Overview
Portland Art Museum invites the community to join a Free First Thursday event, offering free admission to the museum for all, plus a Live Wire event as part of the Literary Arts Portland Book Festival. Visitors can take in the afternoon gallery pop-ups, the evening show, or both!
Free First Thursday + Museum pop-ups
4:30 β 6 p.m. β Free, pre-show, pop-up performances will take place throughout the Museumβs galleries. Performers are poet and rapper Dessa, bestselling childrenβs author Mac Barnett, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park, and Portland comedian Mx. Dahlia Belle.
Free First Thursday tickets can be reserved online one week in advance and are also available at the door.
tickets for free first thursday
Live Wire Evening Recording
7 p.m. β Enjoy a fully seated, ticketed Live Wire taping hosted by Luke Burbank with announcer Elena Passarello, featuring a blend of interviews, comedy, and music performed live for the audience, then edited into an episode for broadcast to over 200 public radio stations nationwide. Performers are poet and rapper Dessa, bestselling childrenβs author Mac Barnett, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park, and Portland comedian Mx. Dahlia Belle. Doors will open at 6:30pm.
GA Tickets are $15. Preferred Seating is $40. Discounts available to Portland Book Festival passholders.
tickets for 7pm Live Wire recording
Performers
Dessa is a singer, rapper, and writer who fell in love with language as a toddlerβand just never got over it. Now, she works in fields that traffic in words: sheβs recorded rap bangers as part of the fiercely independent Doomtree collective, released a live album with the Grammy-winning Minnesota Orchestra; contributed to The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler; delivered a TED Talk on the intersection of romance and neuroscience thatβs notched more than 4 million views; hosted 2 seasons of behavioral science podcast Deeply Human (BBC/American Public Media); and published a memoir recounting most of the above called My Own Devices (Penguin Random House).
Mac Barnett, the 2025β2026 National Ambassador for Young Peopleβs Literature, is a New York Times bestselling author of stories for children. Macβs books have won many prizes, including two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Childrenβs Book Awards, three E. B. White Read Aloud Awards and the Boston GlobeβHorn Book Award, as well as several international prizes. He lives in Oakland, California. His latest book, illustrated by X. Fang, is Tom Nancy: The Sheep Who Swapped Brains with a Boy. From two of the most exciting picture book makers today comes a hilarious trickster tale and Freaky Friday switcheroo story: a sneaky, cheeky sheep named Tom Nancy has a brain swap proposal for an innocent farm boy named Felix that will change both of their lives forever. Laugh-out-loud, subversive, and totally unexpected.
Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and has worked in newspapers, book publishing, and academia. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harperβs Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, his new book Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.
The princess of Portland comedy, best known for her breakout performance on the popular Netflix special Hannah Gadsbyβs Gender Agenda, Mx. Dahlia Belle has been compared to a Swiss Army knifeβdifferent tools to extract sharpness, softness, vulnerability, hope, and wicked wit. Sheβs been declared one of β11 Trans Comediansβ¦ Funnier Than Dave Chappelleβ by Out Magazine, repeatedly featured on NPR, and has written for Cosmopolitan Magazine, The Guardian, The Stranger, and Portland Mercury. Her live performances have included NW Black Comedy Festival, Upper Left Comedy Festival, SF Sketchfest, and an awkward conversation with John Waters and Piers Morgan. In the upcoming live taping of her comedy special Affirmed at Polaris Hall on November 22nd, Mx. Dahlia Belle delivers 60 new minutes of stand-up to celebrate and affirm being human in the modern world through a combination of the wholesome and mundane, anecdotes about house cats, liscivious foibles of the LGBT community, and an unapologetic account of her personal journey with gender-affirming care, all delivered with her trademark free form wit.
About Free First Thursdays
Free First Thursdays at the Museum and PAM CUTβs Tomorrow Theater aligns with the revitalization of the long-standing Portland art galleriesβ tradition of opening their doors for openings, receptions, and events on the first Thursday of each month. In recent months art and culture organizations have joined to bring back this popular activity, including the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in the North Park Blocks.
Generous support provided by Art Bridges Foundationβs Access for All program.
Learn more about other discounted and free opportunities.