JSMA Winter 2022

WI NTER 2022

JORDAN SCHNITZER MUSEUM OF ART

You’re invited to celebrate our winter exhibitions including Remember This: Hung Liu at Trillium

Ron Jude: 12 Hz | Rick Silva: Western Fronts and more

Patron Circle Reception

Friday, February 11 6–8 p.m. | Remarks at 6:30 p.m.

RSVP

https://jsma.uoregon.edu/patron-circle-rsvp or to Tiana Buckley at telkins@uoregon.edu or 541-346-0974

Members Open House Saturday, February 12 11 a.m.–1:30 p.m.

RSVP

https://jsma.uoregon.edu/open-house-rsvp or to Tiana Buckley at telkins@uoregon.edu or 541-346-0974

Related Events A Gallery Walk with Ron Jude and Toby Jurovics of the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment Saturday, February 12, 11:30 a.m.

Hung Liu’s American Journey: A Conversation with Jeff Kelley Saturday, February 12, 2 p.m.

DIRECTOR’S REPORT | WINTER 2022

By February 2022, when this issue of the JSMA magazine comes out, it will have been more than 23 months since the museum went into lockdown in March of 2020.

I began writing this report at the end of October, and our situation at the museum finally felt different.

The JSMA returned to our regular hours on September 22, and students were back on campus in full force, with the largest entering class the university has ever had.

Our galleries are overflowing with UO classes, guided by our curatorial and collections staff, including our two new post-graduate curatorial fellows. We’re all wearing masks and some staff continue to work remotely a couple of days a week to preserve a more distanced, safer office environment, but it finally felt like we’d reached a new version of normal—then Omicron arrived. Enough said.

As all of you know who came to them, our fall Open House events and our Winter Open House were a resounding success. Our galleries were bursting with community members, faculty, UO staff, and students looking at art and talking with the JSMA staff scattered through the building. At the Fall Open House, Prof. Kate Kelp-Stebbins gave a deeply moving, eloquent introduction to the brilliant The Art of the News: Comics Journalism exhibition she curated. Throughout the evening of our Patron Circle Open House and the morning and afternoon of our Members Open House, the focus was on the art, and the galleries were buzzing with energy. At the Members Open House, UO alum Joe Sacco and Sarah Mirk, whose works are featured in the Comics Journalism show, signed books for two hours, chatting with visitors about comics journalism and their publications. And at the Winter Open House, we heard from Ron Jude, whose work is featured in the Schnitzer Gallery.

at the time. Most of the slides showed highly competent “tractor paintings” (as we called them), featuring happy workers, peasants, and other politically acceptable themes, along with some nice landscape images. The program at UCSD was highly conceptual in nature, with influential artists like Allan Kaprow, who invented Happenings in the 1960s. I remember wondering what this Chinese Socialist Realist painter would do there. But I thought she would definitely bring a new dimension to the program and hoped she’d get in. She did, but it took her a year or two to get permission to come and by then I was gone. We finally met in the 1990s, after Hung had joined the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, where I was moonlighting as a guest lecturer while pursuing my day job as a curator at SFMOMA across the Bay. In the Bay Area art world, our paths crossed regularly from that point on.

Hung Liu was an effervescent, dynamic colleague with a sharp sense of humor and a gift for engaging other people and the world.

Her hard-earned, virtually limitless technical ability as a painter allowed Hung’s wide-ranging creative vision to flourish in series after series of works that established her as a significant international contemporary artist. The works in Remember This offer a strong dose of her brilliance, and we only wish we could be presenting them with Hung here among us again.

This issue of the magazine features our Barker Gallery exhibition by Hung Liu. We are still all reeling in the wake of Hung’s death in August, reported in the last members magazine. As we open her show this February, it will be a time to celebrate Hung’s incredible gifts as an artist, and to be grateful for how much she achieved in her 72 years.

The exhibition’s title, Remember This: Hung Liu at Trillium, was chosen long before her unexpected passing, but now acquires a profoundly elegiac resonance.

I am delighted to have photographer Ron Jude’s work on view now.

Jude is an internationally exhibiting artist who joined the UO art faculty in 2015. His show comes to us from the newly launched Barry Lopez Foundation, and will tour nationally. Jude’s new work takes the form of stunning, stark, large-format black and white images that look at the natural world with an eye to its shapes, textures, and forms. It is tempting to call these works “landscape” photography, but I hesitate to do so. Traditional landscape photos show the world from an implicitly anthropocentric point of view—the world, looked at by us humans for our own pleasure and reasons. And we tend to want the world to look beautiful, scenic, inspiring—to us. Ron Jude’s work, taken as a whole, feels utterly distant from that. To my eye, these are anti-romantic, unsentimental images. They depict a “nature” that isn’t here for humanity’s delectation and exploitation.

However beautiful, the nature Jude shows us is fundamentally hard, relentless, dark, and cold. I find this unsettling, yet also important to dwell on. As human-induced climate change creates harsher weather and brutal living conditions for many creatures, Jude’s elegantly bleak, often dark images offer a warning. Humans need to stop looking at the world with the narcissistic eyes we routinely use, because it is not about us. Really.

My own life intersected Hung’s regularly, beginning in the early 1980s when, as a grad student in the MFA program at UC San Diego, I had a chance to see the slides she submitted as part of her application to the graduate program there. Her future husband, Jeff Kelley, was a grad student colleague at the time, too. Hung’s slides showed paintings in the Socialist Realist style demanded by the Chinese communist regime

In December, the huge outdoor projection of Aleph Earth (see photo)—a video/music collaboration by Colin Ives and Craig Phillips—was definitely a highlight (despite the weather). Their installation of the same name in the Artist Project Space opened before Thanksgiving and will continue through late February, a must-see if you haven’t already!

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In Case You Missed It

Black Lives Matter and “Personal History” In the Gallery and On Stage In collaboration with the UO Theater Department In conjunction with the Black Lives Matter Grant Program Exhibition, the museum and the UO Department of Theater Arts collaborated on an innovative program bringing together artists in the exhibition and members of the cast for the department’s winter play, Personal History.

Written by Dominic Taylor of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, the drama tells the story of “an African-American couple as they navigate three moments in American history, stretched out over a century in the city of Chicago.”

Watch Now: https://bit.ly/3Ilt7HO

In December, visitors gathered in the cold to watch the debut outdoor screening of Aleph Earth.

We have had a number of other excellent public programs in the fall, too, both online and, in the case of the Comics Journalism symposium, in person. Please take a look on our YouTube channel. I particularly recommend the dialogue among artists in the Black Lives Matter show here, together with the cast and director, Dr. Stanley Coleman, of the UO Theatre Arts Department’s production of Personal History. The artists offered deeply thoughtful commentary on their work, and the playwright of Personal History, Prof. Dominic Taylor of UCLA, provided superb commentary on his work.

Happy New Year, the Year of the Tiger, and as always, the museum and all our staff send out a big thanks to JSMA members, and to our Leadership Council, Patrons Circle, and Leadership Council Emeriti members. It was great to see you at the Winter Open House, and we look forward to getting together in person as 2022 continues.

John Weber Executive Director

Representation of Figure and Landscape in Puerto Rico in the Work of Myrna Báez and Norma Vila Rivero Join artist Norma Vila Rivero, special guest Dessie Martinez, and Cheryl Hartup, curator of Tiempo suspendido | Suspended Time: Myrna Báez and Norma Vila Rivero, for a discussion of the exhibition and the relationship between figure and landscape in Puerto Rico.

Watch Now: https://bit.ly/3tIacTw

An Evening with Joe Sacco One of the highlights from The Art of the News: Comics Journalism Symposium was a special evening with Joe Sacco, the first credited artist to practice rigorous investigative journalism using the comics form.

Watch Now: https://bit.ly/3nFciPS

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STAFF New faces UPDATES around the JSMA! Mac Coyle

Post-Graduate Museum Fellow in Asian Art “While I have already been involved in a number of exciting opportunities here at the museum, one project I have particularly enjoyed working on is researching the museum’s collection of Ainu-related materials. The Ainu are an indigenous community from northern Japan and eastern Russia, and it has been so exciting to work directly with the museum collection—which includes sketches, prints, paintings, and even traditional textiles—throughout this research.”

Zoey (Zo) Kambour

Post-Graduate Museum Fellow in European & American Art Mac Coyle, Zoey (Zo) Kambour, and Anna Kim

“I am greatly looking forward to the opening of the exhibition I am curating, After Life: The Saints of Russian and Greek Orthodoxy. Working at the JSMA took me out of my comfort zone in academia, and challenges me to think of how art speaks to one another in an exhibition space and to the viewer.”

Anna Kim

Korea Foundation Global Challengers Museum Intern “I chose to come to JSMA because it is an academic art museum that boasts an impressive size of Asian art galleries and collections. I’m excited to be working on my research on the Buddhist painting from the JSMA’s Korean collection, Jijang Siwangdo of the early Joseon period, for the next gallery rotation in Huh Wing in late spring.”

Lesley Williams Executive Assistant Lesley Williams

Lesley Williams has happily settled here after residing on three continents including her home country of Australia. She is an energetic and experienced executive assistant who worked in higher education in the United Kingdom and Florida. She is also an artist and sculptor who has found her “dream job” at the JSMA.

Elizabeth Renchler and Ben Dippy JSMA security team

Security officer Ben Dippy is a Eugene native and previously worked for 5th Street Public Market. Security officer Elizabeth Renchler graduated from UO in 2021 and has held various positions at the JSMA before accepting her role as a security officer.

Those previous positions include visitors services associate and security monitor lead.

Elizabeth Renchler and Ben Dippy

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Left to right: Hung LIU (LIU Hung 劉虹, Chinese-born American, 1948-2021). Polly and Her Horses, 2008. Mixed media, 41 x 41 inches. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon; Gift of Artist Hung Liu and Trillium Graphics/David Salgado

Hung LIU (LIU Hung 劉虹, Chinese-born American, 1948-2021). All the Ancestors, 2011. Mixed media triptych, 60 x 100 inches.

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon; Gift of Artist Hung Liu and Trillium Graphics/David Salgado

Remember This: Barker and Soreng galleries | February 5 – August 28, 2022

In 2018, renowned Chinese-born American artist Hung Liu (19482021) and Trillium Graphics founder David Salgado (1948-2018) donated a legacy collection of 55 mixed-media works to the JSMA. Over 15 years of collaboration, they developed a prize-winning hybrid technique that allowed Liu to revisit, alter, and enhance photographed elements from her paintings, augment them with hand-painted motifs, and embed them in layers of translucent resin.

Tragically, both Liu and Salgado have since passed on, but their creativity and largesse are celebrated in this very special exhibition.

Hung Liu focused with insight and compassion on the forgotten— elevating and imparting dignity and individuality to the poor, the afflicted, and the displaced. With subjects ranging from portraits to landscapes to still lifes, she reflected on history, memory, tradition, migration, and social justice. Although she was originally trained in the Chinese Socialist Realist style, Liu’s mature works are global

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and humanitarian in outlook. Raised at a time when photos were routinely destroyed for political reasons, she came to view such images as precious keepsakes and used them as inspiration, combining (largely anonymous) figures with evocative backgrounds punctuated with auspicious motifs. Characterized by layers of luminous color, drips, and Zen ensō-like circles that mark the passage of time, Liu’s gestural brushstrokes and filmy washes lend a poetic, almost dreamlike quality to her art, which stands in stark contrast to the rigorous propaganda style that was prescribed during her youth.

Nevertheless, she continued to honor the core principle of uplifting and celebrating common people.

Liu’s early life coincided with a tumultuous period of Chinese history.

She was born in 1948 in Changchun, Jilin province. Soon thereafter, her father was imprisoned in a Communist labor camp. After moving to Beijing, she attended school with the daughters of various party leaders, but did not receive a diploma due to upheaval caused by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-76). In 1968, Liu was sent to the countryside to be “reeducated” by working among peasants.

Hung Liu at Trillium Later, she attended Beijing Teachers College and hosted a televised art program. In 1979, she entered Beijing’s prestigious Central Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied mural painting. In 1984, Liu emigrated to the United States to study art at UC San Diego, where she was advised by pioneering American theorist Alan Kaprow (19272006). Oscillating between the poles of Communist propaganda and the Happening, she found her artistic voice and went on to receive numerous fellowships, grants, and prizes while serving as a distinguished professor at Mills College. A tireless artist, Liu created an immense, profound, immediately recognizable body of work imbued with strength and empathy. Her art is represented in many public and private collections and has been the focus of numerous national and international one-woman shows, including the current exhibitions Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands (at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. through May 30, 2022), Hung Liu: Golden Gate (at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco through August 7, 2022), and Remembering Artist Hung Liu (at the Oakland Museum of California through October 31, 2022).

In addition to donating the ground-breaking collection of hybrid mixed-media works featured in this exhibition, Hung Liu and David Salgado generously initiated a prize to be given each year to an outstanding University of Oregon art student. We were devastated to learn of the untimely passing of Salgado in 2018 and Liu in 2021 and we offer this exhibition, programs, and forthcoming catalogue in their memory.

Related Events Hung Liu’s American Journey: A Conversation with Jeff Kelley Saturday, February 12, 2 p.m.

Visit https://jsma.uoregon.edu/RememberThis for additional events

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Rick Silva | Western Fronts

Rick Silva (b. Brazil, 1977). Stills from Western Fronts, 2018. Video, running time: 18:30. Courtesy of the artist

Focus West Gallery | January 15 – May 29, 2022 Rick Silva’s Western Fronts: Cascade-Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Bears Ears is an experimental video that reflects the political and ecological threats that face four U.S. National Monuments. The work combines aerial drone footage and photogrammetry with 3D animation to create a nature documentary that collapses into itself. The wilderness is scanned by large shapes that momentarily reduce the landscape into grayscale polygons—in these redactions we glimpse a near-future dystopia of computer-vision aided resource extraction.

Visit https://westernfronts.com/Mineral_Apocalypse_Transparent_Earth.pdf to read an accompanying essay by Geoff Manaugh (https://geoffmanaugh.com/).

Rick Silva (b. Brazil, 1977) is an associate professor of art at the University of Oregon. His works envision near-future ecologies altered by technology and climate change. See more at http://ricksilva.net/.

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After Life:

The Saints of Russian and Greek Orthodoxy McKenzie Gallery | Opens March 12, 2022

Artist unknown, possibly from the Trinity-Sergius Lavra, working in the style of the Moscow School. Apparition of the Mother of God to Saint Sergius of Radonezh, late 16th century, Russia. Egg tempera on wood panel.

Murray Warner Collection

This exhibition explores the lives of saints, the practice of saint veneration, and the tools of intercession through icons, manuscripts, and other religious objects from Eastern Christian Orthodoxy. A saint is a being worthy of worship and set apart from the world around them due to their unique relationship with the gods. During their mortal life, Christian saints had a special relationship with God, the ability to perform miracles, a willingness to suffer torture and death for their beliefs, and followed the pious behavior set by Christ. One or more of these qualities guaranteed them a privileged place in heaven, where they served as intercessors between humanity and the Almighty. After their death or martyrdom, the body, associated objects, religious buildings in their name, and images of the saints were used as tools to directly communicate with God through the saint. The stories of their lives, called hagiography, provided a semiotic language for art and clear moralistic sermons to preach. Saints can be as renowned as St. John, one of the twelve apostles, or culturally specific, such as the Russian saint Sergius of Radonezh. Zoey Kambour, 2021-22 post-graduate fellow in European & American art, curated this selection of works from the JSMA’s icon collection, courtesy of A. Dean and Lucille I. McKenzie, the Knight Library’s Special Collections, and loaned objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

pearly gates Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) Artist Project Space | March 5 through October 2, 2022 Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos)’s Artist Project Space exhibition pearly gates includes painting installation, video, and woven baskets, and thematically considers access in terms of land, ancestry, resources, and human relationships. The artist makes visible the complex systems of engagement between ancestral objects and contemporary institutional practices. Siestreem’s work bridges education and institutional reform, and this project specifically focuses on the care for Indigenous works in museum collections as well as the structural systems that provide or omit access and appropriate context to the presentations of Indigenous fine art.

Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, b. 1976). summertime, 2021. Painting installation (acrylic, graphite, Xerox transfer, panel board), 88 x 128 in. Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Jason Hill

This exhibition is made possible by the University of Oregon, Center for Art Research (CFAR) and Curators-in-Residence, Tiffany Harker and Iris Williamson.

Their 2021-22 program, titled HABITS OF DENIAL, features research, exhibitions, and public programs around the theme of “access.” Collaborating artists investigate specific issues within larger systems of power and their embedded exclusionary impacts. Four anchoring programs will examine access through lenses of language and communication, technology and economies, communities and archives, and Indigeneity and institutions. Residency and related programming are made possible by The Ford Family Foundation.

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Shared Visions Jean-Michel Basquiat. Self Portrait, 1983. Acrylic, oil paint stick, paper collage and metal hinges on wood, 40 x 70 inches. Private Collection

Jean-Michel

Basquiat 9

Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Self-Portraits A talk by Fred Hoffman March 2, 2022, 5:30 p.m.

The JSMA is pleased to present a special lecture on the work of the acclaimed American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat by Fred Hoffman, a curator, scholar, and art dealer who had a close working relationship with Basquiat during his short but prolific career. Hoffman’s recent monograph, “The Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat,” is recognized as one of the definitive texts on the artist.

As a half Haitian and half Puerto Rican artist living in 1980s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat was critical of the art world’s tendency to stereotype artists based on their biography. Self Portrait grapples with Basquiat’s own identity in this setting.

In the center panel, fiery red crayon pierces through the artist’s eyes and mouth. By contrast, the silhouette on the right is still.

This split self-image may point to the artist’s navigation of his own dual ethnicities and internal struggle between speaking out and remaining silent about his experience of racism in the institutional art world. The twin portraits are framed by Basquiat’s musical inspirations: the left panel is a tribute to jazz tenor saxophonist Ben Webster (1909-1973) and the right panel features lyrics by pianist and composer Thelonious Monk (19171982). Self Portrait suggests the significant role that music and musicians played in Basquiat’s sense of his own identity and his creative influences.

Shared Visions Currently on view: https://jsma.uoregon.edu/SharedVisions

In conjunction with the current JSMA exhibition of Basquiat’s 1983 Self Portrait—a double portrayal of the artist on a found wood panel— Hoffman’s talk will present a number of the self-portraits Basquiat created during his brief career. He will discuss some of the artist’s most highly recognized and iconic works, as well as images of the artist integrated into multilayered narrative themes and subjects. Interestingly, Hoffman had direct involvement in the execution of one now-acclaimed self-portrait, a work executed at Hoffman’s print publishing studio where he and the artist collaborated on Basquiat’s silk screen editions.

As Hoffman will present, Basquiat’s portrayals of himself were part of a larger, lifelong concern with questions of identity, whether his own, his race, or that of humanity. As Hoffman also notes, “At the end of his short career, Basquiat executed few self-portraits, turning more inward, focusing on an ‘interior’ reality, the life of the soul.”

The JSMA has been privileged over the past year to have an unusual number of significant works on view by Basquiat. Visitors to the museum in 2021 will recall his brilliant Daros Suite of thirty-two drawings from 1982-83. Along with Self Portrait, the museum is currently showing Hardware Store of the same year, a large, two-panel painting.

Hoffman’s lecture will be presented either in person, with a live stream, or on Zoom, depending on the health directives of the moment.

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Continuing Exhibitions Ron Jude: 12 Hz On view through March 13

Made in Oregon, California, Hawaii, and Iceland, Jude’s imposing, large-scale, black-and-white photographs describe the raw materials of the planet and its systems—lava flows, sculptural formations of welded tuff, river and tidal currents, and glacial valleys—that are the foundation of organic life. Stripped bare of our presence, they allude to the immense scale and veiled mechanics of phenomena that operate indifferent to human enterprise in a time of ecological and political crisis. Ron Jude: 12 Hz was organized by the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment and comes to us through their generous support.

A Gallery Walk with Ron Jude and Toby Jurovics of the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment Saturday, February 12, 11:30 a.m.

Lava, Ice, and Thresholds of Perception: Ron Jude in Conversation Saturday, February 26, 4 p.m.

RSVP: https://uoregon.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_47lKGC6dS96O6XQvhv5d2A Ron Jude will discuss his work and ideas in a wide-ranging conversation with the curator of his JSMA exhibition, Toby Jurovics, director of the Barry Lopez Foundation, Alan Rempel, UO Department of Geological Services, and other special guests.

Common Seeing: Meeting Points On view through April 10, 2022

Every year, the University of Oregon’s Common Reading program encourages campus-wide engagement with a shared book and related resources. JSMA’s corresponding Common Seeing expands this conversation through the visual arts. This year’s Common Seeing exhibition, Meeting Points, brings together works by nine contemporary Native artists that speak to these issues and their experiences as individuals and members of their communities in response to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.

Artist Talk: Brenda Mallory Saturday, February 19, 2 p.m.

Portland artist Brenda Mallory (American, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma) will discuss Partitioning, her interest in reclaimed materials, themes in her artmaking, and new work. Audience Q&A to follow. This program supports the UO Common Reading of Braiding Sweetgrass and the JSMA’s Common Seeing exhibition, Meeting Points.

Brenda Mallory (American, Cherokee, b. 1955). Partitioning (detail), 2017. Collagraph prints on kozo paper, thread, wax, 30 x 95.5 x 3 inches. Courtesy of the artist

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and Upcoming Programs Fit to Print: The Dawn of Journalism in Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Lavenberg and Michels Collections On view through July 3, 2022

Speechifying Pictures: Highlights from Fit to Print: The Dawn of Journalism in Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Lavenberg and Michels Collections February 4, noon

Join Glynne Walley (Associate Professor in Japanese Literature at the University of Oregon) for a conversation on Fit to Print.

A New Woman: Clara Barck Welles, Inspiration & Influence in Arts & Crafts Silver On view through October 2, 2022

Korean Ceramic Culture: Legacy of Earth and Fire On view through May 8, 2022

Myriad Treasures: Celebrating the Reinstallation of the Soreng Gallery of Chinese Art On view through June 30, 2022

Aleph Earth Closes February 20, 2022

Salvador Dalí: illustrator, printmaker, storyteller Closes February 27, 2022

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Meet the Education Department Whether you are our youngest visitor or our oldest, chances are you’ve been impacted by the work of our dynamic education team. This team of three, often accompanied by a cadre of future museum professionals, creates hundreds of opportunities to engage with our exhibitions and collections annually through tours, workshops, onsite and online programs, teacher professional development, curriculum packets, and exhibitions. And through it all, they remind us that art inspires, art teaches, and art heals.

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Lisa Abia-Smith is the

Director of Education at the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art and Senior Instructor in the College of Design-PPPM, teaching courses in arts and healthcare, arts management, museum studies, and accessible arts curriculum development. For twenty-five years, she has been working in the arena of inclusive museum practice and antiracism education. When she is not training future museum educators, you can find her presenting on her areas of expertise (arts education/healthcare/marginalized communities) at conferences all over the world.

Hannah Bastian is the

Museum Educator for Studio Programs and Special Projects. She earned a Master’s in Arts and Administration from the UO and a Bachelor’s from Colorado State University. She leads VSA Arts Access workshops for children with disabilities, coordinates outreach for adults with brain and spinal cord injuries, and assists with the museum’s Visual Thinking Strategies pilot program for doctors and medical students from OHSU. Hannah has been part of the expansion of our Art Heals program, offered in collaboration with Good Samaritan Medical Services, which has grown dramatically over the past three years. Initially, we were working with doctors and cancer survivors. Those workshops have now expanded to also include a support group for postpartum Latina mothers and hospice care partners.

Sherri Jones has been working

with educational programming since 1997 in healthcare and arts communities. Since 2016, she has been the JSMA Assistant Administrator of Education and oversees K-12 and docent programming, in addition to working with College of Education, OHSU and DEI communities. She enjoys using Visual Thinking Strategies to talk about everything, working with her community colleagues to build communication across local arts organizations, and personal anti-racism work with local and university organizations.

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Member Spotlight:

Maryanne Obersinner

Development News

Want to help teachers like Maryanne engage their students with the JSMA? Go to

uofoundation.org/JSMAEducation to support K-12 arts education throughout the state!

Maryanne Obersinner is a middle school teacher from O'Hara Catholic School.

When was your first educational tour of the JSMA? My first formal tour was taking a class to the JSMA back in 2000, but I had spent a lot of time there as a student at the University of Oregon. I was in the Honor’s College and I would spend time at the JSMA in between classes, both in the galleries and in the Memorial Courtyard. Sometimes it would just be for ten minutes and I could only focus on one work of art, but it was a great way to reset my day.

What does being a JSMA member mean to you?

Being a member means supporting the mission that helps my students experience so much every year. I hope that my support makes these programs accessible to more students.

As a teacher, my students and I have benefitted from the programs at JSMA for decades now. It’s almost magical to see them experience notable pieces of art that they may never get to otherwise. My students were able to see a Picasso! And in turn, I was able to see their eyes light up in wonder and amazement. They’ve had their own art on the walls of the JSMA, on the same walls that they saw the Picasso. Art has given them a voice to express what they’re going through.

How has the JSMA’s collection impacted your lessons?

I have to commend our art teachers, Shauna Scott and Julie Fulton, for how well they’ve taught our students. Our students have learned to understand visual teaching systems and how to discuss art in a thoughtful, technical way. Shauna and Julie have encouraged them to submit art for the Annual K-12 Exhibition. One year the theme was “The Road Not Taken” and I had my students memorize that poem and discuss their interpretations. It was one of the liveliest class discussions I’d had that year and it was amazing to see how it impacted the art they submitted.

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What has been your favorite exhibition?

I Dream a World by Brian Lanker is my personal favorite.

The photographs were powerful and I found myself spending my entire visit on just one. I had to come back several times to see them all! My students and I work with an iconographer as part of our Living Saints Project at O’Hara Catholic School, so professionally the Russian Icon exhibit has been very helpful. I would frequently bring my students through the McKenzie gallery; the blue walls mixed with the golden icons always made it feel like an oasis.

How has the JSMA impacted the education community?

The JSMA has worked hard to make art accessible to all students in our area. It has high quality programming, like the educational tours, and the EIs and curators are happy to customize the tour based on my lesson plan. The tours are structured in a way that encourages smaller groups, so even my quietest students have an opportunity to be active in the discussions.

I’ve participated in professional learning opportunities through the summer programs offered at the JSMA, including a week-long course where I learned how to teach with Asian art. It helped refine some of my skills and taught me how to incorporate Ancient Chinese, Indian, and Israeli art into my lesson plan. I remember that there used to be this treasure chest of ancient Chinese artifacts that we could check out and use for our lessons. It was heavy to cart around, but was always a blast to teach with.

The museum understands that community outreach is important to their mission. The education team at the JSMA is proactive and reaches out to teachers, which shows that they truly care about our students' education.

Programs like Fill Up the Bus have helped make it possible for us to use the museum as a resource. We’re very thankful for the monetary support that helps make this possible for us. Every young person should have the opportunity to have their breath taken away by a work of art. Giving students that experience is a gift that can’t be measured.

Gertrude Bass Warner Award The JSMA is pleased to recognize Kyungsook Cho Gregor as the 2021 Gertrude Bass Warner Award recipient! Named in recognition of the JSMA’s remarkable founder, Gertrude Bass Warner (1863-1951), the award is given to an individual who exemplifies what is best about public service to the museum, including service to something beyond oneself, a willingness to contribute time, talents, treasures, and expertise, and effort that goes above and beyond expectations.

Past recipients include the Dragon Puppet Theater, Don Dumond, Cheryl Ramberg Ford and Allyn Ford, Maggie Gontrum, Sue Keene, Yoko McClain, Lee Michels, Hattie Mae Nixon, Hope Hughes Pressman, Yvette and Charles Stephens, Jim Walker, and Margo Grant Walsh.

Kyungsook Cho Gregor has been involved with the museum since she arrived in Eugene from Korea in 1959, and has been a stalwart champion of the JSMA’s collections and exhibitions and a long-serving member on the advisory council. She has donated more than 200 objects, enhancing our renowned Korean collections, been an enthusiastic participant in various events, and helped to welcome many artists, scholars, and JSMA Korea Foundation Interns over the years.

Announcing a new location for the A. Dean and Lucile I. McKenzie Gallery In winter 2022, the A. Dean and Lucile I. McKenzie Russian Icon Gallery will reopen in its new home in the renamed gallery area north of the MacKinnon gallery. Featuring a selection of the JSMA’s collection of significant Orthodox icons from various Schools, dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries, the McKenzie Gallery will feature regular rotations and curated themes promoting academic offerings in conversation with the MacKinnon Gallery of European Art. The inaugural exhibition in this space is being curated by the JSMA's Post-Graduate Curatorial Fellow of American and European Art, Zoey Kambour, in consultation with Associate Director Kurt Neugebauer, and will highlight the museum’s holdings of beloved Russian icons, many from Gertrude Bass Warner’s foundation collection.

We are grateful to Lucile McKenzie and her late husband, Dean, who taught Medieval art for over twenty years at the U of O, for their generosity and deep passion for the collection, display, and academic engagement with Russian icons.

Congratulations, Cheryl!

Cheryl Hartup, our former Curator of Academic Programs and Latin American and Caribbean Art, is the new director of the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico. Cheryl has strong ties to the Museo de Arte de Ponce, where she was the chief curator from 2005 to 2012.

“I’m thrilled to return to what was my passion and an honor to serve for many years; to reunite with former colleagues with whom I worked collectively on important projects for the institution and to meet others whose work is equally laudable. Together we will continue to serve our communities, dedicating special attention to disadvantaged populations. We will build new partnerships with local and international institutions to extend the reach and impact of the Museum’s collection.

At the same time, we will work incessantly on the reconstruction of the art galleries with the objective of reopening them for the enjoyment of all.”

Congratulations, Cheryl. We wish you all the best!

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JSMA Executive Director John Weber invites JSMA Patron Circle and museum members to the Winter Open House enjoying Ron Jude: 12 Hz, the debut exhibition organized and toured by the new Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment.

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Margo Grant Walsh joined us from New York for the event celebrating A New Women: Clara Barck Welles, Inspiration & Influence in Arts & Crafts Silver, which she helped to curate and design.

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Holly Newlands, Colin Ives, and Zachary Boyd of the Artificial Intelligence Creative Practice research group stand before Aleph Earth, their collaboration with the New York Polyphony.

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Professor Ron Jude discusses his solo photography exhibition, Ron Jude: 12 Hz, at the Winter Open House.

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Curatorial consultant Marilyn Archer chats with Margo Grant Walsh in the installation of A New Women: Clara Barck Welles, Inspiration & Influence in Arts & Crafts Silver.

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Visitors experience Dan Archer’s virtual work using virtual reality glasses sponsored by the School of Journalism and Communication, in Art of the News: Comics Journalism.

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The Art of the News: Comics Journalism was curated by Associate Professor Kathryn KelpStebbins (far right) seen here with (from R-L) Professor Ben Saunders, co-curator, Sarah Mirk, artist, and Joe Sacco, UO alum and comics journalist.

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Sarah Mirk (and Joe Sacco, not pictured) from The Art of the News: Comics Journalism signed copies of their books for almost two hours during the Member Open House this fall.

9-12 The JSMA celebrated the 40th annual observance of el Día de los Muertos. There was a performance by Los Musiqueros (9), dancing by Ensamble Identidad y Folclor (10), a procession through campus (11), ofrendas, and an art exhibition by Grabadores Guanajuatenses. The Day of the Dead event is made possible by Oak Hill School, MEChA de UO, Division of Equity and Inclusion UO, and Adelante Sí.

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Studio visit with photographer Ron Jude, in preparation for his exhibition.

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UO alum and internationally published comics journalist Joe Sacco speaks at the symposium held for The Art of the News: Comics Journalism, in November.

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SOJC professor Kelli Matthews captured this striking image of the museum.

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Incoming University of Oregon law students tour the Black Lives Matter Artist Grant Project Exhibition.

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Nonprofit Organization U.S. Postage PAID Eugene, OR Permit No. 63

Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art 1223 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403–1223

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art gratefully acknowledges the sponsor of our Members Magazine.

Mailing address: 1223 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403–1223

Street address: 1430 Johnson Lane Eugene, OR 97403

In the heart of the University of Oregon campus Phone: 541-346-3027 Fax: 541-346-0976 Website: http://jsma.uoregon.edu

New in the store!

This sweet stroller blanket, modeled by Luci Buckley (daughter of Tiana Buckley, JSMA Development Program Manager) will keep your little one warm and cozy. This blanket features a detail from A Pair of Sleeve Bands with Children in the Garden from our Chinese collection.

Hours Wednesday: 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.

Thursday – Sunday: 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Academic visits by appointment

Cover Image: Hung LIU (LIU Hung 劉虹, Chinese-born American, 1948-2021).

On the Grass I, 2015. Mixed media, 41 x 41 inches. Gift of Artist Hung Liu and Trillium Graphics/David Salgado, 2018:25.43

Buy Now: https://bit.ly/JSMAblanket An equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institution committed to cultural diversity and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. This publication will be made available in accessible formats upon request. Accommodations for people with disabilities will be provided if requested in advance by calling 541-346-3213.