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The 2026 Artists’ Biennial’s title The Price of the Ticket takes its title from James Baldwin’s unpublished 1985 collection, reframing his challenge to America’s unfulfilled promises of equality. Atlanta-based writer and cultural historian TK Smith curated The Price of the Ticket using Baldwin’s provocation as a lens through which to explore how identity, citizenship, and belonging are performed and contested across land, lineage, and language—especially as America stares down the Declaration of Independence’s 250th anniversary and the celebrations the president wants to throw Trump-style commemorating it.
Among next spring’s highlights of the more than 30 creatives showing in the Artists’ Biennial are Portland-based transdisciplinary artist, writer and activist Demian DinéYazhi’, Eugene-based Iranian sculptor and installationist Tannaz Farsi, Portland-based artist, social worker and Air Force veteran Ebony Frison, and Portland-based Iraqi-American artist and filmmaker Sahar al-Sawaf.
DinéYazhi’’s practice spans neon, text, performance and land-based installation. Their work centers radical Indigenous queer feminist resistance and examining the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. DinéYazhi’ has exhibited widely, including at the 2024 Whitney Biennial, and recently won a $100,000 Ford Family Foundation award supporting Indigenous creative leadership. Similarly, Farsi’s installations interrogate how ideology is embedded in objects, architecture, and language. Her installations and sculptures translate bureaucratic language and state symbols into poetic abstractions, exposing the instability of allegiance and belonging.
Conversely, Frison’s work transforms lived experience into layered reflections on race, memory, and healing. Using photography, printmaking, paint and collage, she confronts the visual and structural remnants of segregation and reclaims Black presence within Oregon’s cultural landscape—challenging the historical erasures that persist in public memory. al-Sawaf creates mixed-media collages and films that fuse personal archives, Arabic calligraphy and experimental storytelling. Her work explores how displacement reshapes faith, identity and memory as she draws from experiences of migration and exile.
The Price of the Ticket—perhaps also an allusion to the financial uncertainty which led Oregon Contemporary’s leadership to pause summer programming in May—open April 4, 2026 and runs to July 5.
