Stop by to see the exhibit for yourself and make sure to pick up a gallery map, whether for wayfinding or coloring or doodling or pareidolia practice…

The plans…

“I have been working with other artists on creating temporary architecture for PICA for years—ever since the creation of the Dada Ball bar, complete with a 30’ high nautilus enclosure of white gauzy diaper fabric. It’s been a long history of making cool things with little money, borrowed materials, and lots of committed artists.

This is the last year that PICA will use Washington High School for THE WORKS. It has been a comfortable, yet sprawling site to transform over the last few years. Each year we take a different approach. To me, when walking the site, there is one great space: the WHS front entry, which is a stunning perch with a canopy of trees and a view of Portland in the distance. Everything should be THERE: the TBA entry, the Beer Garden, and access to the WHS performances, with more focus, more energy, and maybe a little tension in one primary place.

Wayfinding. In a big way. Photo: Mitchell Snyder.

We needed to create some shelter, clarity of direction, identity, and containment. We needed to focus on the performances. We needed to move lots of people, accommodate casual dining, and a very big bar. And of course, it needs to be temporary, quick, and cheap.

Experientially, we’ve created a kind of threshold at several key points as you move through the site. These transitions mark the entry to the TBA Festival, the Beer Garden, and finally to the interior WHS performance venues. These thresholds are a symbolic beginning and end, a boundary, a point at which you step through the looking glass and suspend disbelief. Have fun. We hope organic and spontaneous things can happen with this convergence.”

Megan Holmes painting light boxes.

The awesome team at ADX setting up our portals.

ADX really rallied around TBA and built us our beautiful light box entry way.

Guildworks rigging their sky sails.

Guildworks sails at night. Photo: Mitchell Snyder.

The result… Photo: Mitchell Snyder.

A huge amount of thanks goes out to Ellen Fortin Design + Architecture, Makenna Lehrer, Megan Holmes, ADX, Guildworks, Bill Boese, Eco Productions, and all of the volunteers who made this year’s design for THE WORKS into a reality. We could not have done it without you!

Design happens hand-in-hand with programming as our artistic staff make the first decisions about artists at the end of the previous year. Conversations begin early by looking at past books, programs for peer Festivals around the world, and the particular mix of artists coming to this next TBA. Once we’ve got a scope of the initial projects, we start contacting artists and writing text as early as February, working over the next few months through dozens of revisions, hundreds of emails, piles of printouts, and self-made dummy copies to nail down the exact details we want on each and every page. We design on a grand scale, imagining holographic covers, heat-sensitive inks, tear-out pages and so forth, before remembering that we work at a nonprofit, and reining in our hair-brained schemes a bit. But even if we can’t afford to make print every artist photo as a custom sticker, we still like to make sure that we throw in a few changes.

So, what came of this whole process for 2012? Well, when you pick up your book this year, you’ll probably notice that it feels different—that’s the uncoated paper stock we used. Why? So you can write on it. After years of dealing with smudged notes and marginalia in all our books, we made the change. So highlight your schedule, record that quote you wanted to remember from a talk, or jot down the number you got from the beer garden cutie. We’re so excited by your prospects that we gave you a whole “notes” spread in the back of the guide.

You also might have seen a new break-down of how we lay out the Festival projects. As an organization who supports the interdisciplinary explorations of artists, it seemed out-of-character to continue breaking our programs up into the divisions of ON STAGE/ON SIGHT/ON SCREEN/OUTSIDE, when those classifications rarely capture the works we present. After all, how many ON STAGE shows happened out in parks? How many ON SIGHT artists invited your participation beyond just observing? So it was high time we changed it up, to group projects more by their mode of presentation then their location or medium.

Short-run stage shows and performance-based projects became the PERFORMANCE section, longer-run gallery exhibits and visual installations make up VISUAL ART, late-night club-vibe shows round out THE WORKS, and contextual artist talks and workshops comprise the INSTITUTE.

For the VISUAL section, we featured big, bright, full-spread photos of each of the artists. Since most of the visual artists are developing new work for TBA through residencies and commissions, we thought it was best to foreground images of their work, and leave their polished statements for the exhibit catalogue to come.

In THE WORKS section, we tried to capture more of the energy of our late-night hub with  multiple photos for each night and colored pages. Nothing says “party” like yellow.

And the PERFORMANCE section looks the most like past years. Still, if you’re curious which way a project leans, we’ve called out the broad disciplines by which each artist identifies, noted on the upper right of each artist photo. To help you navigate between the Croatian performance projects and the Japanese music, the Mexican theater and the Congolese dance, we marked off handy little country codes in the top left of each artist page. TBA:12 is one of our most international years yet.  And, for those of you who’d like to go beyond the performances to learn about this year’s artists, we’ve called out all of the related workshops and talks directly on each artist page.

Finally, we splurged and included a bright magenta fold-out map on the back flap of the guidebook. Now, you’ll always know where to find us during the Festival!

Look how far we’ve come in 10 years…