World of Work is a 3-month, hands-on paid internship program for high school students at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. World of Work provides students with “ready to work'' practical skills and essential 21st century skills by actively engaging them in the museum’s work. The summer 2021 program was conducted almost completely virtually due COVID-19. As a result, the interns had the opportunity to design their own exhibition about their experience. In this show, you will see what the students curated as part of their internship, including artifacts created during the program and descriptions of their process written in their own words.

Special thanks to the Spencer Foundation and the Cheryl and Allyn Ford Education Outreach Fund for supporting World of Work

The work on display is a sample of art created as part of the JSMA’s Art Heals program. The Art Heals program is a collaboration between the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Good Samaritan Health Services, and Stahlbush Island Farms; the artwork on display is the result of our dynamic partnership working with patients and healthcare providers across the region.

Grant support provided by The Coeta and Donald Barker Foundation

Rick Silva’s Western Fronts: Cascade Siskiyou, Gold Butte, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and Bears Ears is an experimental video that reflects the political and ecological threats that face four U.S. National Monuments. The work combines aerial drone footage and photogrammetry with 3D animation to create a nature documentary that collapses into itself. The wilderness is scanned by large shapes that momentarily reduce the landscape into grayscale polygons —in these redactions we glimpse a near-future dystopia of computer-vision aided resource extraction. Visit https://westernfronts.com/Mineral_Apocalypse_Transparent_Earth.pdf to read an accompanying essay by Geoff Manaugh (https://geoffmanaugh.com/).

Silva (b. Brazil, 1977), is associate professor of art at the University of Oregon. His works envision near-future ecologies altered by technology and climate change. See more at http://ricksilva.net/.

On February 5, 2022, the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon will open the “Remember This: Hung Liu at Trillium” in the museum’s Barker and Soreng galleries. In this exhibition, renowned contemporary Chinese-American artist Hung Liu explored subjects ranging from portraits to landscapes to still lifes and reflects upon history, memory, tradition, migration, and social justice.

Characterized by layers of luminous color, drips, and Zen ensō-like circles that mark the passage of time, Liu focused with insight and compassion on “the forgotten” – elevating and imparting dignity and individuality on the poor, the afflicted, and the displaced; women and children, prostitutes and prisoners. Raised at a time when most photographs were destroyed for political reasons, Liu came to view such images as precious keepsakes, and uses historic photos as inspiration, combining (largely anonymous) figures with evocative backgrounds punctuated with traditional Chinese motifs. Although originally trained as a Socialist Realist artist, filmy washes lend her works a poetic, almost dreamlike quality – the antithesis of the rigorous propaganda style required during her youth.

“These colorful works feature imagery from traditional and modern Chinese history with emphasis on women and children, and reflect themes such as crisis, displacement, and death through a redemptive lens,” says Anne Rose Kitagawa, JSMA Chief Curator of Collections & Asian Art “The creativity of Liu’s mixed-media process, in which she quotes passages from her own paintings and then alters, recombines, and transforms them in successive layers of resin, results in a new kind of shimmering hybrid art.”

Born in 1948 in Changchun, Jilin province, Hung Liu’s early life coincided with a particularly tumultuous period of Chinese history. Soon after her birth, her father was imprisoned in a Communist labor camp. After moving to Beijing in her youth, she attended Beijing Teachers College, studied mural painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and hosted a television program teaching art to the masses. In 1984, Liu emigrated to the United States to study art at UC San Diego, where she was advised by the American theorist Alan Kaprow (1927-2006). Liu went on to become a distinguished artist and professor at Mills College, from which she retired after 24 years in 2014. Her art is represented in many public and private collections and she has received numerous fellowships, grants, and prizes and been the focus of many one-woman shows, including Hung Liu: Portraits of Promised Lands which open this November at at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C.

In 2003, Liu began collaborating with David Salgado, founder and master printer of Trillium Graphics in Brisbane, CA, to create hybrid works combining aspects of painting and printmaking. Together they developed an elaborate process to reproduce, alter, combine, and enhance photographic Iris prints of elements from Liu’s paintings, allow her to augment them with new hand-painted motifs (and in some cases add selected sculptural elements), and to embed them in successive 1/8-inch thick layers of translucent resin. The result was an exciting new body of mixed-media works in which Liu could revisit and refine her art. After 15 years creating ever more ambitious works in this vein, Liu and Salgado created a legacy collection of 55 mixed-media works that they donated to the JSMA to exemplify their prize-winning hybrid technique.

Tragically, both Liu and Salgado passed away, but their combined creativity and largesse are celebrated in this special exhibition.

Visit the virtual tour of Remember This: Hung Liu at Trillium

Gallery Guide - English
Gallery Guide - Spanish

When I saw Ron Jude’s photographs for the first time, it took me about 20 minutes to catch up to the scale of what he was doing, and the way he was using tonal values, and destroying the notion of boundedness in a “work of art.” I felt small in what he was doing and overwhelmed by something that wasn’t all that big. —Barry Lopez

The title of Ron Jude’s most recent project references the limits of human perception—12 Hz marks the lowest threshold of human hearing, suggesting the powerful yet frequently imperceptible forces that shape the physical world, from plate tectonics to glacial erosion to the incomprehensibility of geological time. Made in Oregon, California, Hawaii, and Iceland, Jude’s imposing, large-scale black-and-white photographs describe the raw materials of the planet and its systems—lava flows, sculptural formations of welded tuff, river and tidal currents, and glacial valleys—that are the foundation of organic life. Stripped bare of our presence, they allude to the immense scale and veiled mechanics of phenomena that operate indifferent to human enterprise in a time of ecological and political crisis. 

By pivoting away from the myth of human centrality, Jude’s work asks how one depicts the indifference of the non-human world to our egocentrism and folly without offering false comfort by looking away from our recklessness? Is it possible to engage the landscape in a meaningful way without resorting to formal trivialities, moralizing or personal narrative? 12 Hz establishes a simple premise: that change is constant, whether we are able to perceive it or not. In abandoning notions of sentiment and beauty found in traditional landscape photography, Ron Jude has created one of the most forceful and challenging visual statements of the emergent century.

12 Hz is accompanied by an audio installation by Joshua Bonnetta. Two interacting compositions combine field recordings and manipulated seismic recordings collected from an array of sensors that record vertical ground motion. Both sets of recordings are site-specific to Jude’s photographs and reveal similar imperceptible forces of the earth’s geological systems at work above and below the surface. Repeating on a loop, Bonnetta’s compositions weave in and out, rising and falling against Jude’s images. The seismic data was generously provided by Leif Karlstrom of the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oregon.

Ron Jude 12HZ was organized by the Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment and comes to us through their generous support. The foundation organizes exhibitions by contemporary artists addressing climate change, biodiversity, habitat loss, and our relationship with the land in a time of environmental crisis. JSMA is pleased to be the inaugural venue for the launching of this new endeavor.

Ron Jude was born in Los Angeles in 1965 and raised in rural Idaho. He lives and works in Eugene, Oregon, where he is a professor of art at the University of Oregon. His recent work explores the relationship between place, memory, and narrative through multiple approaches ranging from the use of appropriated images to photographs that echo traditional documentary methodologies.

Jude earned a BFA in studio art from Boise State University, Boise, Idaho, in 1988, and an MFA from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1992. His photographs have been widely exhibited nationally and internationally and are held in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House, Rochester, NY; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Jude is the author of ten books, including Emmett (2010); Lick Creek Line (2012); Lago (2015); Nausea (2017); and, most recently, 12Hz (2020). He has received grants or awards from Light Work; San Francisco Camerawork; the Aaron Siskind Foundation; and the Friends of Photography and was the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2019.

Explore the virtual tour of the exhibition.