Spring Arts Preview 2024

It’s nice out, Portland. That nuclear fusion baddie up above is shining a seasonal spotlight on our hemisphere. And in that spirit, we at the Mercury are focusing our view on projects worthy of your sprung-forward time—in our 2024 🌸Spring Arts Preview 🌼! It may seem cutesy that we’re profiling Peachy Springs. But if you […]

Bingo is the happy medium between party vibes and relaxed game night with your friends.

Laurie Anderson has made an awe-inspiring mountain of music across her 40-year career as an experimental, trailblazing artist. You can attach multiple creative practices to her name, but her most well-known song—thanks to radio play from famed BBC DJ John Peel and an unexpected gen-z resurgence that landed her on the TikTok Billboard Top 50—is […]

The arrival of listening bars—meticulously designed haunts built around the playing of vinyl records on high-end stereo equipment—in the Portland metro area was inevitable. A mainstay of Japanese musical culture since the ’50s (an estimated 600 audiophile cafés and bars are currently in operation there), the concept has been imported to the US over the […]

On March 30th, the Portland Art Museum will raise the curtain on Future Now: Virtual Sneakers to Cutting-Edge Kicks, a new exhibit about the various futures imaginable for the world’s most versatile sporting footwear. Our city is the touring exhibition’s first stop following its premiere at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. This feels appropriate […]

Cherry blossoms aren’t the only feast for the eyes this season, as Portland’s springtime arts scene is blooming with more upcoming delights than your favorite floral sundress. If you’re hoping to cry from joy —not just seasonal allergies—consider screening The People’s Joker. Or keep it weepy as indie mainstay Death Cab for Cutie marks the […]

Looking at this season of spring gallery shows, we are reminded that art is all at once political, speculative, and personal. At the top of our list are interesting curations: Jeremy Okai Davis presents work by his contemporaries at Nationale, and Morgan Ritter pairs up painstaking hand-punctured cotton abstracts by Ash Wyatt with Jean Isamu […]