Things to Do in Portland This Week, January 2026
Image: Courtesy Portland Art Museum
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There are the rhinestone paintings, huge and splashy. There’s the Solange album cover and music video, the video portraits from 2016’s Do I Look Like a Lady? (Comedians and Singers), which are once again displayed at the Portland Art Museum’s new Black Art and Experiences gallery. Mickalene Thomas’s work takes countless shapes. Across paintings, collages, video, photography, and other mediums, her work almost always consists of portraits of Black women. Many are of her mother, the late fashion model Sandra Bush. Saturday at the Tomorrow Theater (7pm, $65), Thomas is screening her film Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman, a documentary-style interview she conducted with her mother while she was facing terminal illness. At the event, Thomas, who attended college in Portland but lives in New York, will chat about the film and its impact on her art with Pink Martini bandleader Thomas Lauderdale and the author and film producer Tanya Selvaratnam, both of whom helped produce the project.
The 23-minute film culminated, collected, or at least punctuated an ongoing dialogue in Thomas’s art about Black femininity. In it, Bush is jaundiced and frail, a stark contrast to the vibrant muse Thomas’s fans will know from other works. Thomas told The New York Times in 2012 that she wanted to capture “a different type of beauty, a different type of aging.” With Thomas asking questions off-screen, Bush discusses her own conservative parents, her near mainstream success as an early Black American model, and succumbing to addiction and suffering abuse.
“I am drawn to objects and people that have undergone some kind of a hardship,” Thomas told Artnet around the HBO premiere of Beautiful Woman. “They are beautiful and there is an artifice to them, but if you dig deeper, there’s another layer.” Coming to understand a parent as a person with their own complicated history and nuance is a formative experience for many. It’s less common to have that experience in public, as a central facet of your decades-long, world-famous art career. “I can finally look at her outside of being her daughter,” Thomas went on. Less common still is the ability to replicate that foundational experience in an artwork, for any curious stranger to immerse themself, which is exactly what Thomas’s work does.
More things to do this week
BOOKS 4 Palestinian Poets
7PM FRI, JAN 9 | MOTHER FOUCAULT’S, FREE
Portland writers, publishers, and literary organizations have gathered in recent months under the name Literary Portland for Palestine in support of Palestinian liberation. The group has supported protests and online activism and, this Friday at Mother Foucault’s, is putting on a reading by Palestinian poets. Portland poets Jaye Nasir and Veera Sulaiman are billed on the event flyer, as well as Philadelphia’s Ahmad Almallah and Seattle-based poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, whose collection Something About Living won the National Book Award in 2024.
OFF BROADWAY Dog Man: The Musical
6:30PM FRI, JAN 9; 11AM & 3PM SAT, JAN 10 | NEWMARK THEATRE, $46+
Dog Man is a cop. He was badly injured and saved by a surgery that traded his pig head for a dog’s, and in Captain Underpants creator Dav Pilkey’s graphic novel series—the basis for this traveling Broadway musical—Dog Man has to save the city from a cyborg fish and several sentient buildings, an evil cat and its eviler clone. The New York Times called it “irreverent and mildly vulgar” when it premiered in 2019. Recommended for ages 6+.
VISUAL ART Charlie Salas-Humara
RECEPTION 2–4PM SAT, JAN 10; THRU FEB 15 | NATIONALE, FREE
Several years ago, Salas-Humara had a breakthrough while erasing a painting in progress. Halfway through washing over a false start, he fell in love with the glimpses into the abandoned painting. Semi-obscured, the abstract painting was full of new questions. In 2022, he described the moment, saying: “Oh, these are me, these are my paintings.” With Billboards, the Portland artist continues his quest to paint canvases that feel like evidence. Previous works had titles drawn from specific childhood memories, and functioned like a hazy recollection. Here, referencing literal billboards, Salas-Humara is exploring the transformation of a commercial advertisement that’s been digested by time and weather.
Elsewhere...
- The head of the Oregon Arts Commission on 50 years of the Percent for Art in Public Places Program, which puts 1 percent of public project budgets toward public art works. (OPB)
- Nolan Parker on Portland band Dustbunny’s latest, Offerings for Weary Dogs: “If these songs are sonic offerings for weary dogs…woof woof.” (Portland Mercury)
