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.
Portland State University (PSU) is a public research university in Portland, Oregon. It was founded in 1946 as a post-secondary educational institution for World War II veterans. It evolved into a four-year college over the following two decades and was granted university status in 1969. It is one of two public universities in Oregon that are located in a large city. It is governed by a board of trustees. PSU is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity".
The Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) is an art school of Willamette University and is located in Portland, Oregon. Established in 1909, the art school grants Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees and graduate degrees including the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) and Master of Arts (MA) degrees. It has an enrollment of about 500 students. The college merged with Willamette University in 2021.
The Oregon Book Awards are presented annually by Literary Arts to honor the "state’s finest accomplishments by Oregon writers who work in genres of poetry, fiction, graphic literature, drama, literary nonfiction, and literature for young readers."
Gail Tremblay was an American writer and artist from Washington State. She is known for weaving baskets from film footage that depicts Native American people, such as Western movies and anthropological documentaries. She received a Washington State Governor's Arts and Heritage Award in 2001.
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.
Juliana Huxtable is an American artist, writer, performer, DJ, and co-founder of the New York–based nightlife project Shock Value. Huxtable has exhibited and performed at a number of venues including Reena Spaulings Fine Art, Project Native Informant, Artists Space, the New Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and Institute of Contemporary Arts. Huxtable's multidisciplinary art practice explores a number of projects, such as the internet, the body, history, and text, often through a process she calls "conditioning." Huxtable is a published author of two books and a member of the New York City–based collective House of Ladosha. She is on the roster of the talent agency Discwoman, a New York based collective and talent agency that books DJs for parties and events around the world. She previously lived and worked in New York City, and has been based in Berlin since 2020.
Heather Phillipson is a British artist working in a variety of media including video, sculpture, music, large-scale installations, online works, text and drawing. She is also an acclaimed poet whose writing has appeared widely online, in print and broadcast. Her work has been presented at major venues internationally and she has received multiple awards for her artwork, videos and poetry. She is nominated for the Turner Prize 2022.
Martine Syms is an American artist residing in Los Angeles, specializing in various mediums including publishing, video, installation, and performance. Her artistic endeavors revolve around themes of identity, particularly the representation of the self, with a focus on subjects like feminism and black culture. Syms frequently employs humor and social commentary as vehicles for exploration within her work. In 2007, she introduced the term "Conceptual Entrepreneur" to describe her artistic approach.
Cynthia Lahti is an American contemporary artist from Portland, Oregon, who works in many mediums: "from collage to ceramics, altered books, and painting".
Eunice Lulu Parsons, also known as Eunice Jensen Parsons, is an American modernist artist known for her collages. Parsons was born in Loma, Colorado, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Portland Museum Art School, where she also worked as a teacher for over 20 years.
Susan Seubert is an American fine art and editorial photographer based in Portland, Oregon and Maui, Hawaii. She has exhibited internationally, photographing subjects from Canada to Thailand.
Hanif Abdurraqib is an American poet, essayist, and cultural critic. His first essay collection, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was published in 2017. His 2021 essay collection A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance received the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Abdurraqib was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.
Hannah Black is a visual artist, critic, and writer. Her work spans video, text and performance. She is best known for her open letter written with Ciarán Finlayson and Tobi Haslett, The Tear Gas Biennial, criticizing co-chair of the board of the Whitney Museum, Warren Kanders, and his toxic philanthropy which comes from selling tear gas and other weapons via Safariland. The letter prompted artists to withdraw works from the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Rindon Johnson is an American artist and writer. Johnson has exhibited and performed widely at exhibitions in New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Johnson's multidisciplinary art practice blurs the line between photography, sculpture, and performance using various materials such as leather, light, Vaseline, video, photography and wood to explore aspects of lived space, memory, and history. Johnson is a published author and co-runs the online poetry website, Imperial Matters, with Sophia Le Fraga. Johnson lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Berlin, Germany.
Aria Dean is an American artist, critic, and curator. Until 2021, Dean served as Curator and Editor of Rhizome. Her writings have appeared in various art publications including Artforum, e-flux, The New Inquiry, Art in America, and Topical Cream. Dean has exhibited internationally at venues such as Foxy Production and American Medium in New York, Chateau Shatto in Los Angeles, and Arcadia Missa in London. Dean also co-directs As It Stands LA, an artists project space that opened in 2015. Dean lives and works in New York City and Los Angeles. She is represented by Greene Naftali.
Elizabeth Mputu is an artist based in Orlando, Florida. Mputu is a "multiplatform, multimedia artist who engages in work which relates to sex, gender, race and queerness". Mputu works within a space of feminist net art to understand the whiteness and privilege on the internet. Mputu constructs projects using interactive media, video, sculpture and installation.
Matthew Minicucci is an American writer and poet. His first full-length collection, Translation, won the 2015 Wick Poetry Prize, and his second collection, Small Gods, won the 2019 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award in Poetry. Having received numerous fellowships and residencies, including with the National Park Service, the C. Hamilton Bailey Oregon Literary Fellowship, the Stanley P. Young Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the James Merrill House, Minicucci was named the 2019 Dartmouth College Poet-in-Residence at the Frost Place.
Demian Dinéyazhi' is a Native American artist and activist. Their work and advocacy focuses on indigenous and LGBTQ+ people and "consists of photography, sculpture, text, sound, video, land art performance, installation, street art and fabrics art."
