 I'm also lucky enough to be the executive director of the institution she founded 20 years ago. When Christie first came to Portland more than two decades ago as a young artist and filmmaker, she immediately began curing community, building bridges. She mentored young filmmakers, collaborated with dancers, musicians, and artists, and reached out to inspire patrons and civic leaders. Her art projects expressed her generosity of spirit, her capacity to see the nuances and complexities of the time, and the access to effect on who we are as a culture. She saw this community's potential and she asked us to fulfill it. She founded Art on the Edge at the Portland Art Museum, PICA, and then the TBA Festival. Her legacy continues here in Portland. We all know it didn't stop here in Portland. Christie quickly became recognized as a leader in our field internationally, from the Neverland International Art Festival to New York Park on Avenue Armory, I'll say that three times fast, to the UCLA Center for the Art of Performance. She continues to impact the careers of artists, inspire communities, and shape the landscape of performing and visual art globally. I'm sure her keynote did a lot of challenges to reflect and inspire us to be part of something larger than ourselves and our institutions. Please welcome our public intellectual, the visionary, Christie Evans. Women, child, everything in between. Okay, can you hear me? I'm truly honored to be here and to be asked to give the keynote, which I keep trying to remind myself I will recover from, and I hope you all do as well. You know, public speaking when I'm not in a direct dialogue is actually very hard for me, and I'm holding onto this for dear life, so if you feel it shaking, it's just me. Nothing to worry about. I think first I want to say that I feel like it's really important for me right now to acknowledge the indigenous people of this land, in this place, and I want to offer and pay my respects to your elders past and present, and thank you for your spiritual guidance in our time. I also want to open the meeting through sharing a number of rather extemporaneous thoughts, and those of you that know me know that that tends to be how I function. I've been mulling over many different things quite a lot of late, and also in the lead up to doing this keynote. I want to share some recent experiences that likely relate to our own practices in different ways professionally and artistically and humanistically, and offer a few stories, little glimpses from the fractal theory of my atlas of self. Before I speak often I have to explain to my two young sons where it is that I'm going and what I'm doing, and one of the things that I, and then I try and engage them in trying to understand something about what I might be doing as I cross space and time to be with people that they don't always know. It's a lot of time that I'm away from them, and one of the things that I thought would be good for me to enlist their wisdom around was to ask them to think for us, you, us, our neighbors, their neighbors and strangers and friends, to reflect on who they thought we were, and so I'll just share a few of those responses to a recently seven-year-old and a maturing, rapidly, taller-than-me, 11-year-old boy. Who are we? Who do you think we are, I say, to Ashby and Malachi? Random people, creative beings, maybe house dwellers. Maybe they are a big community. We are a big community, and a good community. We try not to make pollution. Maybe we are singers, and maybe that singing just comes to everyone. Or maybe they're swimmers. We're swimmers. Happy, part of the family. Maybe you're people with a fun career. Maybe you're good drawers. I was dreaming of selling my own drawings. Actually, I'd rather give them away because it's generous. And I also want to learn how to drive a car. I asked them what they thought it was like having an imagination, what it felt like. And they said, it feels fun and weird and hilarious, especially when you touch the keys to the piano, because you can feel your fingers touching something that isn't yourself and is at the same time. Anyway, we have to look after the animals, and we have to take care of things. And I think maybe that's where you're going. And I thought, yeah, that is. The annual NPN meeting is, as we know, legendary. And it stands as a kind of migratory gathering of the most diverse assortment of catalytic interlocutors in our contemporary visual and performing arts ecology. Over the days and nights ahead, probably very long nights, if I know you like I think I do, we'll have much ahead of us and there will be a cascade of a great deal pouring forth for us to engage in and ponder and try to make sense of how to best integrate or guiltily accept what we will discard later as we return to our studios and offices purely because we all have 30,000 emails we have yet to open. And mainly it's a place and time where we can take hold of one another and seek inspiration and fortitude and add fuel to the ideas at play that can galvanize our creativity and our pressing solutions that we find solutions within our reach. So my job really is simple. It's just to get us started. I think because my curatorial practice and work crosses a variety of lines, I'm continuously prepared to think through the evolving concerns and conditions across art forms. I was asked to speak about hybridity of artistic practice. The hybridity of artistic practices and how to facilitate ideas in transit is very much what is on my mind. Where best to do it? With who? To what edge? And inside of which frames? Whether it's jazz, global dance, theater, spoken word, visual installation, poetry, literature, the list goes on as it does for all of us. Many of us think and speak across artistic languages and expressive ideas in our work. Artists certainly do. And how audiences, viewers, or members, or however we call those individuals, we know that they are very important to us. So much so that we can sometimes lose the plot around our public promise. Hybrid practice, intra-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, and etc. are all in high circulation in our thinking and in our work. But are we making any sense? A lot of this conference will bring us in contact with an immense array of expertise across organizations, across forms, across scales, across diverse cultural models and concerns, and most especially those that uphold the presence of the generous contrary. I wanted to focus here on a various sets of different kinds of stories. And one of the ones that I start off with, I suppose, is that very recently I was watching Laurie Anderson's film, Heart of a Dog. How many of you have seen Heart of a Dog, inter-disciplinary for sure? Among the many, many acutely beautiful wisdoms that are in it, she referenced Kierkegaard, who said this, life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward. So a hybridity, not of disciplines, but of past into present into future and that hybridity that we carry. Standing here in Portland, my best place of places, my whole self, is jogged back to when I lived here, the founding days of Pica 20 years ago. I remember acutely the conditions at the time in which the social systems of the institutional landscape 20 years ago then were perplexed by why I thought another arts organization might be necessary. More vexing and confusing was that I was proposing an organization that was framed by all art disciplines, visual and performance with media and cinema and community practices interwoven and under a particular mission and vision tent pole or series of tent poles that would become Pica. Portland sociologically at the time felt that we had what we needed already, opera, theater, museum, symphony, ballet. We had local mainstream companies that had subscription practices, et cetera, et cetera. Actually what I think they were trying to tell me that there were others more qualified because of their pedigree to fulfill such a thing than I would be. And I sensed that a general indifference to the new was a more comfortable position than an active embrace of a possibility that whole other segments of citizen Portlanders longed to have addressed or given a home. It was with them that I staked my colors to the post and off we went. We carried forward and it is still the case of that today. Pica would need to be DIY before that acronym was clustered. 20 years on, a past impossibility sustains its organizational practice and propels its staff and board and community towards an integrity of purpose with intelligent care within a local and national and international field. And I just want to acknowledge the staff and board of Pica who have carried that forth across headwinds of great indifference locally and also the beauty of extraordinary community care that you've inspired. It's a community of care that likely all of us feel and are endeavoring towards in our own situations and places. And I have often wondered why? Why we do this? Why Pica is able to sustain? Why we cling on, hang on, keep going? And I think that what happens is that it is held up by a continuous generosity of artists in their work. It's championed a hybrid sensibility with an abiding kind of ethos. It listens to a kind of difficult economic wisdom that lasting matters more than annual balances can possibly measure. It is lasted long enough, Pica anyway, and the NPN, to be an influencer on taste, on literacies, and on community memory. It is not a replaceable fabric. It has to sustain the fabric. It has to sustain the fabric, as do we all, in one way or another, in order to be able to consistently embrace the fulfilling of a public promise. Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward. Which makes me think that if we are to have one indispensable tool for navigating our exponentially changing conditions in the arts while understanding backwards and simultaneously and necessarily propelling ourselves forward, it's this, the tool of listening. Listening with our whole selves. And listening is quite a hard thing to master. A couple of months ago, I was presenting Bianca Jouko in Los Angeles at the Center for the Art of Performance in UCLA, and a patron of mine made a beeline for me about 15 minutes before Curtin to express her great disdain about my programming over the past few years having landed in Los Angeles. She said to me, now this is where I was like, I'm looking forward to this listening, she said to me, it's unfair to old people like me and my friends that you offer nothing I already know. And I'm not gonna keep subscribing to performances that I don't recognize with people in them whose names I don't know. I don't like being a foreigner at my alma mater. And I was seeking where to put the jolt of rage that was in my body, and I was also pulling down, looking for that empathy because I did want to understand something more about an unfairness, an unfairness that I thought I understood pretty well, but this was her unfairness. And I wanted to learn something from her. So, mistakenly, I asked her to continue. If you lose people like me, well, it's a business failure. I am more important to your bottom line at an $80 ticket than these students and hipsters and other people who pay $10 or even less. So you really need to think about what I am saying to you, Christy. I want classical music and I want refinement. And this is where my ability to listen was profoundly strained, and I responded. And I responded in the way that I've learned to respond over decades of practice and through the inspired community of linked shoulders and arms that we have in this room by talking very deeply about the power and gift of discovery, about public education, about the cultural commons, about being, well, headquartered and based on a major research university where new knowledge was in fact part of the mission. And I then suggested since the lights were flickering and the ushers were waiting for me that she remember that Royce Hall was named after a philosopher, not a corporation, and not a particular family line. And I think in many regards we have all noticed a particular set of increase or recycling of the same kinds of conversations and same kinds of encounters. The programming that I have championed in one way or another because of artists and what their wisdoms offer us and their capacities and their expressive truths can be seen by some as too ethnic, can be seen by others as too abstract or esoteric, can be seen by others as the kind of fulfillment of a dream because who knew any of this was possible without them. Recently, CAP UCLA, that's the acronym now, and center theater group embraced and embarked upon a co-presentation of theater work by young Jean Lee called Straight White Men. It's a complex and very positive kind of collaboration across our two institutions and young Jean's piece is running currently. One of the ways that we devised it is that on the first preview the audience that works often with me in the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA would come and attend the first preview. So the first preview was populated by my people and the second was populated by their people, the regional theater producing audience. And then on opening night it would be again populated by both of our people. The audience's reactions could not have been more opposite. At issue was that the ending of young Jean's play is left wholly unresolved, wholly unresolved. And for some this was a complete violation of theater making. It was a flaw and it was going to be really difficult to go to home and go to bed. For others this was the powerful metaphor of life itself played out gloriously on a stage. What Diane Rodriguez and I both saw however through our collaboration and through the hybridity of our institutions was that by colliding our differently attenuated audiences they were able to manage a shared discourse about theater, their expectations, their experiences, their longings, their judgments. The audience itself was a hybrid within our community that needed one another to co-create new meaning and to expand their separated literacies. Our collaboration offered both a different chance, offered both audiences a different chance in listening. And by doing something together which was not easy, young Jean, the artist, was more profoundly heard which was our job after all. On that Friday recently when the terrorist attacks happened in Paris I was involved in two things on that afternoon afternoon on the west coast. One was a project that I've been doing with Sam Miller that involves artists, performance makers, and neuroscientists. We were convening and discussing and planning and plotting and thinking about what our cells are doing up there. Truly. And the other was that I was halfway through a major survey of the choreographies of Anterres de Quinoa Smokar and the Rosas Company from Brussels. We were all meeting in my office with a brilliant, much-lotted neuroscientist who at the time was describing what was happening, what happens in our brains, how our cells themselves listen and react and how certain examples would create minimal reactivity and he was providing some examples of that and then maximal reactivity and communication in our cell systems. And he used the example of if a lion came charging through the office window right now our brains would alight in a very different way and in fact there was a lion charging through the window only it was in Paris. I left immediately to check on the company they were rehearsing upstairs. I was preparing myself knowing that I probably would be breaking the news to them with the train ride being an hour away and many of the company members originally from Paris and in my mind I was also thinking about the performance that night because as an executive director not just an artistic director I would be confronted with the questions I knew would happen on my phone. Were we proceeding or not? What was respectful? How to increase security and in what way or not? To sequence the refunds of people who would simply not come because the attacks happened in a theater and they weren't able to stand in a theater on that night. And it was disturbingly familiar to run down those sequences and also how I would now very differently need to prepare to step onto the stage because the show would go on and welcome people to it. How often I have had to acknowledge as have all of you somehow an atrocity that has occurred on that same day or that same week somewhere and each time 9-11 Katrina, Sandy, Sandy Hook, London, Spain, Colorado, St. Louis, Paris, Chicago, San Bernardino we are simply not the same. No matter Charleston. No matter how the list goes on. No matter how we try to be. And I could see when I stood out on the stage who wasn't there as I held the mic to be able to settle into some form of welcome as all of you have as well. There were empty seats out there just as I had thought where just that morning hundreds of people in those seats would have been present and I felt the fear of that absence but what I could really feel in that room was the profound, profound deafening roar of who was there and that is what I was listening to and should be. I said that in a certain way the possession of that ticket on a day like that and increasing days like these what we were doing was more than selecting a seat for a play or a dance or a concert than attendance to a museum and the admissions button and things like that more. A ticket, a membership was a kind of voting attendance to a world of artistic ideas and a percentage of upholding that is about upholding the places in which we activate for the way secular ideas can gather to explore, to co-create meaning to co-author memory within our communities of the things that we can fully possess but of course cannot permanently own. These are the places where collective engagement and consciousness can explore expressive languages together and I was listening to that the hybridity of presence conjoined by absence. Grace conjoined with injustice as we over and over encounter. Royce Hall as I said is named after a philosopher and it is discussed often in my place of employment that renaming it would provide an asset on the financial ledger. It would resource what we do within it more fully and if we could just convert that naming into an income from an inert name that was established over 100 years ago it would provide a robust income stream and would that not be deeply impressive and this is another kind of hybridity of practice that I believe we have an even greater interest in focusing on. Beyond visual art, performance art, cinematic, projected light, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera crossing boundaries, institutional boundaries is also this, the hybridity of our continued navigation between increasingly different poles monetary value in its associated data sets in providing success measures with artistic community and mission value which is the principle and principled driver of our resource allocation whether it be small or large in continuing to uphold a public promise in the cultural commons that lead us towards the force towards equality. We're quite good at this cross disciplinary navigation of accounting and programming and of course they're both human inventions which offer us often a hybrid challenge of a dual responsibility within our work. 18 months ago I was at Harvard doing intensive as part of being a fellow within the National Art Strategy's leadership cohort as were some of my colleagues here in this room. We studied, we looked at case studies at Harvard the business and managerial models of all matter of things willingness to pay ratios and how best to increase them negotiation strategies for winning results PowerPoint on that how corporate models can be adopted by not-for-profit institutions et cetera and at the end our cohort provided feedback to the Harvard professors glowing, fascinating and useful was the majority view and rightly so because they are in possession of much executive business genius they're helping to train the world of future business leaders others recognized from that process that they needed to change careers they could extract no more and me and a few of us however unpopular our feedback might have been basically said and what I said was this I wonder what might be the business model for replenishment within culture rather than further refined extraction which leads me finally to this had anyone told me 20 years ago or 25 when I first started working that the most commonly asked question of my professional life in one guys or another would be this why does contemporary art matter? I would never, never have thought it possible in my 20s that this question in one guys or another would preoccupy an entire segment of our culture in one way or another but equally so that by crossing the fence lines of defined paddocks listening to the artists and their expressive truths worldly wisdoms were required solely at home locally or elsewhere through global migration and deciding that there is just no logical reason to eddy around in the security of decorating the utterly known further we now would be in generous possession of a neighborly, restless, tender humanity in our work that could be continuously shared restored replenished and offered outwardly as acute nourishment they say that the best neighbors make strong fences but I think that our work is to reach right across those fences now and in every way we can to ensure that our collective possession in culture can take place without needing it to be owned and fenced in final thought from my fractal atlas up here as we progress forward bringing the keys to our various mini kingdoms organizations companies and missions we are part of the people's throne and regardless of the pressures and strains to conform to the paths of least resistance we truly must carry forward positive resistance we must leave our crumb trails if that's what we have and our paving stones for those coming up after us we must offer diligent and deafening evidence of care which has to populate our business models our choices and our shining contributions to culture a cross culture within culture in the protection and upholding of culture our hybridity is our chance at equity from my view our hybridity is our poetic ambiguity and our integrity and quite likely also our animation and activation of responsible liberty or at least it's the protection of the contrary which is a crucial thread in the full potential of the tapestry of our human belonging I'll offer one more thought that I think might be actually pragmatically useful when approaching something difficult it's a Buddhist thing think of a time when your mother loved you unconditionally or your father or your grandparent maybe your kid, maybe your dog think of a time when you were loved unconditionally and gather up what that feels like and hold it as long as possible and now pick up your keyboard and try to write that grant application again thank you okay the NPN 2015 annual meeting is officially opened