Impact & Response to COVID

Exhibitions, collections, and people are the heart of museum work. Even during the pandemic, the JSMA continued to present new exhibitions to the public, add significant works to our collection, and engage our members, partners, and constituents through vigorous online educational programming. Looking back to the fall of 2019, the moment I arrived at the JSMA, it’s clear that the Ralph Steadman show marked a pre-pandemic turning point, unbeknownst to us at the time. The following winter we opened the Roger Shimomura and Carrie Mae Weems shows and unveiled Myriad Treasures in our beautifully renovated Betty and John Soreng Gallery. Then COVID hit. We scrambled brilliantly, soon offering everything we do online, essentially recreating every museum function in the virtual space of the internet. Instantly, our staff “pivoted” to create gorgeous online video tours, substantive PDF gallery guides, videos of lectures and talks, exhibition PowerPoints, and a comprehensive Remote Teaching web portal aggregating all of our online materials for easy use by faculty, students, teachers, and the general public. As a result, despite losing the entire spring term’s in-person student tours to the pandemic, in the 2020 academic year we served a record 10,200 students, representing 322 UO classes from 55 academic departments.

Later in 2020, with grant support provided by Art Bridges and a lot of staff talent, we launched an ongoing series of 360-degree virtual tours. Built from zoomable, high resolution photographs, the tours include links to wall texts, video, and audio related to the art on view, bringing the spatial feeling and experience of the gallery into homes and classrooms to an unprecedented degree. I’ve long been a proponent of 360-degree virtual tours as powerful tools for teaching and learning. They are also a great way to re-experience an exhibition you have already seen, to spend more time with wall texts and associated materials. If you haven’t taken a look at our gallery of virtual tours yet, I strongly encourage you to go for a stroll through our recent exhibitions, using as big a screen as you have! Go to jsma.uoregon.edu/VirtualTours to explore today.

Art in Action

Our last two years of exhibitions demonstrate that the presentation of an exhibition program both artistically scintillating and diverse in terms of race, gender, and culture was a core principle at the JSMA well before the overdue racial reckoning of the past years. In 2020, the Shimomura and Weems shows both offered hard looks at the history and persistence of racism in the U.S.—the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II and the police killings of Black Americans. Exhibitions such as Nuestra imagen actual | Our Present Image: Mexico and the Graphic Arts 1929-1956, and Nkame: A Retrospective of Cuban Printmaker Belkis Ayón featured the creative accomplishments of artists in Latin American countries with a close relationship to the United States. In the Preble Murphy Galleries, we continued to explore the histories of Japanese art and printmaking with exhibitions such as Rhapsody in Blue and Red: Ukiyo-e Prints of the Utagawa School, featuring stellar works from the collection of Lee and Mary Jean Michels. Artists from Oregon appeared in shows such as Metamorphosis: Visualizing the Work of Paul Hindemith, a collaboration with the Eugene Symphony, in the Hallie Ford Fellows exhibition, and in Artist Project Space, the work of Ashland’s Claire Burbridge and Portland’s Tom Cramer.

Two projects of the 2021 academic year made a particular statement about art’s role in the long struggle for racial justice. In June of 2020, aggrieved by the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd, and motivated by his own long history of collecting work by Black artists, Jordan Schnitzer called to propose and fund a collaboration between his foundation and the JSMAs of the UO, Portland State University, and Washington State University to offer 60 grants of $2500 to artists in the region of each university and museum, in support of Black Lives Matter. Working via Zoom meetings, the staff of each of our museums and Jordan’s staff assembled local grant selection panels, set up an online application portal, got the word out, and evaluated applications. Grants were announced in the fall of 2020, and the UO JSMA opened our exhibition in early July 2021, the first of the three exhibitions to premier. Although it falls outside of the calendar purview of this biennial report, I am happy to report that the exhibition and its reception by our public have been a huge success, a testimony to Jordan’s conviction that Oregon artists would offer powerful support to Black Lives Matter, and that artists needed to be heard from more than ever at this moment.

The second exceptional project of the past two years was Carrie Mae Weems’s RESIST COVID | Take 6! Responding to the pandemic, it was a nationwide art and public information campaign that joined encouragement of good health practices with a pointed message about the virus’s disproportionately high impact on communities of color. RESIST COVID encompassed billboards, lawn signs, window and wall posters, bookmarks, buttons, and shopping bags. With support from the UO President’s Office, the Division of Equity and Inclusion, Lane County Public Health, the Cities of Eugene and Springfield, the Eugene/ Springfield chapter of the NAACP, FastSigns, Homes for Good, the UO Center for Art Research, and many other community partners, the JSMA helped get Weems's message out across the Eugene/Springfield area. Our participation included three large billboards on major traffic routes, extensive downtown poster displays, lawn sign distribution, banners, and two dramatic installations on our front façade. We thank Carrie Mae Weems for her vision, and all of our community partners for their support!