The Performance Art Museum (PAM) is pleased to announce Public Spirits, a free, day-long festival of performance art taking place on Friday, October 23, 2026, at four sites across Los Angeles’s Chinatown and Dogtown neighborhoods, all within walking distance of the Chinatown Metro station. The festival features performances by Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies), Pau S. Pescador, Da Ron Vinson, and Ryat Yezbick. Each artist approaches performance as a form of public speech and a means of intervening in civic life in a spirit of resistance and critical response to the political climate.
Public Spirits has been curated by PAM Associate Curators Leon Hilton and Anuradha Vikram, stewards of the Museum’s two-year exploration of the history and legacy of High Performance, the Los Angeles–based magazine published from 1978 to 1997 that provided a vital forum for artists working across performance, activism, and community-based practices. Public Spirits draws inspiration from and pays homage to Public Spirit: Live Art L.A., the first Los Angeles performance art festival, which was organized by the Highland Art Agents and co-sponsored by LACE in 1980 and documented in the pages of High Performance.
On the cusp of the 2026 midterm elections, Public Spirits brings this history into the present through commissioned performances that engage with urgent social and political issues affecting marginalized and targeted communities, including immigrants, LGBTQ+ communities, students, and federal workers. The festival is organized around the conviction that performance art has a political dimension insofar as it can reshape perceptions and activate civic engagement.
Pau S. Pescador will present Working (updated 2026), a multimedia video and performance work collecting testimonies from LGBTQ+ government employees to consider the creation of law and the shaping of societal attitudes.
Ryat Yezbick will perform The Innocence of Unknowing (updated 2026), which applies artificial-intelligence analysis to questions of public safety and the news media’s coverage of mass shootings in the United States.
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies) will present Doll (Grandmother’s Oyama Doll) (Kabuki actors • transition MTF) (2026), a new durational performance connecting her Japanese ancestry and trans identity to overlapping histories of displacement and criminalization.
Da Ron Vinson will present Lingering (2026), a three-character play exploring the embodied intersections of race, gender, and ecology.
The festival will begin with a community breakfast and orientation at the Performance Building, PAM’s new home at 109 W. College Street near the Chinatown Metro station. Hosting performances by Pau S. Pescador and Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, the museum will also serve as a community hub where audiences can gather and reflect on the works throughout the day. Voter registration materials will be available. Within walking or rolling distance, Da Ron Vinson will perform at the Los Angeles State Historic Park, and Ryat Yezbick at Homeboy Art Academy. The festival will conclude with a reception with the artists and community leaders at Golden Dragon Restaurant.
The festival is being presented in partnership with two local initiatives, Wild Up’s Democracy Sessions 2026 and ONE Institute’s Circa: Queer Histories Festival, and with support from nearby organizations and businesses, Homeboy Industries and Golden Dragon Restaurant. By situating performance art within a range of civically oriented spaces across the neighborhood, Public Spirits seeks to bring together Chinatown and Los Angeles residents, workers, visitors, and cultural communities.
Public Spirits is made possible by PAM’s Home for Performance Art Campaign fund, courtesy of Karen Hillenburg, Karyn Kohl, Tim Disney, Betsy Greenberg, Abby Sher, Laura Maslon, and January Arnall.
Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo, a.k.a. Puppies Puppies, expands ideas around the readymade by imbuing ubiquitous and everyday objects, signifiers, and actions with a personal and political charge. She has, for example, reconfigured antibacterial gel dispensers, toilet bowl liquid, the color green, as well as the acts of sleeping, peeing, and taking a pill in installations and performances that challenge ableist frameworks of artistic and capitalist production. Many of Puppies Puppies’s exhibitions have also included actionable components: a GoFundMe campaign to support a friend’s transition fund, free HIV testing and counseling, and a working shower available for use by the public. Kuriki-Olivo thus asserts that life can be viewed as its own form of endurance practice, especially for those whose very survival is at stake, including trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people of color. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the New Museum, the Venice Biennale, and Galerie Kandlhofer, Vienna.
Pau S. Pescador is a contemporary trans fem nonbinary artist who works in film, photography, and performance and lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She graduated with an MFA from University of California, Irvine and a BA from University of Southern California. Select exhibitions and screenings include: UV Estudios (Buenos Aires, AR); Biquini Wax (Mexico City, MX); LADRÓNgalería (Mexico City, MX); Museum of Contemporary Art, Arlington (Arlington, VA); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Tyler Park Presents (Los Angeles, CA); and in Coastal/Borders, Getty Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA at Angels Gate Cultural Center among other venues. Select performances include: Salon Silicon (Mexico City, MX); Machine Projects (Los Angeles, CA); Los Angeles Contemporary Archives; Performa 2015: Colony, New York, New York; UC Berkeley: Durham Studio Theater; PAM, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, with KCHUNG TV, Los Angeles; REDCAT, Los Angeles; Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University, Los Angeles; and ForYourArt, Los Angeles.
Da Ron Vinson is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and director working across live performance, video, painting, sculpture, and installation. Drawing on folklore, ritual, and mythic structures, Vinson constructs worlds in which identity, memory, desire, and power are continually rearranged. Their practice moves toward the creation and embodiment of figures not fixed in suffering or redemption, but capable of exceeding morality, naming. Rooted in experimental theater and performance art, each work becomes another “brick in the edifice,” accumulating toward an expansive, evolving artistic vision. Through installations, performances, and moving-image works, Vinson invites audiences into ritualized encounters where the absurd, tragic, comic, and profound coexist. Within these encounters, objects, narratives, and social codes become sites of transformation. Vinson’s practice is an ongoing inquiry into Blackness, gender, relationships, and embodiment as continually negotiated conditions. Across performance, sculptural environments, painting, and video, they position the Black figure within spaces that both expand and unsettle prevailing frameworks of representation. Rather than offering resolution, Vinson’s work creates encounters in which myth becomes a method of survival, critique, invention, and becoming.
Ryat Yezbick is a visual artist who explores the body, memory, and the politics of witnessing in the era of digital surveillance and decentralized global conflict. Figuring their lived experience centrally in their work, Yezbick addresses a complex set of questions around security, gender, home, family, love, violence, power, and responsibility within the context of the crumbling U.S. empire. They work in a variety of mediums – notably live performance, experimental documentary, installation, new media, and drawing – that have garnered support from audiences and curators internationally. They are a published author, multi-time grant recipient, award winning artist, and faculty member in the Narrative and Emerging Media Program at Arizona State University’s LA-based campus. They are a former MIT Open Documentary Lab Fellow, current ONX Studio Fellow, and Lumen Prize Legacy Award Finalist (2026). Their work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Melbourne, Glasgow, and Athens, and in notable group exhibitions and performances at the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Los Angeles), REDCAT (LA), Materials & Applications (LA), Human Resources (LA), The Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), Tribeca Immersive (NY), Glasgow International 2018 (Glasgow), The Banff Center for the Arts and Creativity (Banff), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), Space One (Seoul), the Bangkok Biennial MAHA Pavilion (Bangkok), LAXART (LA), Craft Contemporary (LA), the Queer Biennial (LA), TRIBECA Immersive (NY), Khoj (New Delhi), Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (LA), New Images (Paris), and Ars Electronica (Linz).
Anuradha Vikram is a Continuing Lecturer in the UCLA Department of Art and an Associate Curator of the Performance Art Museum’s two-year initiative examining the history and legacy of High Performance. Recent curatorial projects include The Sky Is Always Falling: HIV/AIDS Activists Unleashing Power in Los Angeles Then and Now for the 2025 ONE Institute Circa Queer Histories Festival and a 2025 Curatorial Fellowship at the Metabolic Studio which produced the book ACTIONS In and Around Los Angeles State Historic Park (2026). In 2024 they co-curated the Oregon Contemporary Artists’ Biennial and the Getty PST Art exhibition Atmosphere of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption (2024–25) at UCLA Art Sci Center. Vikram has authored three books: Decolonizing Culture (Sming Sming Books, 2017), Use Me At Your Own Risk: Visions from the Darkest Timeline (X Artists’ Books, 2023), and ACTIONS: 20 Years In and Around Los Angeles State Historic Park (Metabolic Studio, 2026). They are a contributor to art periodicals including Artforum, Art in America, LA Review of Books, Springerin, and X-TRA, and publications from X Artists’ Books, Paper Monument, Archive Books, Heyday Press, Routledge, Wiley, and Oxford University Press.
Leon Hilton is an Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University and an Associate Curator of the Performance Art Museum’s two-year initiative examining the history and legacy of High Performance. His current curatorial and scholarly work explores genealogies of risk, endurance, and duration in performance. Hilton is the author of Counter-Cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance (University of Minnesota Press) and was lead curator of Queer Durations, a three-day convening held at Brown in 2024 focused on duration in queer and trans performance, visual, and media art. His writing has appeared in Art in America, GLQ, Third Text, Social Text, and TDR/The Drama Review, among other publications.
Wild Up’s Democracy Sessions 2026 has been developed by Wild Up in partnership with MOCA, REDCAT, and CalArts, and expanded through related programming independently conceived and presented by the Clockshop, 2220 Arts + Archives, Human Resources, Performance Art Museum, and Living Earth. Democracy Sessions 2026 is timed to align with the weeks leading up to the US midterm elections and seeks to position music and art as a living civic practice and a space where free expression, cooperation, and collective action can be rehearsed in real time. Wild Up is an LA-based orchestra collective that uplifts people and projects, leading the way for music-making today. Artistic Director Christopher Rountree started the group in 2010 to eschew outdated ensemble and concert traditions by experimenting with different methodologies, approaches, and contexts. Democracy Sessions was organized by Christopher Rountree, Artistic Director, Elizabeth Cline, Executive Director, and produced by Brian Sea, Production Director, with Linnea Powell, Personnel Manager, and Alitzah Oros, Digital Content Manager, Wild Up.
Circa: Queer Histories Festival presented by ONE Institute is a month-long, LA County-wide programming series showcasing the trailblazing histories and vibrant cultural contributions of LGBTQ+ communities through the lens of present-day challenges and triumphs. Kicking off at the start of October in honor of LGBTQ+ History Month, Circa features queer and trans artists, activists, and educators leading the movement for LGBTQ+ liberation through exhibitions, performance, readings, screenings, lectures, dialogues, and parties, and spans the humanities, politics, arts, and culture.
