PICA

Each year, PICA produces a companion program to our Time-Based Art ON SIGHT Visual Arts exhibitions. In recent years, they've featured everything from full-color artist posters to in-depth interviews about Festival projects. With all of this rich content at our disposal, we thought that we should make the past programs available online for your enjoyment. For more artist interviews, recordings, and art publications, visit the PICA Resource Room, Monday-Friday, 10 am - 5 pm.

Download the TBA:08 ON SIGHT Program, featuring Tamy Ben-Tor, Harry Dodge & Stanya Kahn, Lizzie Fitch, Justin Gorman, Jacob Hartman, Corey Lunn, Jeffry Mitchell, Ryan Trecartin, Paintallica, Fritz Haeg, and The Yes Men, with a special poster from Jeffry Mitchell.

Download the TBA:09 ON SIGHT Program, with artist interviews including Robert Boyd, Antoine Catala, Peter Coffin, Brody Condon, Jesse Hayward, Johanna Ketola, Fawn Krieger, Kalup Linzy, Brian Lund, Ma Quisha, robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner, Ethan Rose, and Stephen Slappe.

PICA Visual Art Program Director Kristan Kennedy just returned from a two-week blitz of the Whitney Biennial and Armory Art Fair. Read on for the first of her reports:

This is what my eye looked like when I landed in New York. If this eye is a window, then you would be looking out onto a psychic landscape scattered with detritus from the week prior. It was time to shake off any residue and move on. I had an opening to attend.
 
 

When I come to NY I always stay with family. I was born and raised in Brooklyn and I am lucky to have a free place to lay my head. Tonight, however, I have decided to splurge and spend the night at the Ace Hotel. I am grateful for this spare, but plush limbo-land where I can clear my head and get gussied up. The windows at the Hotel perfectly frame little bits of the buildings across the way, that square starts to blur and I can feel a nap coming on. 
 
 
 
Post nap and room service, my dear friend Topher Sinkinson and I waffle between feeling excited and anxious about the opening. We feel immense amounts of pressure about what we are wearing, which seems silly, but, you have to figure people are going to be puttin' on the ritz tonight. I am not feeling so ritzy, although perhaps the photo suggests otherwise. 
 
 
Storm Tharp; Dolores; 2010; ink, gouache, colored pencil, graphite, charcoal and fabric dye on paper. 
 
Upon entering the Whitney we spy a gaggle of Portland peeps, and we form one undulating, amoeba-like formation for the rest of the night, picking up other cohorts along the way. None of this was planned, but there is a fair amount of Portland pride happening in the Whitney tonight, as both Storm Tharp and Jessica Jackson Hutchins are part of the show. My photos are limited; as the security is fierce you will have to troll Flickr for covert pics.

My first impression is this: the show feels sparse, calm, pretty. I am used to being visually assaulted by the Whitney Biennial, and I cannot remember a time when I can see more wall than art. This is completely disarming. I can see everything clearly, in fact someone in our caravan says to me along the way, "You are actually looking at the art" to which I replied, " I know, weird, right?" Not so weird if you think about it (my job, in fact, is as an artist/curator/friend), but at these kinds of massive openings it is a rare occurrence. In fact, at every opening I have been to since the dawn of time, half of the conversations are taken up by people talking about how they "have to come back".

Visual Art Program Director Kristan Kennedy delivered a fantastic PMMNLS lecture last Monday, and we wanted to make sure that everyone had the chance to experience her presentation. Read on and piece together the YouTube references of a talented artist and curator's mind.

- Frank Stella , 1972 / This is the year I was born.

- Pictorial energy and control, young ideas about art.
- Learning to see from my mother
- Mom's paintings, the seagull
- Painting on the walls in margarine
- Me on a rock, befriending the inanimate
- Learning to feel from my Father
- My Dad makes his first sculpture after going to DIA Beacon, declares he is a minimalist.
- His exclamation inside of a Sera " This is like the universe"
- Maharishi Mahesh Yogo vs. Jesus Christ
- My parent's bookshelf, Future Shock, Radical Child Rearing, e.e. cummings
- Cement Turtles
- Mrs. Epstien's house, The Kimono and the Foot
- Willem De Kooning and the Art Gang
- Peter Schjeldahl, Why Artists Make the Worst Students, 1998
-Ted Morgan plays Husker Du Land Speed Record on vinyl, Joe Sheer throws a great dinner party, Mary Lum and the obsessive mark + never date male painters
- College work

Near the end of last year, the NEA released a report on arts attendance in the US; the results were not encouraging. According to their findings, the percentage of adults who attended at least one arts event dropped to 34.6% in 2008, down from 39.4% in 2002. To an arts organization, even numbers like 39.4% are dishearteningly low. You could argue that arts presenters should change course and show more populist work to garner attention and audiences, but that strategy would run counter to guiding missions and alienate many existing supporters.

What, then, can the strategy be for engaging new (or even existing) audiences in contemporary art? Our friends up at Seattle's On The Boards decided to test out a new model for presenting contemporary performance. With the launch of their On The Boards TV, they're staking out a place in the online, on-demand, video rental market. Their gambit is that cutting edge dance, theater and performance (with high production values) can draw a share of the booming online audiences and create new revenue streams for contemporary art. Already, they have beautiful footage of works by artists including Young Jean Lee, Reggie Watts, and Diana Szeinblum, complete with artist interviews and related content. The appeal of this service for educational institutions and peer organizations is clear - a subscription would be a valuable resource to students, artists, and audiences researching an artist.

However, the main question about in-house audiences remains: if people won't come through the theater doors, is it truly possible to reach them elsewhere? Will OTB.tv be able to draw viewers who couldn't make it to the live show? The quality of the content is certainly there, but will audiences readily replace the live experience with a recorded one?

Our Development Associate, Jessica Burton, was selected as one of Caldera's Artists in Residence for the month of February! While we valiantly try fill all of her duties here, she's off focusing on her choreography and dance in a lakeside studio in Central Oregon. Here is her first report back from a few days into her residency:

I was welcomed to Caldera on Tuesday night by Jason, Kevin, and Wendy with a homemade curry lentil soup, spinach salad and wine. Kevin and Wendy are photographers and Jason is a writer. The soup is delicious. We talk about art on the two coasts (Jason and Kevin are from Brooklyn and Wendy is from Portland). Kevin is looking for a new gallery and that led us to talk to about artist representation and the differences between performance and visual "systems". That led me to talk about the People's Biennial lecture from last Saturday. The question "What makes someone an artist?" keeps coming up for me. They ask me about my plan for the next three weeks and what my process will be. I honestly reply that I have no idea. I am here to find out.

At the end of the evening, after several glasses of wine, the three other artists leave and I take a walk through my dance space. It is huge. The acoustics are great, so I turn on some music, crank the volume, and take a few spins around the room. This is MY space for the next three weeks! I can't believe it.

I sleep well in my A-frame after starting a fire in my wood burning stove and curling up to Deborah Hay's My Body the Buddhist. The next day I sleep in, make coffee and head to the studio for yoga and some movement exploration. I put on Rufus Wainwright and immediately channel Diana Szeinblum and Lucas Condro. I start with an exercise that I learned from Diana that helps to connect your hands and core to the rest of your body. After a few hours I need a break, so I go for a hike around the lake. Today my muscles ache from head to toe. It is a great feeling.

We'll try to keep you updated on Jessica's residency experience, but if you'd like to catch her work in-person, consider making a road trip this weekend for Saturday's Artist Open Studio!

Right now, Kristan Kennedy - our lovely Visual Arts Program Coordinator - is off in New York City, visiting galleries, studios, and festivals to soak up the New Year in art. Read on for the second part of a photogenic insight into the mind of one of our curators:

Oh my aching feet!

I can't see much, my peripheral vision has been cut off by the giant parka hood that I must keep zipped up at all times. It is bone-chillingly cold out here. Even with my blinders on I have noticed people here seem to be proclaiming their inner desires on the street. The other day I saw a giant scrawl that said, "Anthony I need your love now." And then there was this gem.

Speaking of trends... Most of the artists I have been visiting this trip are women. This comes right on the heels of the news that, for the first time ever, there are equal percentages of male and female artists selected for this year's Whitney Biennial. I did not seek out women artists in particular, they are just everywhere! My visits have taken me to DUMBO and Bushwick and LES and Long Island City and Chinatown and Chelsea. My new years resolution to keep studio visits to thirty minutes has quickly been tossed out. How do other curators do it? I hear stories of visits where stone faced curators enter, zip their lips, make the artist sweat, and turn on their heels without so much as a "thank you." Or others who visit seven artists in one afternoon. Do they have a magic flying carpet? Have you ever tried to get from one side of Brooklyn to the other. JEESH!

Right now, Kristan Kennedy - our lovely Visual Arts Program Coordinator - is off in New York City, visiting galleries, studios, and festivals to soak up the New Year in art. Read on for a photogenic insight into the mind of one of our curators:

I spend about a month in New York every year. It is a self imposed sabbatical and a working vacation. It is during this time that I settle into the sidewalk, finding comfort in the canyons created by tall buildings on either side. For the first week I stay way, way, way, way out in south Brooklyn, in a nameless neighborhood past the newly hip Ditmas and before Sheepshead Bay and Coney Island. This is where I grew up, and this is where I come to look at the beautiful noses and beautiful wares and beautiful handwritten signs of my beautiful people. 

Junk, Cookies and Cabbages on Kings Highway, Brooklyn NY

Even though I have just about had my fill of Russian elegance and promise myself that I will rage on New Years in the City, I get an invitation to go to the country, and I take it. The city is going nowhere fast and, when I return, I suspect it will be waiting for me. I head up to Hudson, NY. My friends house is a work of art, with every surface covered in some fantastic pattern, and every possible assemblage of this-and-that; the best kind of installation. They have Portland baristas here now, and Marina Abramovic is rumored to be opening a performance space soon. Other than that, there is snow and there are antiques and there is lots of old upstate glamor. We run through the streets at midnight, it is a good time. 

Keith Crowe (Co- Founder and Former Owner Operator of Portland's Half and Half ), Illustrator Brent Johnson (formerly of Motel Gallery), and me in Hudson, NY. 

Last week, PICA's Victoria Frey was in New York, attending the Under the Radar Festival with Jessica, Kristan, Erin, and Cathy from the PICA team. We posted her day one wrap-up last week, and now we share the run-down from her breathless weekend trying to catch as much art as she could:

Friday starts later because I skip out on the APAP Conference morning sessions. I have time to catch the Urs Fischer show at the New Museum. Really interesting. He photographed the walls, the ceiling, and all the details of the 3rd floor gallery and made wallpaper to cover the space as itself. A lone melted piano sculpture sits in the middle of the room. The 2nd floor gallery is installed with his mirrored cubes.

I walk all over the Lower East Side, the Bowery, Chinatown, Little Italy, and Orchard Street on my way to Brown restaurant on Hester. My first show is Chekov Lizardbrain by Pig Iron Theater from Philadelphia. Good production and accomplished actors. Great characters and ideas but it somehow does not all come together for me. I sit with David Henry from Boston, and we have the same schedule, so we decide to travel together. We walk up toward our next show, the Richard Maxwell piece at PS122 called Ads. We end up nearly sprinting to make it as I lead David the long way there. This pace, the sense of adventure and the camaraderie are what make the festival format so much fun.

Next we have to get all the way to 3LD in the financial district for Gin&"It" directed by Reid Farrington. This is a work-in-progress that will premeire at the Wexner in March and is based on Hitchcock's Rope. It's an inventive work based on a great film - I would love to see the finished work.

Now back uptown to the public for the late show at the lounge. Each night I have told myself that staying up really late is also part of the experience but tonight I am too tired to stay past 1. Kristan is crashing at our hotel tonight so there may be a slumber party after all.

Wednesday kicked off the Sixth Annual Under The Radar Festival (UTR) in New York, and it just so happens that a good half of our staff has flown out to catch the shows. Maybe it has something to do with the annual APAP Conference taking place this weekend, and maybe (just maybe), it's because we love UTR Artistic Director (and past PICA Guest AD) Mark Russell. Still, the real reason to be in New York this week is for the incredible lineup of contemporary performance converging at the Public Theater.

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL 2010 from UTRFestival on Vimeo.

Along with TBA, Under The Radar is one of the few US festivals presenting consistently engaging and genre-bending contemporary performance. For PICA fans, a lot of the names will sound familiar; past artists include Nature Theatre of Oklahoma, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Superamas, and Mike Daisey, and this year alone, you can catch Philippe Quesne/Vivarium Studio, Jollyship the Whiz-Bang, and MK Guth. With over 20 shows running on some days, UTR is a wild and intense burst of theater.

After the jump, read a first-day dispatch from PICA Executive Director Victoria Frey...

robbinschilds perform C.L.U.E. at TBA:09. Photo: Carole Zoom.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has awarded PICA a $100,000, 2-year grant in support of the 2010 and 2011 Time-Based Art Festivals. This grant comes in recognition of PICA's cross-disciplinary programming and community engagement.

According to the Foundation's website:

"Over the past seven years, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art has secured a prominent place in the public imagination by curating one of the most dynamic multi-disciplinary events in Portland, the annual Time-Based Art Festival (TBA)."

"...Perhaps most impressive of all, however, is the way TBA manages to activate public, non-art spaces that bring the city into the Festival and the Festival into the city. This past year, the Festival's late-night programming and ON SIGHT visual arts installations were both staged in the re-purposed Washington High School, and Australia's Back to Back Theater performed its riveting Small Metal Objects to an audience wearing headphones in the middle of a bustling outdoor lunch crowd in Pioneer Square. By presenting work in diverse neighborhoods and alternative spaces, PICA is able to engage broad, new audiences in contemporary art."

This assessment was shared by TBA:09 artist Antoine Catala, who described his Festival experience by saying that,

"TBA is unique in the US, because it encompasses multi-disciplinary forms of art that lead to natural cross-pollinations. It felt like the whole city mobilized around PICA, because the festival gathers so many volunteers and so many events in a short period of time. The whole experience felt like an amazing communal effort."

We are honored to be the only Foundation award recipient in the region, and are excited to apply this funding towards another two years of leading-edge programming!

About the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

The Foundation's objective is to foster innovative artistic expression and the creative process by encouraging and supporting cultural organizations that in turn, directly or indirectly, support artists and their work. The Foundation values the contribution these organizations make to artists and audiences and to society as a whole by supporting, exhibiting and interpreting a broad spectrum of contemporary artistic practice.

The primary focus of the Foundation's grant making activity has been to support the creation, presentation and documentation of contemporary visual art, particularly work that is experimental, under-recognized, or challenging in nature.

For more information, please visit the Warhol Foundation's Awarded Grant's Page.