After nearly twelve wild and wonderful years, December 31, 2023 will be my last day on staff at PICA. This moment is beyond bittersweet. PICA and Portland’s art communities are the greatest gift. As a curator, and as a human, I grew up here. From 28 to 40; from intern to artistic director; from shuttered high school to downtown loft to industrial warehouse; from our tenth TBA Festival to our twentieth; from public programs to visual art to dance to sound; from Summer Symposium to Precipice Fund to TBA Institute to Crucial Bonding to Field Guide to Night School; from Gordon Hall to Carlos Motta to No Human Involved to Remembering to Remember to Make Banana Cry; from one beautiful Creative Exchange Lab cohort to the next. 

My realest art education, and many of my dearest friendships, have come through PICA’s artists, audiences, colleagues, and a fiercely dedicated staff and board that continues to move PICA forward. Even more than how to think about or curate contemporary art, PICA taught me how to feel and be. PICA was my first grown up art job. PICA is where I was mentored, and where I was seen, understood, and honored as a curator. PICA is where my loneliness and anger at the art world’s whiteness and elitism was heard. PICA is where I became both devoted to and disenchanted with nonprofit arts. PICA is where I learned to own my mistakes and do better. PICA is where I fell in love with sound and dance. PICA is where I fell in love. PICA is where my best friend Ernie and I spent our sweetest moments. And PICA is where, in the tumult of 2020, everyone on staff cared for my projects, and carried me, when Ernie died. 

This transition is a healthy one. I am ready to move on. To let PICA, and to let myself, become. To make space for new and different voices and ideas. I am curious about and confident in PICA’s future, in the bold artistic vision and social values it will sustain, and the ways it will change and grow for the better. My next chapter begins at year end, when I will relocate with my beloved partners to rural Washington to slow down a bit; to pursue my own creative projects; to build an independent curatorial, writing, and arts management practice; to lay the foundation for establishing a near-future artist residency; and to see what comes. While I might be departing to freelance from the forest, I am not leaving the field, just exploring new ways of relating to art and artists, to work and labor, to service and hospitality, to space and time, to a sense of self. 

Thank you for being part of my PICA journey. For your enthusiasm, encouragement, and openness. For showing up. For saying yes. For questions, critique, conversation, collaboration. For being here, there, everywhere we went together. I acknowledge and thank Kristy Edmunds, Victoria Frey, Angela Mattox, Erin Boberg Doughton, Kristan Kennedy, and Reuben Roqueñi for believing in me, supporting me, and co-stewarding PICA alongside me in my time here. 

This organization, this city, this local, national, and international community are forever with me. I will always return to PICA–for performances, exhibitions, festivals, parties, dinners, gatherings, a sense of home. I will see you in the gallery and theater, at a festival, on the dance floor, and maybe, one day, in the woods off the Olympic Peninsula, where a door will always be open. 

With love,
Roya