Where to Go and What to See at Portland's Converge 45 Biennial

ByMatthew TrueherzAugust 23, 2023

Hank Willis Thomas’s At the twilight’s last gleaming (2021)

Image: COLLECTION OF JORDAN D. SCHNITZER, © HANK WILLIS THOMAS. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY, NY/AARON WESSLING PHOTOGRAPHY

This year Portland's visual arts scene centers on the Converge 45 Biennial, Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship. Finding your way through the citywide exhibition may prove bewildering. (We’re professional journalists, and it's overwhelming—the map alone induces anxiety.) So we decided to make you a cheat sheet.

What’s the event? Converge 45, a local arts organization (named for the line of latitude halfway between the North Pole and the equator), may not have been on your radar previously, but it absolutely will be in the coming weeks. This is its biennial’s third iteration, and by far its most ambitious, with programming in the majority of the city’s arts venues. It will be one of the largest visual arts events Portland has ever seen, with an expected 60,000 viewers, bringing together revered talent from right here in Portland and around the globe. Organizers say the biennial will help rebuild the city and bolster our reputation as an arts destination.

Where is it happening? It's centered on Pearl District art galleries, including two major group exhibitions, but it spans some 17 galleries and museums across town, from the Portland Japanese Garden in the West Hills to Reed College in Southeast.

Is there a theme?Yep. As the event’s subtitle suggests, all of the shows focus on art as engagement with today’s global civic events. The theme stems from guest curator Christian Viveros-Fauné’s 2018 book Social Forms: A Short History of Political Art, and ties in a thrilling spread of modern and historical works.

What’s the timeline here?Opening weekend begins Thursday, August 24, and is packed with receptions, performances, and artist talks. Then programming stays up into October or later.

What's my strategy?Hit as many opening-weekend events as you can, and then enjoy weekend art jaunts in the coming months for more intimate follow-up visits.

Jump to: Opening Weekend / Two Group Exhibitions / More Solo Shows

Hung Liu’s Loess Plateau (oil on linen and metal star, 2015)

Image: Courtesy Converge 45/Jordan Schnitzer

1 p.m. ceremony and reception; exhibition on thru dec 2 | Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University, 1855 SW Broadway

With the mayor in tow, Jordan Schnitzer—who’s donated much of the historic art included in the biennial—and guest curator Christian Viveros-Fauné will speak at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at PSU to kick off the event. This will coincide with the opening of A Question of Hu: The Narrative Art of Hung Liu at the JSMA, a retrospective exhibition of prints, paintings, and tapestries by Hung Liu, often cited as the first major Chinese American painter.

Installation shot from Richard Mosse’s film Broken Spectre

Image: Courtesy Converge 45/Richard Mosse

4 p.m. reception; on thru Dec 15 | Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College, 615 S Palatine Hill Rd

The Irish documentary filmmaker and photographer will show his acclaimed work and speak with Converge 45 guest curator Viveros-Fauné. Shown previously in London and Melbourne, the film catalogs the deforestation of Brazil’s rainforests. When Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry saw it, he was on a plane within days to bring aid to Brazil.

performance: 11 a.m. | Lloyd Center Ice Rinkexhibition: On thru Oct 28 | ILY2, 925 NW Flanders St

Based in Los Angeles, Ross-Ho creates installations that are often preoccupied with temporality. Ice Time, Ross-Ho’s show at the Northwest Portland gallery ILY2, draws on her youth in figure skating; its title refers both to a practice slot for figure skaters (like a tee time in golf) and to the obscuring slowness ice creates archaeologically. In conjunction with the exhibit, across town at the Lloyd Center Ross-Ho will present Untitled Figure (THE CENTER OF IT ALL), a related, on-ice performance piece.

8 p.m. reception; on thru Oct 15 | center for Native Arts and Cultures, 800 SE 10th Ave

A member of the Seneca Nation, Watt is deeply interested in her ancestral lineage of intergenerational dialogue. This large-scale neon sculpture Chords to Other Chords (Relative) spells out “Turtle Island And” in reference to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) name for North America, and is meant to communicate with past, present, and future generations that this land is Turtle Island and that there is room for other labels, and a multitude of creation stories.

10:30 a.m. reception; on thru Oct 21 | Patricia Reser Center for the Arts, 12625 SW Crescent St, Beaverton

Inspired by the, ahem, wildlife in New York City, Malia Jensen’s Endless Pigeons is a stack of supersized birds nested one atop the next, on a cement barricade. The outdoor installation, which the artist hopes that real birds will perch on, “suggests an inversion of power understood at the level of physical comedy,” according to the show notes. It looks to the natural plinths of a cityscape to comment on modern discussions of who we choose to honor with statues. Tacla, a New York–based Chilean painter, will show a monumental four-panel painting Sing of Abandonment 34. Standing 26 feet tall, the daunting image is of massacred blocks in the Syrian city Homs.

12:30 p.m. reception; on thru Dec 3 | Cooley Gallery at Reed College, 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd

Murry was a Black queer artist whose career, though not well celebrated during his life, has impacted a generation of his former classmates at Yale, many of them now major figures in American painting: John Currin, Richard Phillips, Lisa Yuskavage and her husband Matvey Levenstein, to name a few. This collection of abstract oil paintings was created in the last five years of Murry’s life, before he died of AIDS-related illness; it was first shown at David Zwirner Gallery in New York and is organized in part by Yuskavage.

Still from Seba Calfuqueo’s video project Alka domo

Image: Courtesy Converge 45/PICA

3:30 p.m. performance; on thru Sept 24 | Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, 15 NE Hancock St

As part of its Time-Released programming (an alternative to its Time-Based Art Festival, which is taking the year off), PICA will host the Indigenous Mapuche artist from Chile Seba Calfuqueo for two distinct shows. Their video piece Alka domo (a recent acquisition of the Centre Pompidou in Paris) is a modern retelling of the Mapuche peoples’ fending off of Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. Calfuqueo will also perform a separate piece, Flowing Like Waterfalls, which explores water in relation to ecosystems, gender, and sexuality.

Still from Sam Hamilton’s Te Moana Meridian

Image: Courtesy Converge 45/Sam Hamilton

5 p.m. reception; on thru Oct 8 | Oregon Contemporary, 8371 N Interstate Ave

The Portland-based, New Zealand–born artist Sam Hamilton’s multichannel video project Te Moana Meridian features five operas (with performers both from Oregon and from across the Pacific in New Zealand) that focus on his proposal to move the prime meridian to the South Pacific, which he has presented to the UN, and speculates on its potential benefits. Tavares Strachan is 15,000 entries into his Encyclopedia of Invisibility: a historical log of figures that traditional means of history keeping have overlooked. His expansive neon sculpture One Hundred More Fires resurrects (in lights) a recent entry: Camilo Cienfuegos, the Cuban revolutionary who died a young death in a suspicious, fiery plane crash.

11 a.m.–3 p.m. reception; on thru Oct 14 | SE Cooper Contemporary, 6901 SE 110th Ave

Malcolm Peacock, whose multidisciplinary works examine the emotional and psychic spaces of Black experience, will show an immersive piece, next in line at the peak of the valley, his spine bent forward as he surrendered to his choices. Just two spectators are able to participate at once, and (free) reservations can be made here.

On thru Oct 8 | Various Locations

Presented as a joint show across three Pearl District venues, Assembly is the largest concentration of contemporary work on display at the biennial, pairing artists from around the globe whose work focuses on political tension points. Guest curator Christian Viveros-Fauné calls it the modern counterpart to the biennial shows featuring historical art.

At Pacific Northwest College of Art, 511 NW BroadwayThe exuberant and lively colored textiles of Portlander-by-way-of-Harlem Adriene Cruz; local painter Jeremy Okai Davis’s intimate, stylized portraiture; and Dublin abstract painter Brian Maguire’s civil rights-engaged works. Also showing: Patrick Hamilton (Madrid) and Karlo Andrei Ibarra (Puerto Rico).

At the Parallax Art Center, 516 NW 14th AvePortland artist Lisa Jarrett, who works across mediums (notably, past sculptures have involved human hair) to depict the African diaspora; buzzy painter Julian Gaines, maybe the biggest Nike stan in town, whose representative works reflect Black American experience; and Oaxacan painter Narsiso Martinez’s social realism–inspired portraits of farmworkers that use recycled produce packaging as canvases. Also showing: Portland multimedia artists Sara Siestreem and Vo Vo.

At Stelo Arts, 412 NW Eighth AvePortland artist Jessica Jackson Hutchins’s disorienting ceramic assemblages and Russian-born photographer Anastasia Samoylova’s observational photography. Also showing: Judith Wyss (Portland) and Nicola López (New York).

Robert Rauschenberg’s Signs, edition 44/250

Image: COLLECTION OF JORDAN D. SCHNITZER/© ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG FOUNDATION/AARON WESSLING PHOTOGRAPHY

On thru Dec 1, hours vary | The Schnitzer Collection, 3033 NW Yeon Ave

This show gathers a staggering collection of historical, politically engaged works. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from the German activist photographer Joseph Beuys’s life-size self-portrait from 1972, included here as a phototype on polyester. Brimming with some of the biggest names in American art over the past century (Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Kehinde Wiley), this show is described by Viveros-Fauné as the “historical backbone” of the festival.

There's more? Of course!

Throughout Participating Venues

You’ll spot Gray and Paulsen’s inscribed bricks artfully arranged around all of the biennial’s venues. This wandering installation, more missives, hopes to illustrate the myriad meanings loose bricks hold: a tool, a weapon, an anchor, a garden bed, a barricade.

All hours | Eastbank Commerce Center, 1001 SE Water Ave

The Portland artist’s latest public art installation, fittingly titled Sky Line, plays on his liberal use of the term “line drawing.” A rod of LED light draws a single scribble across the city, cast against a reflective metal billboard (yes, an actual billboard), making art of the most commercial space imaginable. Read our studio visit with Gronquist here.

On thru Nov 26 | Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, 724 NW Davis St

Prussian blue, named for the Prussian army, was one of the first artificial pigments used by European artists. The color uncannily (in the most horrifying way) matches the residue left on the walls of Nazi gas chambers. There are no figures in Jusidman’s exhibition, titled Prussian Blue, but the landscapes of vacant concentration camp sites are loud in their silence.

On thru oct 22 | Blue Sky Gallery, 122 NW Eighth Ave

Aside from his video project Broken Spectre (see above), Mosse will show a collection of photographs concerned with oil spills in Río Tigre, Peru. This show, Occidental, makes its way out of the Amazon as well, showing domesticated tableaus involving plants in the Brazilian city Belém do Pará, juxtaposing nature and urbanization: nature against human activity.

On thru Sept 11 | Portland Japanese Garden, 611 SW Kingston Ave

Though he’s known for large abstract paintings and sculptures produced from clay dug outside his Oaxacan home, Sodi will premiere a video project, Baku, that records the sisyphean practice of gardeners at Kyoto’s Konchi-In temple.

On thru Oct 7 | PNCA, 511 NW Broadway

Spanish for “scrawl,” Garabatos is a series of black-and-white photographs depicting what Valenzuela calls “sculptures to be photographed.” Colloquially, garabatos can be used as an insult; Valenzuela’s series taps into the rich subtext an insult carries (pop culture, class, geography) ultimately attempting to realign what content “fits” into galleries and museums.