Portland’s Converge 45 Reveals Theme and Artists, Including Trisha Baga, Rose Salane, and Srijon Chowdhury

Converge 45, a citywide triennial in Portland, Oregon, has announced the theme and the 28 participating artists for the exhibition’s upcoming edition, launching August 27.

New York–based curator Lumi Tan has titled this iteration of the art festival “Here, To you, Now,” borrowing a phrase from Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1985 science-fiction novel Always Coming Home. The novel focuses on the Kesh people, who have survived an ecological disaster and “prioritize the impermanence of spoken language, insisting that meaning is always remade in the moment: Here, to you, now,” according to a release.

The choice to look at Le Guin is intentional as the late author was based in Portland, as such more than half of the 28 artists are based in Portland. They include Srijon Chowdhury, Aaron Cunningham, Marcus Fischer, keyon gaskin, Linda K. Johnson, sidony o’neal, and Vo Vo. Artists coming from outside Oregon include New York–based ones like Trisha Baga, Frank Heath, and Rose Salane, as well as Los Angeles–based Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork and Rome-based Lex Brown.

“What feels especially compelling about Here, To you, Now is the way Lumi has brought together artists whose work meets Portland with real attentiveness,” Converge 45’s executive and artistic director Amanda Donnan said in a statement. “These projects don’t just arrive in the city, they engage its histories, its spaces, and the communities that shape it. For Converge 45, that is the promise of the triennial: work that is rooted here while opening Portland to broader artistic conversations.”

Converge 45 will take place across 16 venues in Portland, including the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, the Portland State University Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, Oregon Contemporary, and Open Signal Community Access Network.

“Portland is a vital and ever-evolving artistic community where the roles of artists, curators, gallerists, technicians, and administrators can be beautifully indistinct,” Tam told ARTnews in an email. “People are driven to support and provide for each other, to fill in the gaps. Adaptation and regeneration are built into the nature of making and showing—sustaining a creative practice is not about repetition but risk and interrelation.”

Marking its 10th anniversary this year, Converge 45 launched in 2016 with a series of exhibitions and programs that ran for two years. It switched to its current triennial format for the 2023 edition, its fifth overall set of programs. Tan looked to this institutional history for inspiration when conceiving of the exhibition, describing, in her email, Converge 45 as an organization has a core mission “to collaborate and platform those who are already doing the crucial work in the city, and celebrate how that changes every few years.”

That focus informed her conversations with local artists, Tam said, adding that together they “explored ideas of how accepting impermanence opens up new opportunities in their work, and how they have seen audiences in the city become temporary communities that hold and pass on knowledge. Those conversations became the base for artists from across the country to engage with that knowledge, and grow their understanding and experience of the city organically.”

She continued, “We live in an extraordinarily chaotic time that can drive us into isolation, and this is an exhibition that deliberately calls for attention to be a shared responsibility, to bring us together as an audience.”

The full artist list follows below.