Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects

January 18 to May 3, 2020

Nationally celebrated Portland-born artist Carrie Mae Weems used photography, video, and installation to examine contemporary life and the African-American experience in her exhibition The Usual Suspects. Through this body of work created between 2014 and 2018, Weems asks, “How do you measure a life?” and looks at the constructed nature of racial identity— specifically, representations that associate Black bodies with criminality, and the resultant killings of Black men, women, and children without consequence. Opening shortly before the COVID-19 lockdown, Weems’s exhibition both preceded and coincided with the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd that triggered nationwide protests and action seeking to end the long-standing conditions so tragically documented in her work. Carrie

Nuestra imagen actual | Our Present Image: Mexico and the Graphic Arts 1929-1956

October 3, 2020 to February 14, 2021

The JSMA and the Portland Art Museum (PAM) co-organized Nuestra imagen actual | Our Present Image: Mexico and the Graphic Arts 1929-1956. Curated by Cheryl Hartup, Curator of Academic Programs and Latin American and Caribbean Art at the JSMA, with the assistance of Mary Weaver Chapin, Curator of Prints and Drawings at PAM, the exhibition aimed to deepen and broaden the understanding and appreciation of the graphic art of post-revolutionary Mexico, a landmark in the history of twentieth-century printmaking and modern art. The exhibition presented sixty-two lithographs, woodcuts, and wood engravings by twenty-two artists, including Elizabeth Catlett, Leopoldo Méndez, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Rufino Tamayo,

Yampolsky, and other members of Mexico’s world famous Taller de Gráfica Popular (Popular Graphic Art Workshop; established in 1937). The majority of the prints were drawn from PAM’s exceptional print collection, including Siqueiros’s Nuestra imagen actual, a timeless and universal image of subjugation and torture that inspired the title of the exhibition.

Metamorphosis: Visualizing the Music of Paul Hindemith

March 6 to June 14, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic and its closures of museums and performance spaces disrupted our original timeline for Metamorphosis in 2020, but happily the JSMA was finally able to present new works by Oregon artists Mika Aono, Anna Fidler, Andrew Myers, and Julia Oldham in the spring of 2021. The result of a multi-year collaboration with Eugene Symphony Music Director and Conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong, this exhibition was inspired by German composer Paul Hindemith’s orchestral masterpiece Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Weber (1943). Videos of the artists’ works (created by JSMA design services manager Mike Bragg and featured artist Julia Oldham) accompanied the Eugene Symphony’s live performance at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in February 2022.