This special exhibition presents a photographic dialogue between youth in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and students from Kelly Middle School’s Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) program. Ph15, a nonprofit organization that uses photography as a tool for visual storytelling, gave cameras to youth in one of the worst slums in Buenos Aires so they could respond to their surroundings.  A selection of those works is being shown alongside photographs taken by Kelly School AVID students, who participated in a two-month workshop program led by Nori Rice, a UO graduate student and JSMA Arts and Healthcare GTF, and university volunteers. The AVID program aims to close the achievement gap by building critical thinking, literacy, and math skills among at-risk and under-represented middle schoolers.

Prompted by a recent generous gift of Mexican folk art by local collector Robert Bradley, this exhibition features images of domestic and wild animals from around the world. Organized by associate curator June Black and museum educator Arthurina Fears, Birds & Beasts supports our “Animals in Art” summer camp session and Spanish-language art lessons.  Among the works featured in the exhibition are an Otomi embroidered textile and coconut masks from the Mezcala region of Guerrero State, as well as prints, photographs, paintings, and sculptures highlighting all manner of birds and beasts, from cats and cockatoos to doves and dogs

This two-artist exhibition explores the concept of emotional travel. When we travel, especially when we travel in intimate proximity to our travel partners, not only do we move through physical space, but we move through emotional place. During extensive travel, emotional bonds develop that are nearly guaranteed to make intense and complex waves in the lives of these travelers. A visual representation of this deep idea is explored by both artists, who have indeed traveled extensively together. Amanda Marie’s signature visual language, built from an ever-expanding toolbox of hand-drawn, hand-cut stencils, is her mode of expressing the complexities of sharing emotional travels. For Hyland Mather, aka X-O, his stylistic habit of collecting “lost object” materials along his travels is the basis for his often large-scale interpretations of memory and emotion, which he visits through shape, color, and texture.

Jonas Mekas is considered by many to be the “godfather of American avant-garde film.” He is revered for his experimental diary films, his founding of the New York film institutions Filmmakers Cooperative and Anthology Film Archives, and his passionate promotion of avant-garde cinema when he was a film critic for The Village Voice. At 92 years old, he has, in recent years, started a new career as a gallery artist, exhibiting photographic blowups of adjoining frames from his 16mm film diaries. His “frozen film frames” have been exhibited and acclaimed at the Venice Biennale, MOMA/PS1, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among other venues.

The exhibition, which features twenty-two photographic portraits, is co-curated by Richard Herskowitz, director of the Cinema Pacific film festival, and Deborah Colton, owner and director of the Deborah Colton Gallery in Houston. The Deborah Colton Gallery has shown Mekas’s work since 2005 and was founded as an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists worldwide. Frozen Film Frames features, among others, images of Robert Frank, Elia Kazan, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andy Warhol, Wim Wenders, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono, observed filming their experimental film Bottoms.

Also showing in the gallery is Mekas’s 1997 feature film Birth of a Nation, which consists of 170 portraits, sketches, and glimpses of independent film makers and activists shot between 1955 and 1996.

This project is made possible by a JSMA Academic Support Grant.

For the past eight years, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art has organized and presented NewArt Northwest Kids, an annual K-12 juried student exhibition. This year’s theme, Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream, was inspired by our fall 2014
exhibition Ryo Toyonaga: Awakening. From pleasant dreams to surreal nightmares, K-12 students from across the region and state created art in response to this year’s theme using the media of drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, creative writing, comic strips, collage, and digital art—all referencing remembered and imagined dreams, Surrealism, Impressionism, and future goals.

Audra Wolowiec is an interdisciplinary artist whose conceptually-driven work explores the material qualities of language and sound. Complex Systems is the result of Wolowiec’s residency with the lab of Professor Eric Corwin in the Department of Physics at the University of Oregon. For one month, Wolowiec became a working member of the lab, keeping office hours and attending meetings with undergraduate and graduate research students. She became particularly interested in the ways in which scientists deal with failure and in the ways in which humans communicate complex ideas to each other.

Wolowiec’s experiences in the lab resulted in a participatory postcard series, Complex Systems, in which she considers what it means to be “complex.” Each postcard features a graph and descriptive sentence taken from a textbook, Multivariable Feedback Control, by engineering professors Ian Postlethwaite and Sigurd Skogestad. Created using a laser cutter in the Corwin Lab, the artist mailed them to fifty artists and writers across the country in the hope of gaining feedback into a language whose terrain was difficult to navigate for a non-native speaker. Values were removed from each sentence of the postcard, providing an empty space for the participant to fill in the blanks. Through this act of generosity, the participants created new meaning out of misinterpretation.

Complex Systems is the first project to result from a pioneering Visiting Artist Program in the Corwin Lab. This program is funded by a 2012 National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the foundation’s most prestigious award in support of early career faculty. For more information on Complex Systems, please visit http://complex-systems.tumblr.com.