Upcoming
Join 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 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 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 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.
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Past
Good Dang Weekend is a fundraiser, dance party, and bingo event hosted by Kye Alive of Club Alive to benefit Elbow Room, a nonprofit community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Learn moreOn September 21, join TBA:24 artists Javaad Alipoor and Autumn Knight for a free-moving conversation on their unique and unconventional uses of theater to investigate our understanding of reality. Moderated by Jason N. Le, Curatorial Fellow, PICA.
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 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 moreMycelium Dreams is an ongoing, durational dance cartography and interview project initiated in 2022 by Portland dance and interdisciplinary artist Linda K. Johnson. Archival in nature, the PASTfuture interview component of the project is intent on creating an inclusive, nonhierarchical oral record of the stories of artists in the Portland community who have committed their life’s work to the field of dance.
Learn moreTe Moana Meridian Conference is the ongoing public program counterpart to the experimental opera Te Moana Meridian, which centers around a speculative United Nations General Assembly Resolution to formally relocate the international prime meridian from the UK to Te Moananui-ā-Kiwa/the South Pacific Ocean.
Learn morePlease join us on Saturday, May 11, 2024, for Mapping the Pipeline Education Series, created and organized by Buddy Terry and Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr.
Learn moreMMIR: Keeping Us Safe: Community Safety Strategies from PDX Native Community organizers.
Learn moreJoin us for an in-person group listening session of the new audio documentary about Black Cross Healthcare Collective (BCHC).
Learn moreArtist: Power and Practices is a stimulating community conversation that will bring together five of Portland's most innovative creators to discuss the power that visual storytellers hold and the ethics around their process.
Learn moreThis symposium will bring together panels of local community leaders for discussions on the history of police violence and racist policing in Portland, ongoing attempts to hold police accountable and reform policing practices, and burgeoning efforts to radically reimagine public safety in our communities.
Learn moreArtist Panel Discussion Moderator: Mac Smiff Participants: Tai Carpenter, Robert Clarke, Alfredo Jaar, Kimberly Moreland, Sandy Rodriguez, Master Artist Michael Bernard Stevenson Jr., and Robert Trafford
Learn moreThis exhibition examines policing practices in Portland, Oregon, and their relationship to longer local and national histories of oppression through the lens of artists who call Portland their home and those who played witness and documentarian from across the globe.
Learn moreIn 2001, artist and filmmaker K8 Hardy set out to document her daily outfits on video.
Learn moreIn conjunction with the video installation Alka domo and performance Flowing Like Waterfalls, join us on August 29 at 6:00 pm for a panel discussion with Seba Calfuqueo, artist Malcolm Peacock, and radical educator Vo Vo. Moderated by Converge 45's Derek Franklin.
Learn moreWhat does it mean to acknowledge spaces that we could easily dismiss? Are there possibilities for the unity of the self and the other? How do we peel off protective layers as social beings in order to revisit our core selves? How could we unlearn together?
Learn morePlease join PICA + CEC ArtsLink International Fellow and artist in residence Ashot Danielyan (Uzbekistan) with Reese Bowes (Portland) in their presentation of “Lessons of decay.” This is a work in progress created during a CEC Arts Link Residency in Portland. The November 6 virtual event will include introductions from the artists, the premiere of “Lessons of decay,” and a brief Q&A with the audience. This event is free to attend and will include Zoom AI captioning.
Learn moreHong Kong-raised siblings Jennie MaryTai Liu and Simon Liu, in collaboration with Portland-raised artist Andrew Gilbert, share insights into the making of their experimental films force (2020) and Sistern (2021), both shot in Hong Kong in the midst of recent and current political turbulence, and exhibited for TBA in the form of an immersive, multi-channel installation and sound environment. The artists will be in conversation with Kristan Kennedy, PICA’s Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art.
Learn moreThe October conversation would focus on the Let ‘im Move You (L’MY) community (how they've worked with local performers in tour locations and what their experiences have been, what they've learned from location changes, challenges of context that have arisen in J-Sette happening outside of original contexts)
Learn moreIn this featured panel conversation, Elisheba Johnson (curator, Wa Na Wari, Seattle) facilitates a conversation with vanessa german (Pittsburgh) and Mia Imani (Berlin) about their individual TBA performances (The Blue Walk and Mourning Rituals, respectively) and their broader artistic practices. While highly distinct, both german and Imani engage—through iterative processes, movement rituals, place-based research, and public participation—the specificities of space and site, erasure of histories and narratives, and possibilities for gathering and healing in the context of Portland’s Black communities and spatial geographies.
Learn morerise x fall is a collaboration of Portland-based artists rubén garcía marrufo, jaleesa johnston, and maximiliano. Taking the form of live performance, object, and large-scale, multi-channel video installation, their TBA project AT THE END OF EMPIRE is made and presented by marrufo and maximiliano. For this Institute event, they are joined by collaborator johnston for a conversation about the project’s process, ideas, and concerns, as well as rise x fall’s broader collective work.
Learn moreWe are thrilled to announce our Fall 2021 Creative Exchange Lab artists Crystal Cortez (Portland, OR), mario lemafa (Seattle, WA), Sara Siestreem (Portland, OR), Maya Vivas (Portland, OR), and Timothy White Eagle (Seattle, WA).
Learn moreRaja Feather Kelly, a dance and performance artist and choreographer, is joined by artist and educator SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY for a discussion of the digital adaptation of Kelly’s performance HYSTERIA for TBA, a project that builds on Kelly’s previous work and continues his examinations of pop culture, Black queer subjectivity, alienation, and consumption. Kelly and holloway first met and recorded some of their conversations as part of PICA’s Spring 2021 Creative Exchange Lab residency program. Now, they reunite for this virtual TBA Institute event!
Learn moreTBA artist Eileen Isagon Skyers will share a talk covering her multifaceted practice and career in the arts. She will discuss our contemporary framework for viewing, making, and valuing art against a backdrop of rapidly shifting technology, and how that manifests in her own work and criticism about digital art and culture. Co-presented with PNCA’s MA in Critical Studies Program.
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