Past
In The Brutal Joy: A Lecture, Justine A. Chambers unfurls Black vernacular dance alongside sartorial gesture—as intellectual discourse, reverie, and devotion to Black living.
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 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 us for an in-person group listening session of the new audio documentary about Black Cross Healthcare Collective (BCHC).
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 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 moreHow can art be transformative—for individuals, groups, and society? Prem Krishnamurthy explores these and other questions by sharing recent projects across design, writing, and experimental pedagogy. Taking each project as a rehearsal for the next—and as a way to explore different scales of transformation—his approach prototypes forms of connection and collaboration embedded within contemporary artistic practice. Using writing, music, movement, and conversation (+ karaoke!), this participatory event opens up polyvocal ways of working in and on the world.
Learn moreDeriving from the antique alchemistic concept of the four humors, melancholia has been a subject in science, culture, and art for centuries. Originally seen as the result of an imbalance of one of the four humors connected to a specific temperament called “black bile,” melancholia was connected to a deep sense of sadness that was believed to lead to depression, insanity, and later genius in the arts. Based in an auto-biographical collage this lecture will talk about death, birth, and past-potential-futures, proposing Black Melancholia as a place of solace and care for Black Life.
Learn moreRenowned artist, filmmaker, and writer Zach Blas will present a brand new performance lecture as part of the NIGHT SCHOOL program for this year's TBA Festival. Blas’ engagement in Portland is in partnership with the MA in Critical Studies program at Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University.
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 moreTBA Guest Scholars Andrew J. Brown/Sister James (Asst. Professor, Performance Practice, Fairhaven College/Western Washington University) and Shawna Lipton (Chair, MA Critical Studies, Pacific NW College of Art) present 30-minute back-to back lectures on their current research, thinking, and reflections on Festival projects, performances, and experiences. Drinks and light refreshments will be served.
Learn morePICA’s current cohort of Creative Exchange Lab artists in residence will make brief presentations about their current projects and broader artistic practice. Fall 2018 Lab artists include: Gordon Hall (NYC); Victoria Hunt (Australia); C. Davida Ingram; Tiona Nekkia McClodden (Philadelphia, PA); Roza Moshtaghi (Oslo/Tehran); Pepper Pepper (Portland, OR); and ariella tai (Portland, OR). A Q&A moderated by PICA’s Artistic Directors to follow. Don’t miss this festival favorite!
Learn moreTBA Guest Scholar C. Riley Snorton (Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Chicago) will present a lecture on his current research at the intersection of Black, Africana, trans, queer, and performance studies. A distinguished interdisciplinary scholar and writer, Snorton is the author of Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Co-presented with PNCA’s MA in Critical Studies Program.
Learn moreThis spring, rapper 2 Chainz announced his “Pretty Girls <3 Trap Music” tour featuring a Gospel Choir (Trap Choir). Church in the Trap House, in conversation with Josef Sorret’s “Spirit in the Dark”, explores the religious themes and aesthetics in contemporary trap music, and what happens when the lines of sacred and secular are blurred, removed, and combined.
Learn moreTBA:17 Guest Scholars d.a. carter and Robin Deacon present back-to-back lectures that engage their current research, practice, ideas, and questions.
Learn moreTBA:17 Guest Scholars Lydia Brawner and Keith Hennessy present back-to-back lectures that engage their current research, practice, ideas, and questions.
Learn moreJunaid Sarieddeen is co-founder of Beirut’s Zoukak Theatre Company, founded in 2006 to develop an engaged professional theatre practice with a commitment to creativity as a form of resistance. Junaid will position Zoukak as a case study to illuminate the broader landscape of art and politics in Lebanon, sharing the origins of the company as a platform for contemporary performance and vehicle for social change, in a country lacking adequate public and cultural policy and haunted by cycles of ceaseless crisis.
Learn moreTBA Guest Scholar Maya Mikdashi (Dept of Women's & Gender Studies, Rutgers University) traces the history of the modern Lebanese state through an engagement with the archives of the country's high court. Ethnography of daily life at the courthouse is coupled with archival research in order to think more critically about mainstream Lebanese history and technologies of research, census taking, and the politics of identity.
Learn morePICA welcomes ten artists who will be in residence throughout TBA as part of our Creative Exchange Lab program. Twice a year, the Creative Exchange Lab convenes 7–10 local, national, and international artists who spend three weeks immersed in research, new project development, and idea exchange.
Learn moreCarlos Motta will speak about his recent videos, installations, sculptural works, and the upcoming symposium Nefandus: Colonial Sexual Alterity and Histories for the Future, which he is co-convening with historian Pablo Bedoya at the Pérez Art Museum (PAMM) in Miami. These projects investigate pre-conquest and colonial sexualities, a topic that has traditionally held a marginal place on contemporary artistic, academic, political, and cultural agendas. Motta’s practice suggest that the dissemination of knowledge about sexuality and gender in the colonial period may prove important to understand the conditions of sexual and gender politics in the present.
Learn moreFor the first time, we've invited six visiting and local scholars and artists to immerse themselves in TBA as an experimental site for critical inquiry, engaged research, and intellectual exchange with artists and audiences. In this program of brief presentations followed by Q&A, our inaugural TBA Guest Scholars will share their current academic and artistic research, critical questions, and deep reflections spanning disciplines and forms. Catch our our Guest Scholars in action throughout the festival as lecturers, conversation and panel moderators, Field Guide facilitators, essayists, bloggers, manifesto-makers, and resident provocateurs.
Learn moreIn this provocative performative lecture, renowned artist, curator, and educator Marc Bamuthi Joseph uses poem and image to catalog his arc from working on issues of environment in West Oakland to premiering a 6-week installation for Creative Time in New York City's Central Park. The 7-year journey in between describes an individual and collective prototype for uncovering narratives of black joy in these American hours of chaos. Along the way, Bamuthi will touch on the ethics of hip-hop generation organizing; as the true frontline organizers of the current Black Lives Matter movement are women, gender neutral, or queer, we are faced with the question of how the politics of the dance floor become inert when exposed to the politics of social liberation.
Learn more