Reed Arts Weekend 2026: Cyber Miasma

March 6-8, 2026

Now in its 36th year, give or take a COVID break, Reed Arts Weekend (RAW) brings visual art, dance, DJs, literature, and more to Reed College March 6-8, 2026. Highlights include installation of a work by Simon Denny, a VR experience by Veronica Graham, an improv dance workshop by Carla Mann, and a lecture by Hannah Baer. Every event is open to the public. See the full schedule below. Reed Arts Weekend is organized and produced by Nina Friedman, Benny Gunn, Michael Malone, Lily Moyn, and Clementine Gripman Whistler.

Central to this year's RAW is an investigation into artists navigating the state of superabundance-induced paralysis. Stasis experienced in the face of frenetic speeds and liquidity, generative artificial intelligence and algorithmic media has compounded to a point of saturation in the media landscape that can be described as nothing less than a cultural torpor.

This year's RAW survey gathers artists directly responding to and exploring the dizzying excesses of supermodernity, cultivating practices of meaning-making in the face of excessive junk, spam, slop, rot, waste. Rather than capitulating to the inertia of overload, the exhibition foregrounds works that metabolize debris—digital, cultural, or psychic—into new forms of attention. These projects ask what might emerge when production outpaces comprehension, when data multiplies like mold, fed back to us in endless loops.

Exploring how artists and thinkers can produce meaningful work in a digital landscape defined by spam, the exhibition proposes ways art may function not as refuge from excess, but as a method for moving through it: sorting, sifting, resisting. In tracing gestures of refusal and reinvention, RAW 2026 invites viewers to consider new modes of slowness, deliberation, and estrangement as acts of creative survival.

CYBER MIASMA
Reed Arts Weekend 2026 Schedule

FRIDAY

Cyber Miasma
Student Art Exhibition Opening Reception 
4-5:30pm 
Plus viewing hours Friday 4-8PM and Saturday 9-5PM.
Gray Campus Center, Rooms A and B

This group exhibition of work by current Reed students will be on view through Saturday.

Simon Denny 
Dotcom Séance
All weekend
Performing Arts Building

An installation of selected images from Denny’s Dotcom Séance series. Simon Denny is a contemporary artist based in Berlin. Denny makes artworks that unpack stories about technology using painting, web-based media, installation, sculpture, print, and video. He represented New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale. 

Graft Union Reading Series (G.U.R.S.) and Femme Cell
6-8:30pm
Eliot Chapel

GURS - Graft Union Reading Series presents a poetry reading of emerging writers, performance art, and a surprise
musical guest.

Graft Union is a grassroots arts collective which hosts a monthly Reading Series (GURS) showcasing emergent writers across Portland. Graft Union follows a non-hierarchical and transparent organizational structure; continuously seeking new members, organizers, and readers. We foster radical self-expression through creative writing—not limited by form or genre—and actively encourage multilingual as well as multimedia work. A graft union is the junction between the rootstock and the scion of a grafted plant—where two different plants fuse and unify into one. Likewise, the Graft Union Reading Series envisions itself as a locality of interconnectivity and new growth.

SORA 
Shodo/Calligraphy Performance
8:30pm
Student Union

Portland-based Artist, SORA was born in Usuki Oita, Japan. She has studied Shodo since the age of six, most recently under Master Sekko Daigo (Oregon) and Master Futo Suzuki (Japan).

SATURDAY

Hannah Baer Lecture
David Velasco Reading
5pm
Eliot Chapel

Hannah Baer is a writer and licensed clinical psychologist based in New York. She is the author of the memoir trans girl suicide museum and the nonfiction book The Life of the Party, forthcoming in 2027. She is a psychoanalytic candidate and a contributing editor to Parapraxis.

David Velasco ’00 is a writer based in New York and Reed alumnus. He was editor-in-chief of Artforum from 2017 to 2023, and before that, he worked as an editor at artforum.com for twelve years.

Veronica Graham
Diatribes
Lecture, Exhibition, and VR Experience
2-4:00pm
Vollum Lounge

Diatribes is a poetic VR experience that explores the internal conflicts that arise when one is confronted with the reality of climate change. Veronica Graham’s practice centers on poetic world-building in digital media as well as analog print publishing. Her work is held in the collections of MoMA, the New York Public Library, and SFMOMA.

RAW Dance Party 
9pm-
Student Union

SUNDAY

Carla Mann Improv Dance Workshop
1-2pm
Performing Arts Building 240

Equal parts joyful play and practice for navigating the unknown, improvisational dance invites us to attend to our individual creativity, movement history, ideas, and physicality within a community of supportive peers. In this workshop, we'll draw on a variety of improvisational dance practices to explore the possibilities for movement that each of us possess. Wild, shy, gorgeous, awkward, Silly, serene–improvisational dance welcomes all kinds of movement, including yours. This workshop is designed ages 18 and up, at any level of experience. Please join us!

Professor Carla Mann has been a member of the dance faculty since 1995, teaching beginning through advanced levels of contemporary modern technique, choreography, special projects courses, cultural studies in dance and improvisation. Her choreographic work for stage, alternative sites, installation and video has been presented on the east and west U.S. coasts, in China and the Czech Republic, as well as her home base, Portland, Oregon. Mann has performed with Oslund+Co/Dance, tEEth, Troika Ranch, Keith Goodman's Dance Gatherer, Minh Tran & Company, Bonnie Merrill, and Benny Bell & Company among others, as well as in many of her own choreographies.

David Abel and Ceremonial Abyss
1-3pm
Vollum Lounge.

David Abel is a poet and editor, and sometimes performer. Forthcoming publications include the books Sweep (Chax), After the Frontier (Himal), XXI Eclipses (Escandalar/Couch), and a cassette of sound works from Spiral Press. He is the proprietor of Passages Bookshop in Portland, Oregon.

Ceremonial Abyss is a sound artist, writer and curator, residing somewhere in the so-called United States. He has toured extensively in support of his self-releases Despair, Betrayal, 23, and Tape Study for Four Variants. In 2024, Abyss performed throughout the southwest exclusively remixing “found” material from minimalist composer and structural filmmaker Tony Conrad.