2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial

Curated by Jackie Im and Anuradha Vikram
April 26- August 4 of 2024.

Gallery Guide

We will have programs and receptions on First Saturdays of May, June, July, and August.

The Artists’ Biennial is a survey of works by visual and performing artists who are defining and advancing Oregon’s contemporary art landscape. Jackie Im and Anuradha Vikram are the curators of the 2024 Biennial, which is focused on themes of networks, community, care, and support. Rather than a hierarchical approach to artists' works, the curators' goal is to present work that is timely and relevant to the communities of Oregon.

The Artists’ Biennial is a selection of artists who are working within the curatorial themes. The artists included range in age from 25 to over 65 years old. Over 50% are BIPOC, including artists that identify as Asian American, Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and multiracial. Over 50% are LGBTQ+, and the group includes artists identifying as transgender, non binary, or gender diverse. Our choice of curators also supports these demographics.

This will be the seventh biennial in Oregon Contemporary’s series, which began in 2010. Previously focused on Portland artists—as a continuation of the program initiated by the Portland Art Museum in 1949—the biennial expanded to an Oregon-wide selection of artists in 2016. Curator-led each time in its scope and themes, the biennial has been housed in art venues throughout the city, art and community spaces throughout Oregon, and back to the 12,000 square-foot home of Oregon Contemporary in North Portland’s Kenton neighborhood. With more space designated for public arts programming at Oregon Contemporary than ever before, this biennial will utilize the spaces for the exhibitions and our First Saturdays for performances and programs, with occasional partner venues presenting works as fitting for the artists. The programs will run May–August of 2024.

Participating artists:

Additional Programming:

Saturday, May 4

3–5 pm

Horatio Law residency closing reception
Portland Chinatown Museum, 127 NW 3rd Ave, Portland, OR 97209

11-3pm
Oregon Rising Above Hate
Join together to celebrate Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and the AANHPI (Asian, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander) community, its resilience, and commit to combat the continued rise anti-Asian hate.

Lan Su Chinese Garden, 239 Northwest Everett Street, Portland, Oregon 97209

6 pm

Burdened With More Beautiful Things: An Artist Talk and Reading with Epiphany Couch and Cliff Taylor

Presented as part of the 2024 Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial, exhibiting artist Epiphany Couch and poet Cliff Taylor come together for a joint artist talk and poetry reading. As seekers, storytellers, and sensitive souls, Couch and Taylor will discuss their inspirations and the connections between their respective works and practices. Within Couch’s latest artworks, fragments of Taylor’s poetry are seamlessly integrated, highlighting the healing powers of community, collaboration, remembrance, and radical native joy. A brief Q&A and book signing will follow the conversation.

Location: Gallery 1, Oregon Contemporary 8371 N. Interstate Ave

June 1, 2024

6 pm- Courtyard
Maxx Katz
Yelling Choir is a femme, women, and nonbinary performance ensemble, created by Maxx Katz, that reimagines voice, presence, gender, and power. The choir is a vehicle of experimental relational technology, using play, somatic awareness, and vocal practice to reimagine community organization. This performance is a collaborative composition which calls for a socially aware aesthetic of listening and seeing, that includes social relationship as a moving element of the internal composition of the piece.

Yelling Choir shares the immediate, visceral experience of having a voice (both sonically and creatively), especially for those who have historically had less of a voice in our culture. We love to yell—and we also explore other sounds, extended vocal techniques, movement, and improvisation. We explore getting big, taking up space, allowing a full spectrum of emotions—from joy to rage to boredom to delight, and everything in between—in an emotionally-regulated and supported way.

7 pm- Courtyard
Methods Body
Covert/Overt is a new sound art composition by Portland duo Methods Body—Luke Wyland and John Niekrasz. This piece celebrates speech diversity through the lens of people who stutter, Wyland being a person who stutters himself. Methods Body interviewed people from Portland and abroad, drawing musical inspiration from the rhythmic fingerprints and cadences of different individuals’ disfluencies. Covert/Overt employs technological refraction and acoustic syllabic mirroring to share and expand upon some aspects of what it’s like communicating with different forms of verbal disfluency. Special thanks to the National Stuttering Association's Portland, OR, chapter and SPACE (Stuttering, People, Arts, Community, Education).

July 6, 2024

5:30 pm- Gallery 1
Sarah Rushford
Elk woke here once (aware of the world already)
Reading, discussion, and generative writing exercise with guests: Juleen Johnson, Briseida Pagador, and Sarah Rushford. To investigate Sarah Rushford's textual video work Elk woke here once (aware of the world already) there will be a reading, discussion, and writing exercise with Rushford, Juleen Johnson, and Briseida Pagador; the projects' writers and actors.

Elk woke here once (aware of the world already) is a video work that depicts an experiment in creative writing and cognition. The process of making the work was a specially designed, generative process meant to nurture a feeling of recognition in writers, actors, and crew. The final work and its process will be discussed. A short participatory writing exercise will also take place.

6 pm- Gallery 1
Carla Bengston
Other Nations: performance
Research has shown that people subconsciously bring their hands near their noses after shaking hands, a socially acceptable form of collecting subliminal chemical information about one another while reinforcing social ties. The floor graphic doubles as a score for a vocal and dance performance choreographed by Darion Smith and Juliet Palmer which concludes with a social scent-sharing ritual in which the audience is invited to enact the altruistic social network of a ground squirrel community by shaking hands to exchange scents.

7 pm
Tyler Stoll
ATTENTION: Calling all milquetoast mollies, detumescent daddies, softbois, tenderqueers, and any other flimsy folk and lovers of limpness! (and allies)
You are cordially invited to join biennial artist Tyler Stoll in a participatory protest where we will collectively explore flaccidity as an emancipatory, fluid identity and political antidote to phallic masculinity. Participants will march around the Oregon Contemporary grounds and nearby Kenton neighborhood, creating chants, feeling into flaccid embodiment, and encouraging others to join the movement!
All are welcome. Signs and props provided. Costumes are encouraged but absolutely not required.
Suggested costume themes: your favorite anti-phallic icon, a traditionally masculine character you’d like to reclaim, or anything else you imagine representing a flaccid future.

Curator Biographies:
Jackie Im is a curator, writer, and editor based in Oakland, CA. She currently serves at the Associate Curator of the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries. She is also the co-founder and Director of Et al. and Et al., etc. in San Francisco. Im has organized exhibitions at the Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art (SF), Queens Nails (SF), The Lab (SF), Important Projects (Oakland), Holiday Forever (Jackson Hole, WY), and SFAC Galleries. Her writing has appeared in Fillip Magazine, Art Practical, Curiously Direct, and various exhibition catalogues. She holds a BA in Art History from Mills College and an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts.

Anuradha Vikram is a Los Angeles-based writer, educator, and curator of the upcoming Getty Pacific Standard Time Art and Science exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (September 2024-March 2025) at UCLA. They recently curated the mid-career survey exhibition Jaishri Abichandani: Flower-Headed Children at Craft Contemporary (January 30–May 8, 2022) and the series Illuminate LA for the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture (September 2022-January 2023). Their book Decolonizing Culture is a collection of seventeen essays that address questions of race and gender parity in contemporary art spaces (Art Practical/Sming Sming Books, 2017).

The Artists’ Biennial is supported by The Ford Family Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Oregon Cultural Trust, Marie Lamfrom Charitable Foundation, The Robert Lehman Foundation, and Autzen Foundation.

Oregon Contemporary is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Oregon Community Foundation, Prosper Portland, the Henry Lea Hillman, Jr. Foundation, Maybelle Clark Macdonald Fund, and Portland Events and Film. Oregon Contemporary also receives support from the Oregon Arts Commission, a state agency funded by the State of Oregon and the National Endowment for the Arts. Other businesses and individuals provide additional support.