Acknowledgments

Observing, processing, experimenting, arranging: Libby Wadsworth has been busy during the last year’s period of collective crisis and reclusion. Always InFormation presents a selection of new prints and paintings created almost entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic, accompanied by a sampling of earlier works made between 2010-2019. The cumulative effect is soothing to the mind and eye. Yet, Wadsworth’s beguiling mashups of text, image, and idea remind us that such visual beauty is rarely so simple, or easily achieved.

Even the organization of her exhibition for the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s Artist Project Space was shaped by the limitations and strange new realities of coronavirusera collaboration: Zoom sessions replaced studio visits. Where spontaneous conversations once flowed, email chains proliferate. The spark of discovery that usually ignites during an in-person viewing between artist and curator was tended to instead via shared PowerPoint screens and website visits. Now, it is profoundly gratifying to bring together these works in a physical space for this exhibition.

Collaborating with Libby Wadsworth under any circumstances is a delight, and we thank her heartily for her patience, flexibility, good humor, and warm conversation over the past 18 months as we navigated the planning of her exhibition and this catalogue together. The restrictions placed on access to in-person meetings and art-viewings during the COVID-19 pandemic only increased our shared appreciation for these moments. We are all deeply grateful that visitors will now have the opportunity to enjoy Always InFormation in multiple formats: on site at the museum, via this publication, and in an interactive online tour. An interview in this catalogue between Wadsworth and John Weber, executive director of the JSMA, covers the multiple streams of influence, observation, and inquiry that shape Wadsworth’s practice and gives additional insight to the works presented here.

My special thanks to Jill Hartz, former executive director of the JSMA, for initiating this exhibition; John Weber and our colleagues Mike Bragg, Joey Capadona, Erin Doerner, Mark O’Harra, Jonathan Smith, and Debbie Williamson-Smith, for their fine work on all elements of this project; University of Oregon students and JSMA “Museum Students/Museum Stories” interns Sophie Ackerman and Anastasia Harper and their project supervisor Beth Robinson-Hartpence, for their excellent “Creativity in Quarantine” interview with Wadsworth in spring 2020; and Caroline Phillips Smith, former JSMA curatorial extern, for her invaluable editing assistance.

Danielle M. Knapp McCosh Curator