Past
Holcombe Waller’s Requiem Mass: LGBT / Working Title is a ceremonial choral work that deeply explores contemporary faith, advocacy through art, and collective catharsis. Performed in historic Trinity Episcopal Cathedral with an all-abilities community choir drawn from all walks of life towards the project’s mission, Requiem Mass is an emotional and personal work invoking remembrance and peace for the dead who have suffered persecution for their sexual orientation or gender expression. Requiem Mass was additionally informed by research into the pivotal gay history from the 1980s through present day and by community engagement that has included working with experts in liturgical music, queer theory, faith-based equality initiatives as well as over 100 participants in a series of choral workshops with Waller over the past year.
Learn moreLeading curators discuss the festival format as a uniquely relevant platform for global contemporary art, performance, and public engagement. With Angela Mattox, PICA's TBA Festival (Portland, OR); Jeff Khan, Performance Space (Sydney, Australia); Norman Armour (PuSh Festival, Vancouver, BC); and Vallejo Gantner (PS122 / COIL Festival, New York City). Moderated by Sara Krajewski, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum. Note: We regret that Seunghyo Lee (Festival Bo:m, Seoul) and Helen Cole (In Between Time Festival, Bristol, UK), both listed in the TBA Festival print catalog, are unable to join us.
Learn moreKarl Larsson and Pascal Prosek (Sweden) with Morgan Ritter and Gary Robbins (Portland) discuss their TBA project, Commonplace, the genesis of their collaborations, and attempts to create a book that defies its own form. With Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator, PICA.
Learn moreJoin PDX stand out performer Isaiah "Esquire" Tillman and Vogue dancer David (Dee) Yu as they teach a vogue and dance class to get you ready to serve and twirl on the runway. This class is for any level, but come ready to sweat, prance and LIVE! Performance; All Levels
Learn moreOPENING NIGHT: The influential and relentlessly relevant rock band of mythical standing Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks kick off TBA:15 with a free concert for all! Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks are veteran Portland-based musicians Joanna Bolme, Mike Clark, Jake Morris, and frontman Stephen Malkmus.
Learn moreOPENING NIGHT DINNER AT THE WORKS! To kick off the first night of TBA:15, this year's Opening Night Dinner guests will enjoy a sneak peek of the Festival's visual art program and a champagne toast before being whisked away to dine at our TBA:15 central hub. This year’s dinner will highlight everything from the season’s bounty, expertly prepared with love by the accomplished chefs of Feastworks. Gather at the PICA family table with friends and artists for a radiant late summer feast that is not to be missed!
Learn morePICA and Pacific Northwest College of Art's MFA in Visual Studies present a public lecture by Jibade-Khalil Huffman, an artist and the author of three books of poems: 19 Names For Our Band (2008), James Brown is Dead (2011), and Sleeper Hold (2015). Huffman's art and writing projects, which span performance, photography, poetry, and video, have been presented at MoMA/PS1; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Poetry Project; and the Hammer Museum, among others. He is a 2015-16 Artist-in-Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem though otherwise lives and works in Los Angeles.
Learn morePictures of the moon, is the holy spirit, is the tongue of fire, is the ghost body, is host body, is the formless thing, is anxiety, is ecstasy, is seeing through the mirror, is energy, is neither here nor there, is god, is G–D, is godS, is NO GOD ever was, is inside you, is clay, is crystal, is vapor, is hair, is sound, is gold, is light, is words, is wave, is lump, is desert dot, is geometry, is concrete, is floating, is memory, is trickery, is hawk overhead, is notion, is nature, is knowing, is never knowing, is why go on.
Learn moreWHAT IS TIME? a new site-specific performance composition illustrating historical perceptions of time in the ‘age of anxiety’. Referencing philosophical topics such as the meaning of life, existentialism, and time, this work intends to explore, interpret, and draw lines of interconnectivity through improvised movement and sound.
Learn moreFor TBA:15, Jibade-Khalil Huffman presents two concurrently running video works. Within the exhibition space, each will operate independently finding moments of alignment that express a larger narrative between the two. The result is an exploration of adaptation, mediation, and the act of seeing by way of pursuing the vanishing point and the nostalgia of drive-in movie theaters.
Learn moreSimensky’s multi-part Surface Contents 1 & 2 employs gold in a series of actions, prints, and architectural interventions. The resulting work will form a dialogue that sees gold as a literal index of locatable value and something ever-shifting in meaning and immense influence.
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Learn moreWeird Fucks Re-imagined, writers and interdisciplinary artists who are engaged in weird fuckery of some kind.
Learn moreA charged site. Ways and means. “...various little ways of changing things.”
Learn moreYour forecast for the final day of TBA: Spicy, salty, and refreshing and bright with a Bloody Mary or seven...
Learn moreClosing night at THE WORKS lights up the sky with an explosion of a million stars. Enter the sensorial and phantasmagoric world of Evelyn.
Learn moreThis is a story about mosquitos and how much I hate them. It all started with arguments of criminality based on a reading of the French Playwright, Jean Genet. I will deprecate the achievements of the mosquitos in my immediate world. In my work, I often ask, can I physically experience hypothetical graphs? This time, I will plot lines in skewed positions and will track them with the intent to judge the things that make my life so skewed. Reps of boot camp exercises help dissect emotional discomforts that are so little that I could otherwise ignore them, but should not. This is a story about petty crimes vs. noble crimes.
Learn moreHYPNOSIS DISPLAY is an original live sound and 16mm film collaboration between experimental vocalist and musician Grouper (Liz Harris) and filmmaker Paul Clipson.
Learn moreJoël Barraquiel Tan (Director of Community Engagement, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco) and Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (Assistant Professor, Theatre & Performance Studies, Reed College) will make prepared remarks that address the theme of this year’s symposium, Seniors, Sexuality & Spirituality: Art and Social Change. Remarks will be followed by a Q&A and broader.
Learn moreMammalian Diving Reflex's Artistic Director, Darren O’Donnell, provides a glimpse into the company's research and creative process; their numerous socially engaged art and performance projects (including TBA:14 performance All the Sex I’ve Ever Had); and the broader landscape and politics of art and civic engagement with Ariana Jacob, a Portland-based social practice artist.
Learn moreThe first of two TBA Festival Flights, Gender, Culture, & Experiments with Tradition reflects a range of work by artists from diverse disciplines who rigorously examine the intersections of history, culture, language, gender, and aesthetic form, while experimenting with musical, vocal, and choreographic concepts and traditions that both exude and transcend particularities of time and place.
Learn moreJoin artists, activists, and thinkers from Portland and beyond for a participation-oriented community forum exploring ideas, practices, and possibilities within the shifting terrain of art and social change. Using a small-group format, eclectic teams--including performing and visual artists, scholars of multiple disciplines, activists working within a range of sectors, LGBT Requiem Mass Think Tank participants, TBA Festival audiences, and members of the public--will gather to tackle burning issues, discuss specific projects, and devise arts-based scenarios to address local problems. Open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Learn morePICA makes transparent the creative process of a new commission and future TBA Festival project, Holcombe Waller’s LGBT Requiem Mass. Requiring extensive cross-cultural engagement across LGBT, faith-based, and contemporary art communities, PICA and Waller have convened a think tank of national and local specialists in various areas of queer and LGBT activism and advocacy; progressive, inclusive, and affirming churches; queer spirituality studies; and socially engaged art and performance. For this public roundtable, Waller will introduce LGBT Requiem Mass's broader artistic vision and political aspiration at this stage of development, while members of the think tank will share highlights from their previous day's convening. Together, the Roundtable conversation will launch a more expansive, day-long symposium that draws on and builds from some of its key questions, ideas, and critical concerns.
Learn moreMorocco-based choreographer Meryem Jazouli offers a workshop for contemporary dancers that proposes shared time and space to discover the realm where the poetic and vulnerable coincide. The class will start off with a warmup to activate the senses, followed by a dance Jazouli will share that each person will experience and personalize while imparting it with a unique meaning.
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