WHILE SFMOMA'S LIVE ART PROGRAM stages its interventions into the city and collection as discrete pieces over the course of a year, the
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art offers another model for programming: the blitzkrieg of a festival.
Lawn, Tere O'Connor Dance Company (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, September 4-7;
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Ore., September 13-15; Dance Theater Workshop, New York City, October 1-18; Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn., November 7-8).
The rest went to Seattle and Portland, Oregon, to speak with artists and administrators at On the Boards and the
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. None of the visitors expected these conversations, or the ones in New York, to furnish immediate solutions to the challenges they face back home.
FOR TEN DAYS every September since 2003, the
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) turns Oregon's largest city into a temporary international performance hub, casting local artists alongside better-known global acts in a drama that normally plays out at a roundrobin of bigger festivals around the world: Buenos Aires, Melbourne, New York, and beyond.
This "Friendliest Black Artist in America" (as the MIT Press monograph that functions as an exhibition catalogue is titled) has taught theater and rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, for eleven years, and two Maine institutions--the
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, with Diverse Works Artspace in Houston as a third partner--co-organized this traveling show.