Here, To you, Now

The 2026 Converge 45 Triennial

Curated by Lumi Tan

The 2026 Converge 45 triennial Here, To you, Now centers on experiences that bring people together—here and now—while celebrating the meaningful temporary communities that form around art. Inspired by the writing of Portland literary icon Ursula K. Le Guin, the triennial features 28 artists and 17 new commissions that activate the city as a shared stage for discovery, dialogue, and connection.

Here, To You, Now opens across 16 venues citywide with a weekend of receptions, performances, screenings, and talks August 27–30, 2026, with programming continuing through the fall. 

Participating Artists

Partner Venues

Here, To you, Now activates Portland as a distributed exhibition site, spanning 16 partner venues across the city and surrounding area. 

Participating organizations include Barn Radio; Cooley Gallery at Reed College; Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College; Movie Madness; Native Arts and Cultures Foundation; Open Signal Community Access Network; Oregon Contemporary; Pacific Northwest College of Art; Patricia Reser Center for the Arts; PLACE; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art; Portland State University Schnitzer School of Art + Art History + Design; and SE Cooper Contemporary, among others.

About the curator

Lumi Tan is an independent curator and writer based in New York City, specializing in interdisciplinary exhibitions and performances. She has been curator of the Focus section at Frieze New York since 2024 and previously served as Senior Curator at The Kitchen, New York. Recent curatorial projects include exhibitions at Performance Space New York; DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul; and Luna Luna, Los Angeles and New York. Her exhibitions, writing, awards and teaching have spanned institutions and publications internationally. 

Curatorial Statement

In her 1985 novel Always Coming Home, Ursula Le Guin created a rich fictional ethnography of the Kesh people living in a far future, whose way of living developed after they survived an ecological apocalypse in a distant past. In a further bend of time, a present-day anthropologist named Pandora has compiled a thorough guide to Kesh culture. She describes attributes of their language: 

“The written word is there, for anyone, at any time. It is general and potentially eternal.

The spoken word is here, to you, now. It is ephemeral and irreproducible.” 

Here she makes plain that impermanence is a condition of the present. Even if a spoken word is repeated, it cannot be the same. Its meaning arises in the specificity of who is being addressed, in the very moment, while we are together. Attentiveness is a shared responsibility. It brings us together as an audience and determines how a message may linger, dissipate, or repeat. 

The artists of the 2026 Converge 45 triennial find value and resonance in the concept of impermanence, which drives their creation of new forms of communication and storytelling. In turn, we regard Converge 45’s audiences as temporary communities that come together to perceive these new forms, process their potential meanings, and consider how they are carried forth. 

The phrase “temporary communities” typically denotes those formed after disasters. Refugee camps and climate disaster shelters predominate our preconceptions of these places but are amongst a multitude of environmental, political, and economic emergencies that uproot populations around the world. Considered transitional, these communities are meant to meet basic needs. Yet, temporary becomes permanent as much of the world never recovers from disruption or disaster. We understand that displacement, migration, and transience have become more common ways of existence as people only move from one unsustainable situation to the next.  Within such impermanent spaces, ingenuity and generosity are employed for survival. What kinds of knowledge do these temporary communities hold, share, and inherit from site to site? How may they teach us to live in the constant instability of the present? How do contingencies affect communal investments in the future? 

Through this exhibition, I propose that all mediums and approaches—from objects to performance—hold potential for expressions of impermanence. The artists of the Converge 45 citywide exhibition actively think about new methods of belonging and knowledge sharing, regeneration, inherited and embodied histories, and self-defined micro and macro communities. With them—together—we affirm the impermanence of knowledge, recognize ideas that are impossible to translate, accept the cyclical revelations of landscape, and adapt to the erosion and reshaping of our realities. 

– Lumi Tan

Press

One Day Only: Portlanders Gather to Witness a Rare Object and Rebuild a Missing Archive

Converge 45 Announces Artist List for 2026 Triennial "Here, To you, Now”