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.
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Past
Over the last several decades, textile artist Freddie Robins has earned a reputation as a radical conceptualist whose hand- and machine- made tapestries, sculptures, and chimerical assemblages are as playfully cheeky as they are political. In Apotropaic, many of Robins’ recent assemblages are composed of the soft and, at times, unwieldy remains of other projects, coupled with found stones and other natural objects, as well as treasures from her vast collection of things past.
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 moreJasmine Orpilla (performer and composer) and Asher Hartman (director and writer) make Blessed with Switch, an unnerving hacking and syncing of language as it cuts into the geo-psychical feminine.
Learn moreInebria me is a new, experimental opera by acclaimed LA-based musician and performance artist San Cha that queers cisgender and heteronormative tropes of telenovela and celebrates the liberating power of ascendant relationships. Led by a visionary, bicoastal, queer of color creative team, Inebria me’s live sound score—with influences from ranchera, cumbia, punk, classical, and electro—merges with bold vocal performances and innovative theatrical design to create a powerful political and poetic statement for opera’s modern stage.
Learn moreIn DADS, Elby and Shane are confronted with the largest demon they have yet to face: their purpose. This deeply existential and heartfelt dance odyssey between two platonic lovers interrogates queer culture and Elby and Shane’s relationships to their fathers, all while trying to figure out their role in making the world a better place.
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 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 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 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 the 2024 Artists’ Biennial, presented by Oregon Contemporary, Bean Gilsdorf presents an experimental lecture-performance that enmeshes facts, figures, memes, and clichés about the arts with key theories from psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.
Learn moreDo Not Resist (2016): Thursday, April 18, 7:00 p.m. Short: Conditioned Response (2017)
Learn moreAlien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse (2013): Thursday, April 4, 7:00 p.m. Short: Just a Dog (2016)
Learn moreArresting Power: Resisting Police Violence in Portland, Oregon (2015): Thursday, March 21, 7:00 p.m. Short: State of Oregon (2017)
Learn moreReimagining Safety (2023): Thursday, March 7, 7:00 p.m. Short: Is Portland Dying? (2024) Q&A with directors Matthew Solomon and Cory Elia, moderated by Alex Vitale
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 moreDB Amorin's "long shadow" is a 45-minute soundwalk composition inspired by the desire to return to that which may no longer be familiar to us. The layered audio experience, drawing on the artist’s memories of the Ko’olau mountain range, the transition of season, and the longing for vanishing eras, is designed to trace the path of the MAX Red Line from the urban center of Portland to the Portland International Airport as a soundtrack for the movement towards unreachable places.
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