Five Standouts at Portland’s Converge 45 Triennial, From a Gourd Frieze to a Performance That Played with Fire

The US art world has in recent years worked hard to bring a focus to cities outside the market capitals, mounting recurring exhibitions like Counterpublic in St. Louis, the Medina Triennial in upstate New York, and the lamentably discontinued Front Triennial in Cleveland (adding to long-running shows like the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh). One that has remained a little under the radar is Converge 45, established in 2016 by Portland dealer Elizabeth Leach in hopes of getting the art world to converge on the 45th parallel, halfway between the Equator and the North Pole.

Courtesy of the organizers, I traveled recently to the City of Roses for the opening festivities of the latest edition, “Here, To you, Now,” overseen by New York–based independent curator Lumi Tan (shows at multiple venues remain open to various dates, some into 2027). The title draws on the 1985 novel Always Coming Home by Ursula K. Le Guin, a daughter of the city, in which a narrator describes how the people described in the book understood language: “The written language is ‘there, for anyone, at any time,’” as Tan explains in a broadsheet accompanying the exhibition, while the spoken language is always shifting: it is “here, to you, now.” The artists, she says, “take up Le Guin’s challenge: to imagine other ways of living while remaining grounded in the present, producing new forms of thought and feeling that can be offered to others.” 

The show contains some fine work, but overall it was a mixed success. Tan’s curatorial conceit is a stirring concept in the abstract, but it was hard to see how it played out in many of the works on view; moreover, does not much good art produce shareable new forms of thought and feeling? The show takes place at 16 sites around the city, mostly arts and culture venues, such as the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Oregon Contemporary, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA). One might have hoped for more offbeat venues that could have told visitors more about the host city; a several-day itinerary organized for visiting press was mostly taxiing (on a party bus!) from one white cube to another. 

Some of the show’s 28 artists hail from art world capitals, like Trisha Baga and Rose Salane of New York and Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork of Los Angeles, but more than half are Portlanders, some prominent, like Srijon Chowdhury, Keyon Gaskin, and Ido Radon. A number are members of studios that support artists with intellectual disabilities, including Aaron Cunningham, Michelle Fromme, and Annie Rose Macer. This seems like an admirable gesture, but it was hard to see how those artists were integrated into the curatorial concept.

Some artists responded to the local context, for example Linda K. Johnson, whose dance-and-installation piece refers to an earlier performance she conducted in the same city. Salane offers a video installation in which she offers the public access, at a local shopping center, to a pair of shoes she bought at auction that once belonged to Princess Diana, whose death was grieved by Portlanders along with mourners around the globe. Patricia Vázquez Gómez’s audio installation and artist’s book come from her work with local young people learning the Mayan language. 

What is the local context? It’s a challenging one. When Bean Gilsdorf wrote about Portland’s artist-run spaces for Art in America in 2019, the city had lost some important institutions and already seen rents skyrocket—and that was pre-Covid. In a study two years later, Gilsdorf noted that the city was rich with artists but poor on arts funding. Tan’s own informal survey of the city’s arts community, she reveals in the broadsheet, yielded a common refrain: “The city needs a comeback.” Let’s hope Converge 45 can help facilitate that.

Following are five standouts from the show.