The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) is a contemporary performance and visual arts organization in Portland in the U.S. state of Oregon. PICA was founded in 1995 by Kristy Edmunds. Since 2003, it has presented the annual Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) every September in Portland, featuring contemporary and experimental visual art, dance, theatre, film/video, music, and educational and public programs from local, national, and international artists. As of November 2017, it is led by Executive Director Victoria Frey and Artistic Directors Roya Amirsoleymani, Erin Boberg Doughton, and Kristan Kennedy.
Jeff Jahn is a curator, art critic, artist, historian, blogger and composer based in Portland, Oregon, United States. He coined the phrase declaring Portland "the capital of conscience for the United States," in a Portland Tribune op-ed piece, which was then reiterated in The Wall Street Journal.
Seattle Erotic Art Festival was founded in 2002 by the Center for Sex Positive Culture. It is now the flagship program of the nonprofit Foundation for Sex Positive Culture.
Kenneth Robert Lum, OC is a dual Canadian and American academic, painter, photographer, sculptor, and writer. Working in a number of media including painting, sculpture and photography, his art ranges from conceptual in orientation to representational in character and is generally concerned with issues of identity in relation to the categories of language, portraiture and spatial politics.
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist who emerged in the early 1980s known for her large-scale multimedia installations. After receiving her BFA in textile design from the University of Kansas in 1979, she lived in Banff, Alberta, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada before deciding to pursue an MFA in sculpture at Yale in 1983. From 1985 to 1991, she taught on the faculty of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Since 2001, Hamilton has served on the faculty of the Department of Art at the Ohio State University. She was appointed a Distinguished University Professor in 2011.
The Bellevue Arts Museum is a museum of contemporary visual art, craft, and design located in Bellevue, Washington, part of the greater Seattle metropolitan area. A nonprofit organization established in 1975, the Bellevue Arts Museum (BAM) provides rotating arts exhibitions to the public. Since 2001, the museum has been located across from Bellevue Square in a three-story building designed by architect Steven Holl.
Zoe Scofield is a choreographer and dancer best known for her work with Juniper Shuey as co-directors of zoe|juniper, a Seattle-based dance and visual art company. Her work is characterized by multi-media, cross-genre works utilizing stage performance, video installation, photography and complex technical elements.
Fiona Bowie is a Vancouver-based Canadian installation artist. She uses film, video, photography and sculpture, and makes "immersive environments".
Sanford Biggers is a Harlem-based interdisciplinary artist who works in film/video, installation, sculpture, music, and performance. An L.A. native, he has lived and worked in New York City since 1999.
Heather T. Hart is a visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing gender gap and diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.
Gregory Euclide is an American contemporary artist and teacher who lives and works outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Born in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, and raised there before moving to Minnesota, his rich natural surroundings fostered an interest in and connection to the environment that lasts to this day.
Corrina Sephora Mensoff is a visual artist who specializes in metal work, sculpture, painting, installation, and mixed media in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States. Corrina works with universal and personal themes of loss and transformation, within the context of contemporary society. In Corrina’s most recent bodies of work she is exploring lunar images, cells, and the universe as “a meditation in the making.” In a concurrent body of work she has delved into the physical transformation of guns, altering their molecular structure into flowers and garden tools through hot forging the materials. Her work has led her to community involvement with the conversation of guns in our society.
Weston Teruya is an Oakland-based visual artist and arts administrator. Teruya's paper sculptures, installations, and drawings reconfigure symbols forming unexpected meanings that tamper with social/political realities, speculating on issues of power, control, visibility, protection and, by contrast, privilege. With Michele Carlson and Nathan Watson, he is a member of the Related Tactics artists' collective and often exhibits under that name.
Kristan Kennedy is an American artist, curator, educator and arts administrator. Kennedy is co-artistic director and curator of visual art at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). She is based in Portland, Oregon and has exhibited internationally, working with various media including sculpture and painting.
Jennie C. Jones is an African-American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been described, by Ken Johnson, as evoking minimalism, and paying tribute to the cross-pollination of different genres of music, especially jazz. As an artist, she connects most of her work between art and sound. Such connections are made with multiple mediums, from paintings to sculptures and paper to audio collages. In 2012, Jones was the recipient of the Joyce Alexander Wien Prize, one of the biggest awards given to an individual artist in the United States. The prize honors one African-American artist who has proven their commitment to innovation and creativity, with an award of 50,000 dollars. In December 2015 a 10-year survey of Jones's work, titled Compilation, opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Texas.
Ari Glass is an American painter, designer and musician.
Twyla Exner is a Canadian contemporary artist who resides in Prince George, British Columbia. She creates art works in various mediums, including drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and installation. Exner's pieces explore themes of nature, combined with technology and electronics, and have been exhibited across Canada. She is currently employed as the director of Public Programs at Two Rivers Gallery.
Fernanda D'Agostino is an American artist and sculptor from Portland, Oregon. Her 30-year career includes works that "integrated personal, societal and environmental concerns" into public art installations. Her new media works frequently incorporate technically sophisticated interactive elements.
Barbara Noah is a sculptor in glass and concrete, best known for her large installation pieces.
The National Association of Artists' Organizations (NAAO) was, from 1982 through the early 2000s, a Washington, D.C.-based arts service organization which, at its height, had a constituency of over 700 artists' organizations, arts institutions, artists and arts professionals representing a cross-section of diverse aesthetics, geographic, economic, ethnic and gender-based communities especially inclusive of the creators of emerging and experimental work in the interdisciplinary, literary, media, performing and visual arts. At the apex of its activities, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, NAAO served as a catalyst and co-plaintiff on the Supreme Court case, National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley having spawned the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression. NAAO's dormancy in the early years of the 21st century led to the formation of Common Field.
