Working with Metal: A Teaching Selection

The University of Oregon’s art department has a long and distinguished tradition of teaching metalsmithing and jewelry making. Working With Metal: A Teaching Selection draws on the JSMA’s extensive metalwork collection, presenting a group of works selected by current UO art faculty members Anya Kevarkis and Claire Webb to support their metalsmith teaching. Their selections draw on metalwork in the museum’s founding collection of East Asian Art donated by Gertrude Bass Warner; works donated by Max Nixon, UO’s longtime metalsmith faculty member; and works from the Margo Grant Walsh Collection of 29th Century Metalwork.

To help students visualize and appreciate the nature of choices and decisions metalsmiths make in the creation of their work, Kevarkis and Webb chose a wide variety of jewelry, hollowware (vessels), containers, candlesticks, and other objects made from silver, copper, aluminum, and other materials. Each piece offers an example of ways to approach problems such as how to connect different components of a design; how materials can be treated to convey or obscure the impact of the artist’s hand; the possibilities that a repeated shape can offer; and other issues experienced metalsmiths routinely grapple with. Commentary in the exhibition elucidates what kinds of questions students will be encouraged to consider as they explore the works on view. For a more general public, the exhibition opens a window into how working artists think as they make, and how they interrogate other artists’ work as they consider the creation of their own.

Working With Metal: A Teaching Selection, highlights the museum’s role as a university-based teaching museum. It supports object-based art instruction, offering faculty and students the opportunity to engage works of art first-hand in a direct, unmediated way.

The museum thanks professors Kevarkis and Webb for their collaboration on this project.