Upcoming
The Walks is an app with a collection of audio walks by Rimini Protokoll. Each walk is a short audio experience that covers specific locations in your city and invites you to rediscover and interact with your environment.
Learn moreOur Bar Garden is back—and this time, it’s a block party! We are closing down Hancock Street and bringing back your favorite hangout spot. Join us every day and night of the festival in the TBA:26 Bar Garden for shared beverages and meals that bring artists, crew, and community together.
Learn moreJoin us for the final morning of the Festival for our beloved Pancake Breakfast.
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Past
During TBA:25, come gather in PICA’s Bar Garden for shared meals that bring artists, crew, and community together. PICA’s Bar Garden is home for the TBA:25 Opening Night Dinner, pre-show box meals with artists, and post-show chats over a drink.
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 moreThe 2024 Time-Based Art Festival opens by honoring the Portland tradition of First Thursday with a come one, come all jam session with Videotones, Elbow Room’s neurodiverse digital media collective. No musical ability required—bring yourself, an instrument,* your voice. Come make a sound or just witness our giant, undulating community band.
Learn moreA creation of Black narrative, an offering to Black lineage, Black Feast is a culinary event celebrating Black artists and writers through food. Black Feast: Black Imagerial, envisioned by artists Intisar Abioto, Akela Jaffi, and Salimatu Amabebe with creative support from Annika Hansteen-Izora, is a culinary creation and site-specific performance on Black-stewarded land inspired by the legacies of Black movement artists in Portland and the Pacific Northwest.
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 moreLet 'im Move You is a series of works choreographed by jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham that stem from their decade-long research into J-Sette performance. Intervention brings together a group of Black dancers for a live outdoor performance work on sidewalks and in alleyways in historically or predominantly Black neighborhoods.
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 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 moreMia Imani interrogates the ways that disenfranchised communities can heal individual, communal, and societal trauma by creating works that live in between the worlds of art and science.
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 moreTHE BLUE WALK is a spectacle of LOVE. It activates RAGE, TENDERNESS, REST, RHYTHM and THE HOLINESS OF THE BLACK BODY ON THE LIVING PLANET as a healing channel of release and power.
Learn morePICA is pleased to present deadbird and can anybody help me hold this body by New York-based artist devynn emory on May 27-30, 2021.
Learn moreALL - a physical poem of protest investigates the individual and shared agency of choreography in social, political, and artistic spaces. An epic durational community performance, it considers the force of the protesting body and human mass through the meditative action of walking and running in circles.
Learn moreThis performance takes the form of a slow walk through a section of the city. All are welcome to participate. Please contact the TBA Box Office for any questions about or requests for mobility or accessibility accommodation. Audience will be asked to remove their shoes during parts of this performance. Please that this performance is not able to be ASL interpreted or have other accommodations for Deaf and Hard of Hearing audiences.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE: Can resistance be choreographed? Pushit!, a site-responsive performance by NIC Kay, is a meditation on emotional labor and the impossibility of the stage as a place of freedom for the Black performer. This work is part of a larger set of exercises in getting-well-soon.
Learn moreA weekend-long, build-it-ourselves outdoor modern art museum, artist Libby Werbel orchestrates an exhibition in the heart of the city, inviting an impressive roster of performers to engage with the space. PMOMA draws a direct link between Portland’s lack of a major contemporary art museum and the impressive output of our creative community. Do Portland’s quickly shifting economic demands endanger the cultural equity essential to maintaining the quality of any major city? Is it possible to have a museum without an established infrastructure to support it? What does a museum look like when fashioned through our ideal ethical processes?
Learn moreThere’s no place like home… gather with us at the PICA family table with friends and artists for an unforgettable feast from Stacey Givens of The Side Yard Farm.
Learn moreNIGHT TRIPPER is at once an outdoor ritual, social event, forest walk, and concert that unfolds in the theatre of the outdoors at the first glow of dusk. The piece features dancers, art objects, a local choir, and potent forest spirits. Ancient mythology meets a vision of contemporary life where dreams and reality merge into an otherworldly tale. NIGHT TRIPPER explores the idea of nature as a place of healing, destruction, immanence, and transcendence.
Learn moreJoin PICA and Know Your City as we look back on PICA’s 20-year history through a tour of central Portland! Together, we’ll see sites that shaped our colorful past; share memories of intimate moments and outrageous spectacles; and consider the city’s arts, urban, and economic landscape through the lens of PICA’s pioneering itinerant model. We’ll visit our place of origin; venues for groundbreaking exhibitions and performances; infamous parties and costume balls; early TBA sites transformed from raw warehouses to magical festival hubs; and more. Guest speakers will share unforgettable stories of how PICA and Portland have evolved—and what it means to our future as artists, an arts institution, and a city.
Learn morePositioning three Chrysler minivans atop 42 inflatable airbeds, Sugarmann creates a slow-motion wreck.
Learn more“Pensotti has a fine facility with irony, with the fine balance between comedy and tragedy.” —British Theatre Guide
Learn morePICA's seventh annual convergence of contemporary performance, dance, music, new media and visual arts projects in Portland, Oregon, USA.
Learn moreOver thirty local musicians, composers, and sound artists have mapped out their favorite sonic spaces in Portland, creating an "audio tour" of the most interesting naturally occurring acoustic landscapes, concluding in a one-day live concert.
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