Public Spirits

Public Spirits is a publicly-accessible, free performance festival on Friday, October 23, 2026, featuring Pau S. Pescador, Ryat Yezbick, Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies), and Da Ron Vinson. The festival unites diverse communities at public and civic sites in Los Angeles’s Chinatown around urgent social themes in anticipation of the 2026 midterm elections. Public Spirits will feature commissioned performances that engage with urgent social issues affecting members of marginalized and targeted communities to collectively transform systems of exclusion through active civic engagement.

Public Spirits will take place on October 23, 2026, from 9:30 am to 10 pm at public sites in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, beginning with a community gathering and orientation from 9:30 am to 10 am at the Performance Building. Featuring catering by Homeboy Industries and located within walking or rolling distance of all festival locations, the Performance Building will serve as a community hub for participants to reflect on the performances throughout the day. Da Ron Vinson will perform in the LA State Historic Park twice, from 10-11 am and 4-5 pm. Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo (Puppies Puppies) will perform twice, from 1-3 pm and 5-7 pm. From 12 pm to 8 pm, Pau S. Pescador’s one-hour multimedia video and performance will recur eight times on loop at the Performance Building. From 7-9 pm, Ryat Yezbick will perform at a location nearby. From 9-10 pm, the festival will conclude with a closing celebration and talk back with artists and community leaders at the Golden Dragon Restaurant.

More info at PAM's website.

Public Spirits is part of High Performance: A 2-Year Conference presented by PAM with the GRI, Highways, 18th Street Arts Center, and LACE. 

Participant Bios:

Anuradha Vikram (curator) is a writer, curator, and educator born in New York and based in Los Angeles. 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. They are a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Art at UCLA. 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. They were Artistic Director of 18th Street Arts Center from 2014-2019. 
 
Leon J. Hilton (curator) is an associate professor of theatre and performance studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. His research focuses on modern and contemporary theatre and performance art, with particular attention to the way these fields overlap with disability studies and neurodiversity, feminist and queer theory, critical race studies, and psychoanalysis. His first book, Counter-cartographies: Neurodivergence and the Errancies of Performance, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2025. In 2024, he curated “Queer Durations,” a symposium at Brown University delving into the significance of duration as a vital aesthetic concern for queer and trans performance, visual, and media artists. He holds a PhD from the Department of Performance Studies at New York University and a BA from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. 
 
Artists: 
 
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); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; LADRÓNgalería (Mexico City, MX); 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.  
 
Ryat Yezbick is a visual artist who uses their training in cultural anthropology to inform the issues they tackle as a maker. Yezbick investigates technology's impact on group identity, morals, and collective memory through public archives and collaborations. Figuring their lived experience in their work, they address a complex set of questions around security, gender, home, family, love, violence, power, and responsibility in the era of digital surveillance and decentralized global conflict. They work in a variety of mediums – notably live performance, experimental documentary, installation and new media – that have garnered support from audiences and curators internationally. 
 
Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) was born in 1989 in Dallas, TX. The artist received her BA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2014. Kuriki-Olivo’s work is rooted in a conceptual practice that takes many forms including performances, installations, sculptures, drawings, paintings, and community organizing. The artist’s work questions standard notions of what is and isn’t art, blurs lines between the personal and public, and explores the performance of identity as it’s mediated through the commodities and media we consume and surround ourselves with. 
 
Da Ron Vinson is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and director whose practice encompasses live performance, video, painting, and sculpture. At the center of Vinson’s practice is an ongoing inquiry into relationships, Blackness, gender, and embodiment as fluid, evolving conditions. Through self-experimentation and exchange, they engage the gaps and distortions of memory, moments of self-effacement, and forms of social critique. Their work unfolds in vivid visual vignettes that tend to linger. In performance, Vinson draws on a logic of disorientation and sudden clarity. Across installations and live work, they place the Black figure within spaces that both stretch and challenge familiar frameworks of representation. 

Public Spirits is organized by Performance Art Museum as a part of the 2026 Circa: Queer Histories Festival, presented by One Institute.