Upcoming
Memento Mori in the Dreamatorium is a 55-minute demonstration of Michelle Ellsworth’s best thinking on how to prepare for death, including one’s own and one’s dear one’s.
Learn moreThis final installment in Allie Hankins’ performance series, By My Own Hand, queers autobiography through examinations of manipulation, featuring dancers Linda Austin, claire barrera, keyon gaskin, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Through strategies of deconstruction, distillation, resurrection, and re-membering, INVISIBLE TOUCH invites audiences into an architecture of alteration—a shifting field of entanglement and transformation—to confront notions of finality, authorship, and perception of self.
Learn moreThis is a work in progress of an interdisciplinary performance project that examines Sarai’s experiences of love as they are formed through risk, trust, memory, and cultural inheritance. Drawing from lived encounters and personal histories, this piece considers how intimacy can manifest in unconventional, high-stakes, and spiritually resonant forms. Situated at the intersection of dance, live action, and visual documentation, the project reflects on love as a series of embodied negotiations shaped by vulnerability, autonomy, and relational exchange.
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 moreUsing an improvised language of disintegration, How does it feel to look at nothing is an opera of the elemental, of pre-deities, of illusions of containment, and of transitional states. Visionary composer-performers, multi-instrumentalists, vocalists, and life partners Holland Andrews and yuniya edi kwon co-create this work of composition, improvisation, dance, ritual, and stunning sculptural and visual imagery to explore the forces and conditions that compel life’s emergence, and the spiritual act of meaning-making during epochs of decay.
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 moreSmall Songs (2025) is a 39-minute experimental short film accompanied by an album, also titled Small Songs. This companion piece includes short-form synthesizer recordings that received a limited-edition vinyl release in 2023.
Learn moreJoin us on Sept. 12 for the screening of By My Own Hand, Part 4: MELODY, a solo work that engages the biomechanics of voice and an interweaving of movement, sound, and specter. As if intoning an elegy to her past selves, Allie conjures a space alive with poltergeist activity—dancing and singing within an intricate tapestry of wails, laughter, overtones, and unplaceable sounds. At once methodical and mundane, otherworldly and operatic, the work lives between elegy and manifesto, between haunted house and an architecture of alteration.
Learn moreSubsisting on car-toasted Pop-Tarts, Michelle Ellsworth and Brian Rogers will drive all day, and edit all night, while weeping their way from Boulder, CO to Queens, NY to PICA, and back again.
Learn moreSeattle-based artist Kole Galbraith (Sinixt/Peoria) presents Q'əssápiˀ kəsˁác'əc' snk'əl'íp'. Foraging sounds and textures in the Okanagan and Columbia Basin, Galbraith uncovers latent sonic capabilities and hidden histories. Additionally, Galbraith will be joined by musicians Lori Goldston on the cello and Noel Kennon on viola.
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Past
FEAR - the joint album from Jared Mattson of The Mattson 2 and Ruban Nielson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra - was recorded in June of 2024. All recording and mixing took place in Palm Springs. Mastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios in London.
Learn moreJoin us at PICA, AKA Portland Institute for Contemporary Athletics, for an evening of competitive art created by an all-star mashup of artists and athletes, scored by a panel of acclaimed art and sports professionals! Join PICA and cheer on your favorite teams, experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
Learn moreJoin us on Thursday, June 18 at 7 PM for the Oregon Premiere of Gasp!, a theatrical performance by Colin Self about queer ancestry, spiritual guidance, and the spirit of play.
Learn moreQueer performance artist Jibz Cameron, best known for her multimedia alter ego Dynasty Handbag invites you to an evening of performance, film, and readings celebrating the debut of her memoir. Entitled Hell in a Handbag.
Learn moreAllie Hankins’ By My Own Hand is a 5-Part series of performances that began in 2022, culminating with Part 5, which will be presented during PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival in September 2026. PICA will be hosting a series of free screenings of Parts 1–4 leading up to the live premiere. Please join us for the first screening on Monday, March 2, 2026, at 7:30 PM in PICA’s Annex. Allie Hankins and her collaborators will be in attendance.
Learn moreThis event features contributors to EARTH TO YOU: a compilation of guitar players responding to a short story about a guitar player by Sara Jaffe, as well as a reading by Sara and possible special guests.
Learn morePortland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) is thrilled to announce Body on Me, a group exhibition by Cameron Clayborn, .Compost Cooperative (Tabitha Nikolai, Myra Lilith Day, garima thakur, Zanna Kerrigan, and Carly Barton), and Vishal Jugdeo, curated by Kristan Kennedy, PICA Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art. Taking the human body and its many negotiations as its conceptual starting point, the presentation features media-based works that cross photography, installation, video, and video game technology and design. Throughout the exhibition, artists investigate digitally-mediated imagery of the natural world and human form in conversation with technological interventions. Body on Me will open with a performance by Clayborn on October 18, and will remain on view through December 20, 2025.
Learn moreA narrator searches for the shape of the universe amidst the ruins of 1980s material culture—bikini babes, Saturday morning cartoons, and the erotic overlap in between. Commercial detritus and degraded three-dimensional scans invoke feelings of memory and decay, while psychedelic mycelial rainbows provide hope and humor.
Learn moreAn evolving, experimental Black movement and sound sensorial experience crafted with local artists.
Learn moreIn a world where Manifest Destiny and “white” European immigrants definitely did not commit genocide to force colonialism and rewrite history in order to establish a country that treats corporations as people over Indigenous populations…comes a night of perspectives and stories from the original people who call these lands HOME.
Learn moreIn 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 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 moreHorizon is the perceived line where sky meets Earth—a locator in constant motion. Horizon is a dance.
Learn moreOmni Rail is an ambisonic, walk-through instrument designed from the stairwells, railings, and cable system of Portland’s historic 511 Building, transforming the architecture itself into a resonant body. The instrument is its own speaker system, both metaphorically and physically.
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 moreNOTHING#15: a bluff is the third part of Knight’s series. This performance presents Knight alone, responding improvisationally to a mostly empty space, its features, and its audiences.
Learn moreAutumn Knight’s performances create spaces for intimacy between the audience and performer. Her series NOTHING#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff is a three-part investigation into the Italian concept of “dolce far niente,” or “the sweetness of doing nothing.”
Learn moreOsten Cetto : Four Snakes is a new multimedia performance from Mvskoke sisters Olivia and Celeste Camfield alongside collaborator Woodrow Hunt. Through movement as an offering, live music, film, and tattoo’s relationship to body and shape, the performers explore the relations and abstractions between stories of the Alien, Mvskoke stories of beyond the stars, and themselves as family navigating space. The performance is accompanied by a program of short films from Indigenous filmmakers.
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 moreThe first installment of Autumn Knight’s performance series NOTHING#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff, NOTHING#15: a bar enacts a social experiment that transforms PICA’s warehouse space into a host club, where a multitude of performers take on the task of provoking desire and exchanging acts of care with audience members.
Learn moreIn this performance, artist JJJJJerome Ellis presents portions of their latest project, Aster of Ceremonies. Using piano, saxophone, electronics, and voice, they perform excerpts from Benediction, a devotional song cycle attending to eighteenth and nineteenth century Black runaway slaves who stuttered.
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