Upcoming
For the 2026 Converge 45 Triennial, New York-based artist Trisha Baga presents MORE, a monumental immersive installation at PICA that weaves together the rise of consumer AI and the artist’s own journey into parenthood. Guest Curated by Lumi Tan.
Learn moreJoin us for the opening night of TBA at Elbow Room’s GOOD DANG WEEKNIGHT!—a bingo night and live music show/fundraiser to benefit Elbow Room, a nonprofit community art studio and gallery space focused on providing artistic mentorship, material support, and meaningful exhibition opportunities to artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Portland, OR.
Learn moreIn The Goldberg Variations, Canadian performance artist Clayton Lee freely references and entangles queer diasporic sexuality and aesthetics with classical music by Johann Sebastian Bach and with references to professional wrestler Bill Goldberg. Using deadpan humor, generosity, and a low-vibrating mischievousness to facilitate and indulge the “what-ifs” of the live encounter, The Goldberg Variations is an unhinged and reckless deep dive into power dynamics, identity, and the tensions that exist within—including a surprise twist we can’t yet disclose, but you won’t want to miss.
Learn moreSad Boys in Harpy Land is a falling-apart coming-of-age tale, a decaying bildungsroman, a semi-autobiographical tour-de-farce. Equal parts sad clown show, demented cabaret, and extended crisis of meaning, Tatarsky collages narratives of art-making and despair into an unhinged solo performance in the hellscape of the mind.
Learn moreTBA artist Alex Tatarsky joins theatre historian Kate Bredeson for a conversation about Sad Boys in Harpy Land.
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Past
Join PICA and the Hollywood Theatre for a screening of "Monk in Pieces," a new documentary about the boundary-breaking artist Meredith Monk.
Learn moreCinema Project presents selections from Madison Brookshire's Number Series, 16mm dual-projector works of shifting colors. Double projection creates an uncanny experience of color as both presence and absence.
Learn moreA random encounter with a camera on the streets of Tallinn, Estonia made choreographer and dancer Rakesh Sukesh a momentary poster boy for a right wing news channel’s campaign against immigration from Asia and Africa. What happens to his body when it is rendered into a viral, racist symbol? In because i love the diversity (this micro-attitude, we all have it), Rakesh tells the story of his own journey through the powerful semi-improvisational, trance-like movement technique that makes him such an in-demand teacher across the world. *show has brief full nudity.
Learn moreIn Preparation for Disappearances to Come is a music/dance collaboration. It is a machine to practice remembering and forgetting. It is an occasion for us to slyly, if futilely, enact strategies to sidestep the inevitability of our own future dissolution and the ephemerality of performance. It is a prompt to consider how our lives and works dissolve, replenishing the cultural compost that nourishes the future, even as we ourselves are forgotten. In Preparation for Disappearances to Come is presented by Performance Works NorthWest with the support of the PICA's SPACE Program.
Learn moreRoger Beebe returns to the road with a program of 16mm multi-projector performances celebrating the 25thanniversary of his first touring program. This evening of expanded cinema will include multiple-projector performances and essayistic videos that “explore the world of found images and the “found” landscapes of late capitalism.” With a fleet of 16mm, Super8, and video projectors, Beebe’s work touches on the themes of labor, structures and structuralism, and the real and virtual, not only in the content of the images, but also in how they appear on screen. This will be his first show in Portland since 2015.
Learn moreAlmost Everyone Is Ready: The Cinema of Stephanie Barber Presented by Cinema Project Stephanie Barber makes films and videos in which verbal communication often takes top billing, but they could also be watched for their elegant imagery alone. She is continually drawing our focus, with the intense work of her art, to the tenderest spots mostly out of reach.
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 morePart freewheeling comic lecture, part podcast, and part play, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is a thrilling ride down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia and murder mystery podcasts about a case you’ve never heard of.
Learn moreILY2 is thrilled to announce Noise / Grain, an exhibition of new works converging image, sound, and video by the Toronto-based artist Timothy Yanick Hunter. Noise / Grain will open on September 14 with a performance in the PICA Annex, co-presented by ILY2 as part of the 2024 Time-Based Art Festival. The exhibition will remain on view at ILY2 through November 9.
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 moreGranular Synthesis converges installation, sound, and video in a nonlinear presentation of digital fragments in reference to diasporic memory. The work integrates experimental sampling, splicing, and rearrangement, as well as conceptual methodologies around collapse and incompletion.
Learn moreSculptor Jess Perlitz has visions of boulders—big ones, large enough to hide behind or stack inside a museum diorama. With wry, anthropological wit, Perlitz offers her sculptures for examination in the context of two large vitrines in an academic reading room.
Learn moreTender is the nature of this immersive, dual-sited exhibition that invites us inward to experience the slow transformation of thought into moments of uncertainty, doubt, and recovery. Tenderness embodies the honesty we can bring to life, like the flow state that pulses throughout this magical collaboration.
Learn morePAM CUT presents a screening of "The Untold Tales of Tuteremoana" and a discussion with special guest actress Mere Tokorahi Boynton (Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki & Ngāi Tūhoeof Aotearoa New Zealand), who stars in the third episode. Prior to this event, Mere will be performing in Sam Hamilton’s experimental opera Te Moana Meridian as part of TBA:24. Prior to this event, Mere will be performing in Sam Hamilton’s experimental opera "Te Moana Meridian" as part of TBA:24.
Learn moreTe Moana Meridian is a major new experimental opera based on a speculative United Nations General Assembly Resolution that upends the colonial machinations embedded within our current means of determining global space and time by relocating the international prime meridian from the UK to Te Moananui-ā-Kiwa/the South Pacific Ocean.
Learn moreEqual parts survey exhibition and emergent experiment, Outside Inside World activates PNCA’s 511 Gallery as a showcase for works in the Videotones archive as well as a site for making and sharing new work.
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 moreTrue to the title, we’ll slowly share more information about each Time-Released program over the coming months. Read on to learn more.
Learn moreMake Banana Cry is a critical and destabilizing dance performance that questions Asian stereotypes while examining the transmission of cultural identity.
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 moreSeba Calfuqueo (b. 1991, Santiago, Chile) is an internationally celebrated artist of Indigenous Mapuche origin. Their work appeals to their Indigenous inheritance to propose critical reflections on the social, cultural, and political status of the Mapuche subject in contemporary Chilean society, in Latin America and the world. Calfuqueo’s work marshals, among other elements, installation, ceramic, performance, and video art to explore the cultural similarities, differences, and stereotypes produced by the melding of Indigenous and Western ways of thinking. Their work often starts from the broad field of performance art, but also extends into videos that are often exhibited later and sometimes together with elements used in the action itself.
Learn moreIn addition to major video installation, Alka domo — on view at PICA August 24 through September 24, 2023 — Seba Calfuqueo will present Flowing Like Waterfalls (2022-2023) in PICA's Annex on August 26 at 3:30 pm. Flowing Like Waterfalls is a 20-minute performance that approaches the power of water's fluidity as a means to explore the body, gender, sexuality, and the relationship of water with life, forests, and ecosystems.
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.
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