The Best Shows and Events in Portland This Week, February 2026
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Sister Corita Kent was ostensibly famous for repurposing texts in her screen prints—everything from ad copy to scriptures to Whitman. In reality, Kent, who left the Immaculate Heart of Mary order in 1968 to pursue her activist art more fully, made pictures of inertia itself. Her work holds still these snipped bits of text to showcase their numberless and ever-shifting meanings. IF, from 1965, gives the latest show at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College its title (thru May 17, free). Paired with the sculptures of Hilda Morris and paintings by Kristan Kennedy, Kent’s looming conjunction is still very much alive. The orange letters wobble with the hope and uncertainty of a waiting diving board, naming the present moment, as the gallery’s incoming curator Derek Franklin has it in the show notes: “when calamity feels ambient and hope persists less as assurance than as impulse.”
The show, Franklin’s first since taking over from longtime curator Stephanie Snyder, marks a new chapter for the over-performing campus gallery, while picking up on its tradition of in-depth and nuanced storytelling bridging archival work with that of living artists.
Morris’s craggy sculptures are similarly forever in motion. A modernist, she landed in Portland in the early 1940s and fell in with a cohort of abstract expressionists, the so-called Northwest School, which included her husband, the painter Carl Morris. Franklin writes specifically about the mysticism animating Hilda Morris’s work, her secular fascination with bodily experience as a parallel to Kent’s Catholicism. Titles like Centaur’s Laugh and Presence of the Beginning bolster the point, but Morris also looked often to choreography and musical composition for inspiration, casting their gestures in ceramic, bronze, and even concrete.
Kennedy, the only living artist in the show (Kent died in 1986 and Morris in 1991), explodes form altogether. Her paintings on unstretched linen gather evidence of life. Abused by a washing machine and stained with ink and foodstuffs, they hang loosely like makeshift window dressings, each gracefully draped between two points. The release describes them as less images than atmospheres. If Morris cataloged figures moving through the world, and Kent the things they said, Kennedy shows the space they moved through (one painting quite literally sits like a mat underneath a Morris sculpture), and the traces they continue to leave. Together, they testify that “calamity” can mean so many things, depending on the day, and it’s always ambient.
More things to do this week
DANCE Breakin Portland
7:30PM FRI & 7PM, SAT, FEB 27 & 28 | NEW EXPRESSIVE WORKS, $25+
Rejoice! Diaspora Dance Theater’s community ensemble program is taking to the streets. Both fundraiser and performance, Breakin Portland pairs dancers from the city’s breakdance scene with voice-over storytelling and interviews about the art form as a mode of community building and resilience—an apt representation of the activist company, which advocates for the entirety of dance forms of the African diaspora.
THEATER Los Empeños de una Casa
7:30PM FRI & SAT, 2PM SUN; THRU MAR 8 | MILAGRO THEATRE, $22+
Local Latino arts center and theater company Milagro is behind this modern adaptation of seventeenth-century playwright Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s classic, Los Empeños de una Casa (Pawns of a House). The playwright, a polymath nun and a hero of the Spanish Golden Age with progressive ideas about women’s rights, translated much of her thinking about agency and education into this romantic farce. Behind the raucous wisecracks is the sincere story of two siblings battling colonial constraints while pursuing their respective love interests. Director Juliana Morales Carreño, a recent graduate of Yale’s theater school, specializes in bilingual theater, though this production is entirely in Spanish.
BOOKS Alicia Jo Rabins
7PM WED, MAR 4 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
Portlander Alicia Jo Rabins may be best known for A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff, the one-woman show that became a film sanctifying the onetime Nasdaq chairman via a “socio-political-personal rock opera,” elucidating, in experimental meta-fashion, an artist’s perspective of the Great Recession. Rabins is also an indie-folk musician, a poet, and an essayist. Across mediums, her subject is an assemblage of feminism, ancient wisdoms like the Old Testament, and her experience as a queer woman devoted to studying the Torah. Her new memoir, When We’re Born We Forget Everything, is perhaps Rabins’s most direct approach to her muse yet.
Elsewhere...
- Derek Hunter Wilson’s latest ambient album, Sculptures—a “sonic estuary,” per Lindsay Costello, in which “waters mix and meld, blending piano phrases with drifting string instrumentation and dissolving electronic textures.” (Portland Mercury)
- Architecture critic Brian Libby chatting with Ben Waechter, and wondering aloud if Waechter is Portland’s best of a generation. (Oregon ArtsWatch)
