Artists, Constellations, and Connections: Feminist Futures

Artists, Constellations and Connections: Feminist Futures has been organized by the JSMA and seven members of the UO Department of Art as part of the 50th anniversary of the Center for the Study of Women in Society. Placing current work by studio art faculty alongside and in conversation with works they have selected from the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s permanent collection, the exhibition explores critical questions about artmaking, history, the future, and feminist models of intersectional inquiry in the current moment of great social, political, and environmental change.  

The participating women faculty approached this as a collaborative and collective project. The works in the exhibition are conceived of as a constellation of connections —connections between peer artists responding in diverse ways to our moment, and connections to relevant artists and artworks of the past.  Some of the artworks chosen from the JSMA collection, such as the OTAGAKI, Rengetsu (Japan 1791-1875) bowl, represent echoes and affinities with the faculty work and speak to the power of art to collapse time and space. Artworks provide an uncanny bridge to other moments of lived experience and assert ties of kinship. Other selected artworks, such as the Edward Weston photograph, function as antagonists, as a catalyst to interrogate more inclusive and complex experiences.

A multiplicity of questions, convictions, and uncertainties is evident in the faculty work—social and political histories, wonder and play, agency and subjectivity, material culture and mediation, formal invention, identity and language, posthuman imaginaries, domesticity and the everyday, emergent systems and environmental precarity. The artists’ studio practices reflect current approaches in the field, including a fluid continuum of physical and technological processes. What these artists share are positions deeply informed by changing conceptions of feminism and their ongoing dialogue and commitment in this specific place and time.

The exhibition is curated by the featured artists, Amanda Wojick, Charlene Liu, Stacy Jo Scott, Laura Vandenburgh, Tarrah Krajnak, Tannaz Farsi and Anya Kivarkis, with the curatorial advice of Danielle Knapp and Adriana Miramontes Olivas, PhD.

Explore the virtual tour here!