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 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 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 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 moreTBA artist Alex Tatarsky joins theatre historian Kate Bredeson for a conversation about Sad Boys in Harpy Land.
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.
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Past
Join 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 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 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 moreHorizon is the perceived line where sky meets Earth—a locator in constant motion. Horizon is a dance.
Learn moreOmni Rail is an ambisonic, walk-through instrument designed from the stairwells, railings, and cable system of Portland’s historic 511 Building, transforming the architecture itself into a resonant body. The instrument is its own speaker system, both metaphorically and physically.
Learn moreRooted in dovetailing practices of artmaking and gastronomy, Ray Anthony Barrett's "Who by Fire" returns to fire as one of the most fundamental elements for human survival.
Learn morePresented in conjunction with "ja' / buuts' / t'aan," Patricia Vázquez Gómez's immersive installation on the maayat’aan language, join us for an afternoon screening short films from the Yucatec Mayan diaspora!
Learn moreThis immersive installation explores the relationship between a group of Mayan youth living in Portland with with their mother tongue: maayat’aan (Maya Peninsular/Yucatec Mayan), an Indigenous language of present-day Yucatán, Mexico. Mostly shot in the Yucatán municipalities of Maní and Dzan with audio recorded in Portland, ja’ / buuts’ / t’aan investigates personal struggles to learn and preserve Indigenous languages that mirror enduring societal failures to support their survival.
Learn moreNOTHING#15: a bluff is the third part of Knight’s series. This performance presents Knight alone, responding improvisationally to a mostly empty space, its features, and its audiences.
Learn moreAlmost Everyone Is Ready: The Cinema of Stephanie Barber Presented by Cinema Project Stephanie Barber makes films and videos in which verbal communication often takes top billing, but they could also be watched for their elegant imagery alone. She is continually drawing our focus, with the intense work of her art, to the tenderest spots mostly out of reach.
Learn morePNCA’s Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies is thrilled to welcome visiting artist Autumn Knight for a lecture on her work and practice.
Learn moreThis exhibition is an extension of Autumn Knight’s three-part performance series "NOTHING#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff," which investigates the Italian concept of “dolce far niente,” or “the sweetness of doing nothing.”
Learn moreJoin cultural workers Alexandria Saleem and Sarah Farahat to steep in Teta’s tea. This is an invitation to grieve, nourish, and connect with what has been passed down through love and lineage, while remembering to cultivate new futures.
Learn moreILY2 is thrilled to announce Noise / Grain, an exhibition of new works converging image, sound, and video by the Toronto-based artist Timothy Yanick Hunter. Noise / Grain will open on September 14 with a performance in the PICA Annex, co-presented by ILY2 as part of the 2024 Time-Based Art Festival. The exhibition will remain on view at ILY2 through November 9.
Learn moreOn Sunday, September 15, from 12:00 to 2:00 PM, join us on the lawn in front of the Reed library for music, picnic fare, and a conversation with artists Sarah Gilbert, Jess Perlitz, and exhibition curator Stephanie Snyder, facilitated by Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art at PICA. There will also be tours of Perlitz’s Reductions of Mountains, as well as the Cooley exhibition Tender (a collaboration with Ditch Projects, Springfield, OR).
Learn moreYelling Choir is a performance process that reimagines voice, presence, and power. Created by Maxx Katz, the Choir is a vehicle for experimental relational technology, using play, somatic awareness, and vocal practice to reform the psychosocial basis of community relationships.
Learn moreThe Things Around Us is a solo, live-looping, music and narrative performance featuring trumpet, clarinet, everyday objects, and darkly humorous stories about other people. Composed, written, and performed by Ahamefule J. Oluo.
Learn moreThe 2024 Time-Based Art Festival opens by honoring the Portland tradition of First Thursday with a come one, come all jam session with Videotones, Elbow Room’s neurodiverse digital media collective. No musical ability required—bring yourself, an instrument,* your voice. Come make a sound or just witness our giant, undulating community band.
Learn moreFor this lecture, American Artist will speak about new and old work and the conceptual ties that inform their practice as an interdisciplinary artist.
Learn moreDB Amorin's "long shadow" is a 45-minute soundwalk composition inspired by the desire to return to that which may no longer be familiar to us. The layered audio experience, drawing on the artist’s memories of the Ko’olau mountain range, the transition of season, and the longing for vanishing eras, is designed to trace the path of the MAX Red Line from the urban center of Portland to the Portland International Airport as a soundtrack for the movement towards unreachable places.
Learn moreTHE ACHE is the third installment of Allie Hankins’ five-part performance series of projects entitled, By My Own Hand. Developed in collaboration with Hannah Krafcik, THE ACHE calls attention to the myriad of ways selfhood can be constituted and remixed through creative acts of self-determination; it takes shape as 1) a video exhibition 2) a publication release and 3) a series of free intergenerational art-making workshops facilitated by local artists dee bustos, Muffie Delgado-Connelly, Midori Hirose, and Ralph Pugay.
Learn moreCommissioned by PICA in 2022 and now being released in full,ﾠCove of Harmony, Episode 1 is a musical film about a mysterious and transformative encounter, showcasing an in-studio performance by vocalist and composer Holland Andrews, and a conversation between Joseph and Holland.
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