Skip to main contentEvery spring and fall we feature new and exciting work in theatre, visual arts, performing arts, literature and more - encouraging readers to keep Portland’s artistic world alive.
Our biannual Spring and Fall Arts Guides serve as Portland's essential seasonal cultural roadmaps.
Our 2026 Spring Arts guide reflects on a Portland that feels out of sorts after emerging from a winter with snowless ski slopes, flowers blooming in December, and beloved institutions like the Portland Chamber Orchestra shutting down. Creativity, however, is still finding ways to flourish in unexpected corners of the city. Four spaces in particular stand out: a repurposed Kenton photography studio, a Russian theater troupe that swapped an ICE-disrupted show for a puppet production, a Milwaukie gallery championing tradespeople's art, and a Pearl District room that treats music like sculpture.
Willamette Week's Fall Arts Guide 2025 arrives at a moment when Portland's arts community is under serious financial strain from federal funding clawbacks and city budget shortfalls that have hit every creative sector. Local arts leaders are pushing back rather than giving up since art is worth fighting for, ot just as entertainment but as a means of human connection.
Portland's rainy winters are an unavoidable fact of life, but spring always follows, and with it, a renewed sense of possibility. The city's artists and art institutions follow that same pattern, shaking off the dreariness of the previous months and getting back to work. This year's Spring Arts Guide captures that energy, highlighting a range of artists and events coming into season: visual artist Jess Ackerman debuting a new collection, Adrian Younge bringing his Jazz Is Dead concert series to Portland stages through May, Portland Opera staging an adaptation of The Shining, and Boathouse Microcinema returning to screen experimental films by the river.
Portland's arts scene thrives on the strength of deep roots, decades of creative infrastructure that give emerging artists a rich foundation to learn from and build on. Portland has long been as a proving ground where new talent can develop, whether that means chorus members breaking off to start their own opera company focused on living composers, or longtime community stewards like the organizers behind The Thesis, a hip-hop showcase celebrating its 10th anniversary and still championing an often-overlooked local music scene.
Welcome to our Spring Arts Guide, which begins with a trip to the symphony. Specifically, Heroes: A Video Game Symphony, which fuses music from countless video games to create a sonic journey through several decades of gaming. For this issue, we chose to spotlight works of art that defy the limits of genres and borders to enlighten and entertain. It’s still a scary time to be an artist in the Rose City, but Portlanders keep creating, trusting that audiences, readers and viewers will heed a simple but powerful call: Game on.
