Watt’s work has included towering sculptures of Indigenous blankets and the aforementioned giant neon signs blaring the name of her ancestral land, Turtle Island. A Portlander and a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians who also has German-Scots ancestry, Watt is interested in what beloved and familiar objects offer when collaged into artworks—and how mixing artifacts from her own various heritages reflects multicultural identity. The same is true of her printmaking work featured in this traveling exhibition, Storywork. The layered pieces are made in short-run series using techniques like photogravure combined with appliqued objects and gilt foils. While they are mostly flat and ostensibly reproducible, each piece carries the complexities and heirlooms of her room-size installations. 

Like Watt, Sara Siestreem is a Pacific Northwest artist who combines Indigenous and Western crafts and art in her entirely singular practice. Siestreem is a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, and her work—which ranges from large-scale paintings to gilded porcelain sculpture to basket weaving—draws on references as diverse as Xeroxed punk zines to Indigenous textile patterns. All of the above feature in her latest solo exhibition, dance apron, her second at Elizabeth Leach. 

Aside from the photo of LA musician and performance artist San Cha that announced the festival’s dates, the 2025 lineup of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s annual Time-Based Art Festival is still TBA (expected at the end of August). Though the weekslong, citywide event is in its 22nd year, guessing what will be on the bill is futile. It’s always a thrilling, challenging, enriching trip. Some examples from last year: Autumn Knight’s installation that was a bar and also a work of performance art; Morgan Bassichis’s performance that was a love letter to, a recreation of, and a meta-dialogue with Frank Maya’s groundbreaking queer stand-up; and the Javaad Alipoor Company’s mind-breaking play (?), which comprised too many things to recount here. 

The adjective aptropaic (sometimes spelled with another “O”: apotropaic) describes, per Webster’s, an object, ritual, or some other effort “designed to avert evil.” It’s also the title of textile artist Freddie Robins’s forthcoming show at Reed’s Cooley Gallery. Robins, whose inventive sculptures and installations often involve knitting and themes of gender and labor, is a professor at London’s Royal College of Art who’s in Portland this fall for a distinguished visitorship at the college. Aptropaic is also the gallery’s longtime curator Stephanie Snyder’s final show; after two decades at Reed, she herself is headed to Europe for an extended writing fellowship.  

Marine biomaterials, toxicology, energy harvesting—these are the building blocks underlying Sasha Fishman’s sculptures. Fishman, a recent Columbia MFA grad who lives in New York, is as much a researcher as she is an artist. Collaborations with biology labs in school manifested an ongoing series of sculptures made with hagfish slime, algae, and cicada shells. Repurposing these once-living materials in art—instead of the industrial means they’re engineered for—Fishman questions the use of so-called natural resources in industry. Shad Mode is her first show with Portland’s ILY2. 

Though its new Rothko Pavilion opens in November, PAM’s programming earlier in the fall is reason enough to visit ahead of the big event. Yoshida Chizuko, who died in 2017, was a tremendously influential Japanese modernist and, as the rare Japanese woman artist to find critical success midcentury, she was also a powerful advocate for women artists. She worked at the avant-garde of traditional Japanese aesthetics and techniques and adopted early Western modes of abstraction, including the wiggly optical patterns of so-called “Op art,” before turning her interests to representational pictures of nature in her later years. This retrospective of nearly 100 works includes early paintings from the 1940s and ’50s as well as monotypes and woodblock prints spanning Chizuko’s long career. 

Curated by Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son, this biographical exhibition, A Larger Reality, brings some of the late Portland science fiction and fantasy author’s—and poet and essayist and revolutionary thinker, and, and—most beloved works to life. A range of art installations pulling from, among others, her Earthsea and Hainish universes are scaffolded by more traditional manuscript pages, archival photos, and outlined chronologies. Think of an augmented-reality psychiatrist’s office à la The Lathe of Heaven (if you’re catching up, that novel is about a man whose dreams become reality, and the psychiatrist who tries to gain control of their power). Collected, the Oregon Contemporary space should prove a true Planet Ursula.