate and indulge the “what-ifs” of the live encounter, The Goldberg Variations is an unhinged and reckless deep dive into power dynamics, identity, and the tensions that exist within—including a surprise twist we can’t yet disclose, but you won’t want to miss.
Learn moreUsing an improvised language of disintegration, How does it feel to look at nothing is an opera of the elemental, of pre-deities, of illusions of containment, and of transitional states. Visionary composer-performers, multi-instrumentalists, vocalists, and life partners Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon co-create this work of composition, improvisation, dance, ritual, and stunning sculptural and visual imagery to explore the forces and conditions that compel life’s emergence, and the spiritual act of meaning-making during epochs of decay.
Learn moreSad Boys in Harpy Land is a falling-apart coming-of-age tale, a decaying bildungsroman, a semi-autobiographical tour-de-farce. Equal parts sad clown show, demented cabaret, and extended crisis of meaning, Tatarsky collages narratives of art-making and despair into an unhinged solo performance in the hellscape of the mind.
Learn moreIn this workshop, we can explore how we treat drawing, sculpture, sound, video projection, sets, costumes, and beyond as an equal material to dance/bodies moving in space.
Learn moreTBA artist Alex Tatarsky joins theatre historian Kate Bredeson for a conversation about Sad Boys in Harpy Land.
Learn moreSmall Songs (2025) is a 39-minute experimental short film accompanied by an album, also titled Small Songs. This companion piece includes short-form synthesizer recordings that received a limited-edition vinyl release in 2023.
Learn moreTheatre historian Kate Bredeson reads from her new book, The Diaries of Judith Malina, volumes 1-4 (Northwestern University 2026), an edited volume of radical Jewish anarchist and stage director Judith Malina’s diaries. In these diaries, Malina charts her vision for theatre as a tool to provoke what she calls the Beautiful Nonviolent Anarchist Revolution. The reading will include a conversation with theatre historian Jasmine Mahmoud and time for questions.
Learn moreJoin us on Sept. 12 for the screening of By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY, a solo work that engages the biomechanics of voice and an interweaving of movement, sound, and specter. As if intoning an elegy to her past selves, Allie conjures a space alive with poltergeist activity—dancing and singing within an intricate tapestry of wails, laughter, overtones, and unplaceable sounds. At once methodical and mundane, otherworldly and operatic, the work lives between elegy and manifesto, between haunted house and an architecture of alteration.
Learn moreJoin us for the final morning of the Festival for our beloved Pancake Breakfast.
Learn moreTBA artist Clayton Lee and visiting arts writer and thinker Jason N. Le will discuss Lee’s performance, Goldberg Variations, and issues related to queer desire, performance, and Asian diasporic identity.
Learn moreSubsisting on car-toasted Pop-Tarts, Michelle Ellsworth and Brian Rogers will drive all day, and edit all night, while weeping their way from Boulder, CO to Queens, NY to PICA, and back again.
Learn moreSeattle-based artist Kole Galbraith (Sinixt/Peoria) presents Q'əssápiˀ kəsˁác'əc' snk'əl'íp'. Foraging sounds and textures in the Okanagan and Columbia Basin, Galbraith uncovers latent sonic capabilities and hidden histories. Additionally, Galbraith will be joined by musicians Lori Goldston on the cello and Noel Kennon on viola.
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Past
FEAR - the joint album from Jared Mattson of The Mattson 2 and Ruban Nielson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra - was recorded in June of 2024. All recording and mixing took place in Palm Springs. Mastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios in London.
Learn moreJoin us at PICA, AKA Portland Institute for Contemporary Athletics, for an evening of competitive art created by an all-star mashup of artists and athletes, scored by a panel of acclaimed art and sports professionals! Join PICA and cheer on your favorite teams, experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
Learn moreAllie Hankins’ By My Own Hand is a 5-Part series of performances that began in 2022, culminating with Part 5, which will be presented during PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival in September 2026. PICA will be hosting a series of free screenings of Parts 2–3 leading up to the live premiere.
Learn moreJoin us on Thursday, June 18 at 7 PM for the Oregon Premiere of Gasp!, a theatrical performance by Colin Self about queer ancestry, spiritual guidance, and the spirit of play.
Learn moreOn Wednesday, June 10 from 6:00–8:00 PM, join artist Meech Boakye and mathematician Kyle Ormsby for a collaborative workshop exploring playful forms of drawing through meander combinatorics.
Learn moreQueer performance artist Jibz Cameron, best known for her multimedia alter ego Dynasty Handbag invites you to an evening of performance, film, and readings celebrating the debut of her memoir. Entitled Hell in a Handbag.
Learn moreYou are cordially invited to Funhouse, PICA’s 2026 annual gala, taking place where the fun never ends: the Historic Dance Pavilion at Oaks Park. Come curious.
Learn morePICA presents "an imagined place (here and now)," a multichannel audio and visual installation by the Brooklyn-based artist Satpreet Kahlon. A 2022 Creative Exchange Lab artist, Kahlon’s exhibition will transform PICA’s 10,000-square-foot main space into an immersive exploration of fugitivity, deep space time, geologic memory, and possibility.
Learn moreAllie Hankins’ By My Own Hand is a 5-Part series of performances that began in 2022, culminating with Part 5, which will be presented during PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival in September 2026. PICA will be hosting a series of free screenings of Parts 1–4 leading up to the live premiere. Please join us for the first screening on Monday, March 2, 2026, at 7:30 PM in PICA’s Annex. Allie Hankins and her collaborators will be in attendance.
Learn morePlease join PICA’s 2025 Creative Exchange Lab artists, Olivia Camfield, Marcus Fischer, Woodrow Hunt, Kite, and Angelo Scott, for an informal presentation of their work and research.
Learn moreJoin PICA and the Hollywood Theatre for a screening of "Monk in Pieces," a new documentary about the boundary-breaking artist Meredith Monk.
Learn moreThis event features contributors to EARTH TO YOU: a compilation of guitar players responding to a short story about a guitar player by Sara Jaffe, as well as a reading by Sara and possible special guests.
Learn moreJoin us for the 2025 Precipice Fund Award Ceremony and celebration—the warmest and coziest night of the year! This annual gathering is PICA’s way of ending the year on a note of generosity.
Learn morePortland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) is thrilled to announce Body on Me, a group exhibition by Cameron Clayborn, .Compost Cooperative (Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zanna Kerrigan, and Carly Barton), and Vishal Jugdeo, curated by Kristan Kennedy, PICA Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art. Taking the human body and its many negotiations as its conceptual starting point, the presentation features media-based works that cross photography, installation, video, and video game technology and design. Throughout the exhibition, artists investigate digitally-mediated imagery of the natural world and human form in conversation with technological interventions. Body on Me will open with a performance by Clayborn on October 18, and will remain on view through December 20, 2025.
Learn moreGood Dang Weekend 2 is a bingo fundraiser and dance party to benefit Elbow Room, a nonprofit community art studio and gallery space focused on providing artistic mentorship, material support, and meaningful exhibition opportunities to artists with intellectual developmental disabilities in Portland.
Learn moreGet ready to get down at the TBA:25 closing party, Dirty Thirty. This high-energy blowout marks the last official night of the Festival, bringing together artists, audiences, and the entire TBA community for one unforgettable throwdown.
Learn moreOver the last several decades, textile artist Freddie Robins has earned a reputation as a radical conceptualist whose hand- and machine- made tapestries, sculptures, and chimerical assemblages are as playfully cheeky as they are political. In Apotropaic, many of Robins’ recent assemblages are composed of the soft and, at times, unwieldy remains of other projects, coupled with found stones and other natural objects, as well as treasures from her vast collection of things past.
Learn moreA narrator searches for the shape of the universe amidst the ruins of 1980s material culture—bikini babes, Saturday morning cartoons, and the erotic overlap in between. Commercial detritus and degraded three-dimensional scans invoke feelings of memory and decay, while psychedelic mycelial rainbows provide hope and humor.
Learn moreTender Revolutions/Yellow Songs is a hybrid project comprised of writings, music, and visual ephemera that tend to “yellow subjectivities” and enact small spaces of connectivity across boundaries of diaspora and identity. The work features poetry and music by Dao Strom, with She Who Has No Master(s) and Fear No Music.
Learn moreCinema Project presents selections from Madison Brookshire's Number Series, 16mm dual-projector works of shifting colors. Double projection creates an uncanny experience of color as both presence and absence.
Learn moreAn evolving, experimental Black movement and sound sensorial experience crafted with local artists.
Learn moreIn a world where Manifest Destiny and “white” European immigrants definitely did not commit genocide to force colonialism and rewrite history in order to establish a country that treats corporations as people over Indigenous populations…comes a night of perspectives and stories from the original people who call these lands HOME.
Learn moreIn The Brutal Joy: A Lecture, Justine A. Chambers unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture—as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black living.
Learn moreThroughout TBA:25, Creative Exchange Lab artists will be developing work in real time, sharing process and dialogue with one another and the public. Hear from the cohort on Saturday, September 6 at 12:00 PM for a lunchtime conversation in PICA’s Pavilion.
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