Past
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) proudly presents Enchiridion: aisle, spline, resort, sidony o’neal’s first major solo exhibition in North America. Curated by Kristan Kennedy, Artistic Director and Curator of Visual Art, PICA. Supported by Oregon Community Foundation’s Creative Heights Initiative, The Ford Family Foundation, Stephanie and Jonathan Snyder, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Learn moreState of Being PICA’s 2022 Spring Fundraiser, State of Being, is a chance to get out and BE together. This outdoor/indoor event is a time to let loose, express yourself, and raise funds in the name of contemporary art. State of Being is the excuse you’ve been waiting to don your finest dopamine duds! Power clash, layer, and experiment, but most importantly, BE YOU, COME AS YOU ARE, AND SUPPORT PICA. This is not your typical fundraiser—this is an active exchange. Parties are back, and we are all here to bring it.
Learn more100 Keyboards is a live music performance/installation featuring as the title implies over 100 keyboards. This performance focuses on the phenomenon of “interference sound," the complex distribution of sound pressure and other parameters as sound waves of the same frequency but with a different direction of transmission overlap. As each keyboard plays a sustained note of a certain pitch, and as the number of notes increases, a “moiré of sound” is created. The auditory experience is akin to weaving an individual “textile pattern" (the original meaning of “moiré") and a sound equivalent to the visual “moiré effect.”
Learn moreWhat does it mean to acknowledge spaces that we could easily dismiss? Are there possibilities for the unity of the self and the other? How do we peel off protective layers as social beings in order to revisit our core selves? How could we unlearn together?
Learn moreApplications for Precipice Fund Round 10 are now open. If you are interested in applying, we recommend you attend the upcoming Information Session, happening on Zoom, on Thursday, March 31st at 12:00 - 1:30pm PST. Facilitated by Precipice Fund staff, the info session will cover grant guidelines, eligibility, selection process, and tips for composing your application narrative and budget. There will also be time for Q&A.
Learn moreFaye Driscoll's first solo exhibition, Come On In, offers an enveloping sensory installation. Bringing the immersive experience of her performance works into the gallery, Come On In conjures states of longing and seizes desire as I take listeners on a journey that reflects upon power and presence, yearning and absence, while inviting them to reconceive their body and its limits.
Learn morePlease join PICA + CEC ArtsLink International Fellow and artist in residence Ashot Danielyan (Uzbekistan) with Reese Bowes (Portland) in their presentation of “Lessons of decay.” This is a work in progress created during a CEC Arts Link Residency in Portland. The November 6 virtual event will include introductions from the artists, the premiere of “Lessons of decay,” and a brief Q&A with the audience. This event is free to attend and will include Zoom AI captioning.
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Learn moreDáyquiri: Little Poems is a collection of poetry that has been building on itself over the course of seven years. The artist began this project at age 23, and he is now 30. The collection is meant to be an exploration of the things that orbit you at different points in your twenties: the evolution of identity, the swinging in and out, and the life experiences that still happen amidst crises.
Learn moreHong Kong-raised siblings Jennie MaryTai Liu and Simon Liu, in collaboration with Portland-raised artist Andrew Gilbert, share insights into the making of their experimental films force (2020) and Sistern (2021), both shot in Hong Kong in the midst of recent and current political turbulence, and exhibited for TBA in the form of an immersive, multi-channel installation and sound environment. The artists will be in conversation with Kristan Kennedy, PICA’s Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art.
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 moreThe October conversation would focus on the Let ‘im Move You (L’MY) community (how they've worked with local performers in tour locations and what their experiences have been, what they've learned from location changes, challenges of context that have arisen in J-Sette happening outside of original contexts)
Learn moreThis offering is a sci-fi-inspired multi-sensory stim, a personal reflection on the ways our sensitive systems intertwine with surroundings—how they collapse time, reorganize, spin out, and regulate. Apogee is climax at a distance.
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 moreWe are thrilled to announce our Fall 2021 Creative Exchange Lab artists Crystal Cortez (Portland, OR), mario lemafa (Seattle, WA), Sara Siestreem (Portland, OR), Maya Vivas (Portland, OR), and Timothy White Eagle (Seattle, WA).
Learn moreRaja Feather Kelly, a dance and performance artist and choreographer, is joined by artist and educator SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY for a discussion of the digital adaptation of Kelly’s performance HYSTERIA for TBA, a project that builds on Kelly’s previous work and continues his examinations of pop culture, Black queer subjectivity, alienation, and consumption. Kelly and holloway first met and recorded some of their conversations as part of PICA’s Spring 2021 Creative Exchange Lab residency program. Now, they reunite for this virtual TBA Institute event!
Learn moreIn Raja Feather Kelly’s HYSTERIA, Kelly continues his study of pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity. Picking up where his 2018 performance UGLY left off, Kelly re-situates himself as a glamorous, extraterrestrial entity—both alien to the world and wholly consuming its pop-cultural byproducts. HYSTERIA marks the collapse of fiction into fact, tracking the subsequent inner turmoil, confusion, and mania that Kelly sets out to exorcise.
Learn moreAT THE END OF EMPIRE: the glitching of ghosted bodies haunting, collapsing time and space. As the rumble unbounds, dust blows to sleep in the heart of those existing. Veiled figures, both on screen and embodied, perform rituals at the end of empire.
Learn moreFor the second celestial season of K.o.W 2021, we consider S/Kin as the means through which we connect and ground into our kinstillatory relationships. For TBA, we will be offering a praxis session related to kin-making and corporeal-celestial relations.
Learn moreTBA artist Eileen Isagon Skyers will share a talk covering her multifaceted practice and career in the arts. She will discuss our contemporary framework for viewing, making, and valuing art against a backdrop of rapidly shifting technology, and how that manifests in her own work and criticism about digital art and culture. Co-presented with PNCA’s MA in Critical Studies Program.
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.
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