Past
Curated by Roya Amirsoleymani and Felisha Ledesma, Remembering to Remember: Experiments in Sound is a multifaceted program of 15+ international, national, and local artists spanning six live performances; five newly commissioned multichannel compositions; four film/video works at the intersection of sound and moving image; and one month of artist residencies, community workshops, and public engagements. The container for this breadth of programming is an exhibition that will be on view at PICA from February 17 to March 19, 2023, with an opening reception on Friday, February 17, 2023, 6:00 - 8:000 pm. Artists include Adee Roberson, Alison O’Daniel, bone lattice, Crystal Quartez, Hiro Kone, Kite & Robbie Wing, Lucy Liyou, Nivhek, Nyokabi Kariũki, Reese Bowes, Saint Abdullah, Sholeh Asgary, Synth Library Portland, Takashi Makino, and Tomoko Sauvage.
Learn moreCelebrated New York and Florida filmmaker Sasha Wortzel debuts her films on the West Coast in this one-night screening. Blending the archival and the imaginary, Wortzel uses film to examine queer place-making, geographies of resistance, and the systems that marginalize, extract, and erase communities, peoples, and histories. The films will be followed by a Q & A with Wortzel.
Learn morejaamil olawale kosoko’s meditative multi-channel film and installation Syllabus for Black Love serves as the ship inside which the multimedia performance the hold is positioned. Through rhythmic and restorative gestures, the hold creates a perceptive and somatic experience for both performer and audience.
Learn more100 Keyboards is a live music performance/installation featuring as the title implies over 100 keyboards. This performance focuses on the phenomenon of “interference sound," the complex distribution of sound pressure and other parameters as sound waves of the same frequency but with a different direction of transmission overlap. As each keyboard plays a sustained note of a certain pitch, and as the number of notes increases, a “moiré of sound” is created. The auditory experience is akin to weaving an individual “textile pattern" (the original meaning of “moiré") and a sound equivalent to the visual “moiré effect.”
Learn moreA Letter from Souls of The Dead will be presented at PICA from July 10, 2021 to September 4, 2021. On the opening day of the exhibition Saturday, July 10, there will be intermittent performances by Aki Onda and Portland-based sound artist Marcus Fischer.
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Learn more„The Want“ adapts Marie-Koltes’ In the Solitude of Cotton Fields (1985) as an experimental dance, musical score, and opera--with a libretto littered with interjections from Derrida to Missy Elliot--examining language, desire, and the contract between performer and audience. Curated by Kristan Kennedy and Roya Amirsoleymani
Learn moreSUSAN, the follow-up to Ahamefule J. Oluo’s acclaimed musical Now I’m Fine, is a story about the failings of men and the endurance of women. The performance on Sept 14 will be ASL interpreted.
Learn moreSUSAN, Ahamefule J. Oluo’s darkly comic musical portrait of his mother, builds one story out of many, a journey from Section 8 housing in 1980s Seattle, to the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta, to the Clallam Bay Correctional Facility. With stunning new compositions performed by some of Seattle's best musicians, combined with soul-baring stand-up interludes, Oluo explores two intertwining narratives: his mother’s life as the white, Midwestern wife of a Nigerian chief, and later a destitute single mother; and his own journey to Nigeria as an adult, to visit his late father’s village and discover a family on the other side of the world. SUSAN, the follow-up to Oluo’s acclaimed musical Now I’m Fine, is a story about the failings of men and the endurance of women. It is a crystalline slice of American life; a collision of class, race, bodies, love, and men with bad intentions; a tragedy about the most comically optimistic person on earth. Through decades of chaos and catastrophe, one thing was always consistent. Susan loved her children. She loved them so much. SUSAN is a story about doing what it takes.
Learn moreEiko Otake collaborates with artists of diverse backgrounds and disciplines, both living and dead, for her evolving Duet Project. Eiko is accompanied by Ishmael Houston -Jones, Marc Mccloughan, Alexis Moh.
Learn moreStarring Anthony Hudson—the human vessel for Portland’s premiere drag clown Carla Rossi—Looking for Tiger Lily (Solo) utilizes song, dance, drag, and video to put a queer spin on the ancestral tradition of storytelling. Asking what it means for a queer, mixed Native person to experience their heritage through white normative culture as they recount growing up watching the 1960 production of Peter Pan featuring Sondra Lee’s blonde, blue-eyed, 'Indian Princess' Tiger Lily, Anthony (and Carla) draws from a songbook stretching across Disney’s Pocahontas to Cher’s "Half- Breed." Not just autobiography, Looking for Tiger Lily (Solo) is a coming-of-age story that's more than cowboys versus Indians.
Learn moreSan Cha is a singer-songwriter, based in the City of Angels, increasingly known for her visceral and explosive live performances. Her name, derived from the Spanish word sancha, which translates to ‘mistress’, is a mischievous reference to the title of ‘San’, given to male saints in the Catholic tradition. Fans of cumbia and punk, bolero and electro, flock to see San Cha’s emotional renditions of traditional Mexican rancheras and original songs that queer conventions of identity, power and love. Her striking stage presence is accompanied by the one-of-a-kind garments she adorns, aesthetic reflections of the years spent performing in drag and club scenes in the Bay. San Cha was most recently the headlining act at the kickoff of the 2019 Red Bull Music Festival, with upcoming performances at the Levitt Pavilion, Getty Museum and Santa Monica Pier. Partner Program Presented by lumber room Curated by Libby Werbel In conjunction with their exhibition Kate Newby A puzzling light and moving. Limited seating, no reservations, doors at 6:30
Learn moreSix Latinx performers map an elusive choreography of obsessive and perverse action within an unstable terrain of bodies, materials and sounds. Inspired by This Bridge Called my Back - an anthology of feminist essays that explore identity and critique white feminism. West Coast Premiere
Learn moreWith varied natural and urban instrumentation, including violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar, Laura Ortman showcases the wide range of her practice as a composer and visual artist.
Learn moreWater Will (in Melody) is a devised choreographic work for four performers, using melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of 'the will,' this dystopian fantasy becomes a space for negotiating desire, imagination, and feelings of an encroaching end. Unfolding with playful inventiveness, a wet and cavernous landscape becomes host to a fiction that invites instability, recreation, and catastrophe.
Learn moreCome hear our Spring 2019 Creative Exchange Lab artists present on their current practice.
Learn moreunearth mines histories of desire and loss, recasting the black box theater as parietal underground.
Learn moreJoin PICA and Outside the Frame for a closing celebration of Abigail DeVille's The American Future, as we co-present a free screening of short films by houseless youth, including the premiere of a new project. A panel discussion with participating youth filmmakers will follow. Light snacks will be served. This event is a public program affiliated with Abigail DeVille's exhibition The American Future, on view at PICA through January 12, 2019.
Learn moreIn connection with Abigail DeVille's exhibition The American Future, PICA presents a free screening of Arresting Power: Resisting Police Violence in Portland, Oregon (2014), co-directed by Julie Perini, Erin Yanke, and Jodi Darby. Documenting the history of conflict between the Portland police and community members over the past 50 years, the film features personal stories of resistance told by victims of police misconduct, the families of people who were killed by police, and members of Portland’s reform and abolition movements. Utilizing meditative footage taken at sites of police violence, experimental filmmaking techniques, and archival newsreel, Arresting Power creates a space for understanding the impacts of police violence and imagining a world without police.
Learn moreThe American Future by Abigail DeVille is a monumental installation, or as the artist puts it, "a model for reflection” comprised of foraged materials, publications, time, labor, up-rooted histories, politics, poetry, and research. In an attempt to form a new kind of space or landscape, DeVille takes us on a trip through time from 1804–2018.
Learn morePortland-based curatorial initiative Nat Turner Project presents The Black Condition, Live!, the materializing of a multimedia lyric essay by Los Angeles-based artist jayy dodd. This audio-visual performance retells an account of fetishization, technology & obsession. Spectators, acclimate at your own risk.
Learn moreJoin PICA’s Artistic Directors, Roya Amirsoleymani, Erin Boberg Doughton, and Kristan Kennedy for a final TBA:18 farewell. They’ll be a pancake brunch, Vic’s infamous Bloody Mary bar, and plenty of time for conversation and reflections about the past 10 days. Let’s bask in the last festival moments together.
Learn moreOne of the brightest voices on the Portland hip-hop scene is Alana Chenevert, aka The Last Artful, Dodgr. Her name is a nod to her hometown of Los Angeles, a pun on its baseball team, a reference to Oliver Twist, and it illustrates a life spent dodging bullets. Since arriving in Portland in 2013, she’s made the city her own and has quickly become a rising star. Press and fans have compared her to Chance the Rapper, Missy Elliott, and Dizzee Rascal with lyrics inspired by Sufjan Stevens. While we’re always sad to see the festival end, brilliant hip-hop delivered by a queer black woman is the perfect way to say ‘until next year.’
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