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 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 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 more
Past
Throughout 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.
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 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 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 moreWhat does it mean to have a critically engaged nervous system? How might the practice of following this intuitive and predictive technology cultivate possibilities for meaning-making and self-knowing? In this workshop Hannah and Emily will offer various scores and practices from their collaboration. Participants will be invited to attune to their sensations with attention toward nervous system awareness. This workshop will prioritize personal agency, needs, and boundaries for engagement.
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.
Learn moreEmily Johnson and collaborators on her TBA project Being Future Being—including Raven Chacon, Drew Michael, and Holly Mititquq Nordlum—will share insights into their creative and collaborative processes in making a work of performance, installation, sound, and ancestral landscapes that propose new futures and relationalities with each other and our world.
Learn morePortland-based curator and writer Ashley Stull Meyers facilitates a conversation with Garrick Imatani and Travis Stewart (Chinook, Kalapuya, Rogue River) about The Drift, the culmination of their multi-year project that engages questions of repatriation, healing, and Indigenous futures through virtual reality, publication, digital fabrication, and photography. Imatani and Stewart will be joined by special guest Dr. Brook Colley (Wasco, Warm Springs, Eastern Cherokee; Enrolled: Eastern Band of Cherokee), Assoc. Professor & Chair of the Native American Studies Program at Southern Oregon University.
Learn morePICA Artistic Director & Curator of Public Engagement, Roya Amirsoleymani, joins Javaad Alipoor to discuss the many layers of Alipoor’s Rich Kids: A History of Shopping Malls in Tehran, a groundbreaking work of live theatre adapted to the digital realm. Structured through interactive multimedia, driven by a compelling narrative, and embracing of internet-aware art and web culture, Rich Kids offers sharply nuanced critical commentary on geopolitics and the social conditions of our time. This conversation will unpack this multifaceted work, its cultural influences, and Alipoor’s broader practice in experimental theatre-making.
Learn moreSUNDAY MORNING WORKSHOPS
Learn moreCONVERSATION with Dao Strom and Elisa Harkins with Pablo de Ocampo
Learn moreFor the TBA Institute, home school will curate and host Friday afternoon virtual presentations and discussions. home school is a free pop-up art school co-run by manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis, in its fifth year of curriculum presenting multimedia, genre-nonconforming edutainment and creating welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art.
Learn moreCONVERSATION with Shawné Michaelain Holloway and Kendra Jayne Patrick
Learn moreFor the TBA Institute, home school will curate and host Friday afternoon virtual presentations and discussions. home school is a free pop-up art school co-run by manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis, in its fifth year of curriculum presenting multimedia, genre-nonconforming edutainment and creating welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art.
Learn moreTBA:20 Post-Show Q&A’s
Learn moreCONVERSATION with Demian DinéYazhi’ and Kevin Holden with Joseph M. Pierce
Learn moreFor the TBA Institute, home school will curate and host Friday afternoon virtual presentations and discussions. home school is a free pop-up art school co-run by manuel arturo abreu and Victoria Anne Reis, in its fifth year of curriculum presenting multimedia, genre-nonconforming edutainment and creating welcoming contexts for critical engagement with contemporary art.
Learn more