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Converge 45 has had a significant presence in Portland’s art scene for a decade, though it’s never been easy to say what exactly it is.
Gallerist Elizabeth Leach founded the organization in 2016 to organize and fundraise larger local arts projects and bring far-off programming to, per the name, converge on the 45th parallel. The plan was to appoint a guest curator to oversee the organization in three-year stints. The first run manifested as a slew of shows and a conference. COVID squandered the second. Then, in 2023, Converge took shape around a citywide exhibition of blockbuster shows, which it somewhat confusingly called a biennial. But in 2024, the organization announced that the celebrated New York curator Lumi Tan, known for progressive and often experimental shows, would head up its next exhibition in 2026, a triennial.
“We’re sort of a spaceless organization that works through partnerships,” says executive and artistic director Amanda Donnan, whose appointment this January marked another change.
The Converge model has always been flexible. But Tan’s inventive curation meets up with a new moment in the organization itself—many of the original players, including Leach, have moved on to other projects—and might clue which direction Converge is moving. Tan’s overarching title for the exhibition is Here, To you, Now. Pulled from Ursula K. Le Guin, the title sets an interactive tone. Instead of bringing existing artworks to Portland, Tan prioritized commissioning new works and setting artists up to create them in conversation with the city and specifically for Converge 45.
The 2026 triennial opens with a weekend of performances and receptions, running Aug. 27–30. Some shows fill venues that more often host high-profile art exhibitions. Three are set to inaugurate the galleries of the new Schnitzer School of Art at Portland State University. Oregon Contemporary and the Reser are hosting as well. But so is Movie Madness, the downtown DJ club Barn Radio and SE Cooper Contemporary, a small residential gallery in Lents.
New York artist Rose Salane’s show at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College was created in direct conversation with the city. Salane displayed a pair of Princess Diana’s shoes around Portland earlier this year and then had a Lloyd Center magician vanish them, all the while creating a video installation that will be her show, Afterlife in Public. The project riffs on condolence albums that many cities, including Portland, produced when the princess died. Most never made it to Buckingham Palace and have since disappeared. Salane’s project taps into the ways such monocultural moments live in the collective memory of a specific place.
Portland dancer and choreographer Linda K. Johnson’s inventive archive of Portland’s contemporary dance community will make another excitingly collaborative show. The Evidence of Foot Fall at Place Gallery collects mind maps, interviews, posters, costumes and other ephemera drawn from Johnson’s ongoing Mycelium Dreams project, which uses forest mycology as a guiding metaphor for the networks within the local dance scene.
Street Meetz, a video project by the Portland artist Vo Vo, hits the Here, To you, Now theme quite squarely. Artist-on-the-street style, the video, which will premiere at Movie Madness Aug. 29, is made up of interviews with people in public settings. They’re asked about the best moments of their lives as a way of “highlighting how brief, meaningful exchanges with strangers can create temporary community.”
“Last time around, it was maybe more about shipping paintings—shipping more traditional art forms to Portland,” Donnan says. Last time, in 2023, was curator Christian Viveros-Fauné’s Social Forms, a massive collection of over 50 shows inspired by his book of the same name, subtitled A Short History of Political Art.
The exhibition garnered a lot of attention, and it brought a lot artworks to the city that likely would not have made it here otherwise—think Kara Walker, Roy Lichtenstein, Kehinde Wiley and others. The animus appeared to be hosting an internationally significant exhibition in order to put Portland on the map of internationally significant arts places.
Tan’s programming is practically an about face. “She’s interested in turning that on its head,” Donnan says, “and looking at impermanence and temporary community…and the ways that big projects like this do actually shape a city.”
The larger intention is the same. Donnan describes it as “creating a moment and drawing attention to the city.” The difference seems to be, instead of creating a moment for Portland and the rest of the world to look at, it’s about creating a moment for Portlanders to be a part of.
GO: Converge 45, converge45.org. Showtimes and locations vary; see website for a detailed schedule. Opening weekend runs Aug. 27–30. Free. All ages.
