Art After Midnight: Curating Time-Based Art in the Museum

Sophie Cavoulacos is visiting Portland to talk about curating time-based art at PICA on Thursday, October 15. The talk, Art After Midnight: Curating Time-Based Art in the Museum, is part of Critical Conversations, PICA's platform for dialogue and inquiry that supports Oregon artists and writers.

Cavoulacos is a curator in the Department of Film at MoMA in New York, and she'll be drawing on her work there. MoMA's film archive and live-performance activities provide tools for engaging with art made outside traditional forms and settings, and that's where her talk starts. She'll use case studies ranging from the 1980s New York club scene to avant-garde circles in 1960s Tokyo to explain a curatorial practice in which preservation, oral history, collaboration, and site-specificity all play a role in stewarding art made in ephemeral and collective modes. It's a look at how a museum handles work that doesn't fit into a frame or a pedestal—the kind of art that exists in a moment, in a room, or among a crowd.

Beyond this talk, Cavoulacos has programmed MoMA's Doc Fortnight and New Directors/New Films festivals and leads the artist cinema series Modern Mondays. The conversation runs alongside MORE by Trisha Baga, a monumental immersive installation showing at the institute from August 20 to October 24, 2026, so you can see a large-scale work in person before or after the talk.

It's free and open to the public, starting at 6:30 PM on Thursday, October 15, at PICA in Portland.