Get an art history professor talking, and they’ll almost certainly start telling yarns about their favorite massive international contemporary art exhibition: the biennial. From the oldest one in Venice to one that exists only online, the art world loves its biennials. And though they can often seem like more pretentious, less reasonable versions of Coachella to the casual art-appreciator, Portland has its own answer to these large-scale shows. If you care about local art, it belongs on your radar: The Portland2016 Biennial starts this week and lasts for two entire months.
Portland2016’s curator, Michelle Grabner, comes to us with some substantial experience. She served as a co-curator of the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and is a longtime professor of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (disclosure: I have an MFA and it came from there). When Grabner was announced as Portland2016’s curator a year ago, it was exciting to see someone singled out for the job whose work is strongly interdisciplinary, spanning sculpture, video, writing, drawing, and painting, with an occasional feminist bent—and a breadth of knowledge that’s exactly what you want from a person putting together a massive survey of local work.