Past
Good Dang Weekend is a fundraiser, dance party, and bingo event hosted by Kye Alive of Club Alive to benefit Elbow Room, a nonprofit community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Learn moreTBA:24 concludes with an epic (FREE) afterparty at PICA, DJ'd by the legendary SHANNON F (Shannon Funchess)—the "beating heart of dark techno." On September 21, we will come together in the spirit of TBA to dance and sing, yell and laugh, and share in how it feels to be alive. Bring a friend. Dress to impress. Come as you are.
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 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 moreJoin cultural workers Alexandria Saleem and Sarah Farahat to steep in Teta’s tea. This is an invitation to grieve, nourish, and connect with what has been passed down through love and lineage, while remembering to cultivate new futures.
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 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.
Learn moreYelling Choir is a performance process that reimagines voice, presence, and power. Created by Maxx Katz, the Choir is a vehicle for experimental relational technology, using play, somatic awareness, and vocal practice to reform the psychosocial basis of community relationships.
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 moreMycelium Dreams is an ongoing, durational dance cartography and interview project initiated in 2022 by Portland dance and interdisciplinary artist Linda K. Johnson. Archival in nature, the PASTfuture interview component of the project is intent on creating an inclusive, nonhierarchical oral record of the stories of artists in the Portland community who have committed their life’s work to the field of dance.
Learn moreCurated and hosted by Carla Rossi, Carla Rossi’s Queer Horrors presents short horror films intercut with performances from Portland’s finest ghouls—plus an artist market, psychic readings, and a dance party complete with a Friday the 13th costume contest. It’ll be a scream!
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 moreGoner is a live, suspenseful choreography delving into the depths of psychological horror. Exploring alienation, migration, violence, and more, it crafts radical visual culture from a marginalized perspective and engages a new Black tradition of horror in live performance.
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 moreRave meets experimental late-night talk show at Club Alive, a multidisciplinary queer performance party. Hosted by Portland artist Kye Alive, Club Alive brings together DJs, musical acts, dance performances, live interviews, dramatic entrances, group experiments, and bizarro house band Special Permission (featuring local musician Wolfgang Black) for an unpredictable celebration of crowd power. How alive are you willing to be?
Learn moreTe Moana Meridian Conference is the ongoing public program counterpart to the experimental opera Te Moana Meridian, which centers around a speculative United Nations General Assembly Resolution to formally relocate the international prime meridian from the UK to Te Moananui-ā-Kiwa/the South Pacific Ocean.
Learn moreThis new “solo” performance by Morgan Bassichis humbly attempts to ensure that the performer Frank Maya’s legacy is no longer overlooked, while also resolving the bottomless queer search for laughter in times of crisis and for fame and father figures and intense attachment dynamics no matter how fleeting.
Learn moreFORCE! an opera in three acts is a Black femme story of interior lives and shared fantasies. What blooms in the shadows of the bureaucratic state, of carceral power? What dreams of a sisterhood with the power to disintegrate walls? Through sound, movement, and shared silences—as well as lessons learned from direct action, mutual aid, and emergent strategies—we put into practice the free worlds of our dreams.
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 moreThe Things Around Us is a solo, live-looping, music and narrative performance featuring trumpet, clarinet, everyday objects, and darkly humorous stories about other people. Composed, written, and performed by Ahamefule J. Oluo.
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