Oregon Contemporary is open when exhibitions are on view from Friday to Sunday, noon to 5 pm. Additionally, we are open on First Saturdays, when our hours are extended until 8 pm. Find details for upcoming First Saturdays below and check back regularly as more details are released.

May 4, 2024

6 pm- Gallery 1
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.

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

5:30pm- 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, 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.

7pm
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 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

Studios
Exhibition openings at Carnation Contemporary, Well Well, and more. Special art on loan in Studio 2. 

Support our Kenton business partners when you visit us for First Saturdays!
Mantel
Parkside
Swift & Union