Past
Holcombe Waller sheds light on the development of Requiem Mass: LGBT / Working Title, including aesthetic constructs, conceptual underpinnings, public engagement, and partnership experiences across faith-based and queer communities. With community choir participants. With Roya Amirsoleymani, Community Engagement Manager, PICA.
Learn moreInterdisciplinary performance artist Lars Jan shares insight into his TBA performance, The Institute of Memory (TIMe), including inventive uses of technology and the personal and political histories inspiring the piece. With Robert Quillen Camp, Visiting Professor of Theatre, Lewis & Clark College.
Learn moreLos Angeles-based choreographer Milka Djordjevich asks us to abandon ‘neutrality’ and uncover our bodies’ ingrained knowledge and history. By using sensorial, perceptual, anatomical, spatial, behavioral and imaginative pathways, we will transform our individual movement patterning; play with technical structures, improvisational concepts, and choreographic frameworks; and rock out to some sweet jams. Movement; All Levels.
Learn morePICA’s signature public engagement program continues to cross disciplines and explore new thematic territory with five Festival Field Guides facilitated by leading local and visiting artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist’s social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and lively discussion; group viewing of a TBA performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. For this session join Sampada Aranke, Assistant Professor, History & Theory of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Art Institute, in exploring artist keyon gaskin's performance it's not a thing. Online artist interviews and media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art welcome. Bring a friend!
Learn moreConceived by Portland artists Sharita Towne and keyon gaskin, in collaboration with BCC: BrownHall (Black Creative Collective), GLOVES OFF will take the form of a panel discussion and community conversation on Black contemporary, experimental, and abstract arts and audiences. Featuring artists and scholars Sampada Aranke (San Francisco), Samiya Bashir (Portland), keyon gaskin (Portland), Jibade-Khalil Huffman (Los Angeles), Eileen Isagon-Skyers (Portland), and sidony o'neal (Portland).
Learn moreIn this politically and artistically timely presentation, Sampada Aranke (Asst. Professor of History and Theory of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Art Institute) examines critical and often forgotten works by black conceptual performance artists. Taking the body seriously, these artists engage violent histories against black flesh, while opening up possibilities to imagine a fugitive future.
Learn moreTBA artist Okwui Okpokwasili reflects on her TBA solo performance, Bronx Gothic, and its personal inflections. With Angela Mattox, PICA Artistic Director.
Learn moreThe Bay Area’s legendary boundary-breaker Fauxnique (the drag queen alter-ego of artist/choreographer/dancer Monique Jenkinson) leads an expedition through layers of femme artifice and authenticity. We will rigorously honor practices of drag tradition and boldly expand definitions of drag performance. Be prepared to move and WERQ! Performance; All Levels.
Learn moreLeading curators discuss the festival format as a uniquely relevant platform for global contemporary art, performance, and public engagement. With Angela Mattox, PICA's TBA Festival (Portland, OR); Jeff Khan, Performance Space (Sydney, Australia); Norman Armour (PuSh Festival, Vancouver, BC); and Vallejo Gantner (PS122 / COIL Festival, New York City). Moderated by Sara Krajewski, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum. Note: We regret that Seunghyo Lee (Festival Bo:m, Seoul) and Helen Cole (In Between Time Festival, Bristol, UK), both listed in the TBA Festival print catalog, are unable to join us.
Learn moreKarl Larsson and Pascal Prosek (Sweden) with Morgan Ritter and Gary Robbins (Portland) discuss their TBA project, Commonplace, the genesis of their collaborations, and attempts to create a book that defies its own form. With Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator, PICA.
Learn moreJoin PDX stand out performer Isaiah "Esquire" Tillman and Vogue dancer David (Dee) Yu as they teach a vogue and dance class to get you ready to serve and twirl on the runway. This class is for any level, but come ready to sweat, prance and LIVE! Performance; All Levels
Learn morePICA and Pacific Northwest College of Art's MFA in Visual Studies present a public lecture by Jibade-Khalil Huffman, an artist and the author of three books of poems: 19 Names For Our Band (2008), James Brown is Dead (2011), and Sleeper Hold (2015). Huffman's art and writing projects, which span performance, photography, poetry, and video, have been presented at MoMA/PS1; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Poetry Project; and the Hammer Museum, among others. He is a 2015-16 Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem though otherwise lives and works in Los Angeles.
Learn moreJoël Barraquiel Tan (Director of Community Engagement, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco) and Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (Assistant Professor, Theatre & Performance Studies, Reed College) will make prepared remarks that address the theme of this year’s symposium, Seniors, Sexuality & Spirituality: Art and Social Change. Remarks will be followed by a Q&A and broader.
Learn moreMammalian Diving Reflex's Artistic Director, Darren O’Donnell, provides a glimpse into the company's research and creative process; their numerous socially engaged art and performance projects (including TBA:14 performance All the Sex I’ve Ever Had); and the broader landscape and politics of art and civic engagement with Ariana Jacob, a Portland-based social practice artist.
Learn moreThe first of two TBA Festival Flights, Gender, Culture, & Experiments with Tradition reflects a range of work by artists from diverse disciplines who rigorously examine the intersections of history, culture, language, gender, and aesthetic form, while experimenting with musical, vocal, and choreographic concepts and traditions that both exude and transcend particularities of time and place.
Learn moreJoin artists, activists, and thinkers from Portland and beyond for a participation-oriented community forum exploring ideas, practices, and possibilities within the shifting terrain of art and social change. Using a small-group format, eclectic teams--including performing and visual artists, scholars of multiple disciplines, activists working within a range of sectors, LGBT Requiem Mass Think Tank participants, TBA Festival audiences, and members of the public--will gather to tackle burning issues, discuss specific projects, and devise arts-based scenarios to address local problems. Open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Learn morePICA makes transparent the creative process of a new commission and future TBA Festival project, Holcombe Waller’s LGBT Requiem Mass. Requiring extensive cross-cultural engagement across LGBT, faith-based, and contemporary art communities, PICA and Waller have convened a think tank of national and local specialists in various areas of queer and LGBT activism and advocacy; progressive, inclusive, and affirming churches; queer spirituality studies; and socially engaged art and performance. For this public roundtable, Waller will introduce LGBT Requiem Mass's broader artistic vision and political aspiration at this stage of development, while members of the think tank will share highlights from their previous day's convening. Together, the Roundtable conversation will launch a more expansive, day-long symposium that draws on and builds from some of its key questions, ideas, and critical concerns.
Learn moreMorocco-based choreographer Meryem Jazouli offers a workshop for contemporary dancers that proposes shared time and space to discover the realm where the poetic and vulnerable coincide. The class will start off with a warmup to activate the senses, followed by a dance Jazouli will share that each person will experience and personalize while imparting it with a unique meaning.
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome.
Learn moreHalory Goerger and Antoine Defoort dissect GERMINAL’s philosophical investigations into a staging of the construction and deconstruction of society, civilization, and the world. Moderated by Kate Bredeson, Assistant Professor of Theater, Reed College.
Learn moreWE ARE THE INSTITUTION: after inside/outside there is this mass of people. We are already whole. We're all here together. Administrators need to be involved in the uselessness of practice. Beyond outcome and object, there is a culture of questions, a pursuit of pleasure, an acceptance of our inevitable wasting. This workshop will create a non-utilitarian space for the human basis of art. Though open to all, this workshop is designed for art’s administrators and artists working in concert in the hot bed of the studio. Come, be useless, be pleasure, be awkward, be sincere, be wasted.
Learn moreExperimentalists Liz Harris (Grouper) and Paul Clipson discuss HYPNOSIS DISPLAY, a their cross-disciplinary collaboration of live sound performance and 16 mm film. They are joined by Andrew Neerman of Beacon Sound, a record store/music label in Portland.
Learn moreIn their individual and collaborative work, Hilary Clark and Luke George share an investigation into the ways we exist, move, relate, and experience ourselves and one another, and how that translates into presence and performance. In this workshop, we will consider how to develop tools, methods and questions for ourselves towards openness, vulnerability, rebellion, ability and perceived lack of ability, and about how being a performer is also being a maker and an audience. The workshop will include improvisation as a practice and tool to know our bodies while generating energy and depth.
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome. Limited to 25 participants.
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