You’re Invited

Friday, September 22, 2023, 6 p.m.

Join us to celebrate the museum’s 90th anniversary, build support for JSMA’s educational impact in our community, and celebrate the artistry and creativity of our region’s cuisine and libations.

Featuring local chefs’ inventive creations, and drinks by local vintners, brewers, and distillers, Art of the Harvest will also include live music, an experience-packed silent auction, prizes, and a brief program featuring physicians and med students, patients, and others who have participated in the museum’s Art Heals programs.

Individual tickets, hosted tables, and chef sponsorships are still available. Go to jsma.uoregon.edu/gala to learn more.

Strange Weather

From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation

Patron Circle Reception

October 20, 2023 6 – 8:30 p.m.

Member Reception

October 22, 2023

Public tour from 2 – 3 p.m.

Member Reception 3 – 4:30 p.m.

There’s a lot to tell you about in this report! We have an incredible line-up of shows coming this summer and fall. A big party planned to celebrate the museum’s 90 th anniversary. A beautiful new catalogue featuring Arts and Crafts copper and the show we opened in May. And great news from our Art Heals program. We’ve also just finished a banner year for JSMA Academic Programs, with student and class visit numbers on par with our pre-pandemic highs.

On September 22 we will gather throughout the museum and then in the Barker Gallery to celebrate 90 years of museum work at the University of Oregon. The museum opened in 1933 as the University of Oregon Museum of Art, and then reopened in 2005 after a successful capital campaign and a naming donation by Jordan Schnitzer as the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. In September we will look back and forward in Art of the Harvest: JSMA at 90. We’re calling it a celebration, not a “gala,” but a bit of fancy dressing will be welcome. The event is planned as a special fundraiser for our education programs, particularly our innovative Art Heals activities. We’ll roam the museum’s first floor to sample delectable dishes by a select group of Eugene’s finest chefs, sip local libations, and peruse silent auction items. With live music (don’t worry, not too loud!), and a crisp program presented during dessert in the Barker Gallery at the close of the evening, Art of the Harvest promises to be a thoroughly enjoyable way to salute the JSMA’s first 90 years. Stay tuned for more information as the summer progresses, and please plan to be there!

On the exhibition front, in late August we will open Lessons of the Hour, a stunning 10-screen video installation about Frederick Douglass, the great 19 th -century Black abolitionist and orator.

Created by the British video installation artist and filmmaker, Sir Isaac Julien, Lessons brings Douglass to life in a montage of reenacted scenes and documentary imagery. The emotional climax of the piece is Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What, to the American Slave, is the 4th of July,” a searing indictment of American chattel slavery and the racism underlying it. Douglass’s words resonate to this day, and bringing Lessons of the Hour here has been one of my personal goals since arriving at the University of Oregon.

Isaac is a valued colleague from my time at UC Santa Cruz, where we presented a festival of his film work in 2017, and where he has been a distinguished professor of the arts since 2019. I had admired his multi-screen video installations long before I knew him personally. So it is a genuine pleasure and a privilege to present Lessons of the Hour at the JSMA—all the more so in the immediate wake of his huge, 40-year retrospective at the Tate Britain in London.

This fall in the Barker Gallery, we are thrilled to present Strange Weather : From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, an exhibition including prints, painting, sculpture, and a massive wall installation by the Brooklyn-based artist, Leonardo Drew. In another connection to UC Santa Cruz, Strange Weather is curated by Rachel Nelson, Director of the UC Santa Cruz Institute of the Arts and Sciences, and her colleague Jennifer González, UCSC Visual Studies professor. Strange Weather brings together a superb selection of work by a stellar and highly diverse group of artists. Drew’s installation is a tour-de-force, and the show has a wide range of work, moods, and imagery. Together it’s a testimony to the unsettling nature of the world and the way we live now, and artists’ voices speaking about it.

At the same time, we will also show a group of works on paper by New Yorker Glenn Ligon in the APS Gallery, also from Jordan’s collection, and also curated by Nelson and González. Ligon is another long-time favorite of mine, and the selection of pieces in this show displays his range, ironic bite, and the distinct conceptual/political flavor of his work. Even in smaller-scale pieces such as those on view in this show, his work hits home.

Elsewhere in this issue of the magazine, you’ll find my wide-ranging interview with Jordan himself. He talks at length about how he began collecting prints, his art heroes, and how he approaches the work of creating a “teaching collection” aimed at projects exactly like Strange Weather. He also tells the story of how he came to add immense installation pieces like the Leonardo Drew to his collection. As you’ll see this fall, Drew’s Number 215b (he numbers his pieces rather than using narrative titles) is about as far from a framed print as you can get!

Also on the exhibition front, in An Unfinished Journey: Embodying the Feminist City, curated by Adriana Miramontes Olivas, our Curator of Academic Programs and Latin American and Caribbean Art, we are pleased to present a powerful video installation in the APS Gallery by Mexican artist Tania Candiani, along with works by Sandra C. Fernández and Lilliam Nieves. Framing the Revolution, our first show from the Wadsworth Collection of Contemporary Chinese Photography, curated by Chief Curator Anne Rose Kitagawa, continues through August 27. At a moment that continues to see a rise in tensions between the U.S. and China, we feel it is more important than ever to show these images and encourage our visitors to learn more about the histories they represent. I also want to put in a plug for James Turrell’s CAPE HOPE , on view through next spring in our Focus West Gallery. Words cannot explain the impact of his mesmerizing, everchanging light installation, you just have to experience it. Please do! time keeping up with requests for art viewing sessions there. All of our curators and our academic and collections staff have contributed to the ongoing success of our work in support of the UO academic program, and I thank them for the fantastic year we just completed. I also thank the faculty who brought their students to the museum, and our Faculty Engagement Working Group for helping to keep us in touch with teaching and research at the university.

If you haven’t seen it yet, please check out our beautiful catalogue for The First Metal: Arts and Crafts Copper. The show went on view in early May in the MacKinnon Gallery. It features work in our own Margo Grant Walsh Collection of 20 th Century Metalwork, along with a select number of private and museum loans. The catalogue has been in the JSMA Store since then and can be ordered online as well. This is the first publication devoted exclusively to the emergence of copper metalworking in the late 19 th and early 20 th century Arts and Crafts movement. Printed in Italy, it’s a gorgeous publication. I thank Margo for making it possible, and Marilyn Archer for her work as co-editor.

Please be sure to read the article on our Art Heals programs in this issue. It outlines the amazing work and research project the JSMA has been conducting with the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland and their head of narrative medicine, Dr. Elizabeth Lahti. Conceived and brilliantly executed by Lisa Abia-Smith, our Director of Education/Outreach, this partnership is truly breaking new ground in the application of art and art activities to the science of wellbeing, caregiving, and physician training and resilience practices. Our thanks to Dr. Lahti, and to Stephanie Hagerty and our other Art Heals partners at Good Samaritan Hospital in Benton County for working together in this rapidly developing and important field. Thanks also to the Coeta and Donald Barker Foundation and the Tykeson Family Foundation for supporting our Art Heals work.

Great news: Faculty and student academic use of the JSMA is back to its pre-pandemic highs! By the end of April we had over 10,100 students from 368 classes using the collection and our exhibitions for their classes. Our new Collections Lab has been a hit, and we’ve had a hard

As we launch into the coming academic year, I thank our Leadership Council (LC) and its President, Patti Barkin, and Vice President, Sarah Finlay, for their work last year on our behalf, along with our committee chairs Ina Asim (Collections), Doug Blandy (Education), Doug Park (Development), and Sarah (Communications and Engagement), and all of the LC members. In the past year, the LC worked with us on Long Range Strategic Planning, gearing up for Art of the Harvest: JSMA at 90, advised on collection matters, community engagement and communications, and JSMA education programming. Our meetings were substantive and meaty, and we had great participation as well from non-LC community members. I look forward to another good year of collaboration.

See you at the museum, John Weber