Every year, the University of Oregon’s Common Reading program encourages campus-wide engagement with a shared book and related resources. JSMA’s corresponding Common Seeing expands this conversation through the visual arts. The 2021-22 selection, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer, addresses humanity’s responsibility to the natural world through its author’s observations as an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, academically trained botanist, and mother. Kimmerer calls for a reciprocal relationship between people and nature that prioritizes generosity and respects the needs of all living things. Her memoir’s interwoven topics include ecology, parenting, Indigenous land and water rights, traditional foodways, good citizenship, sustainability, climate change, and the preservation of language. This year’s Common Seeing brings together works by nine contemporary Native artists that speak to these issues and each’s experiences as individuals and members of their communities. Featured artists include Natalie Ball (American, Black, Modoc and Klamath), Joe Feddersen (Colville Confederated Tribes), Bud Lane (Siletz), Joey Lavadour (Walla Walla/Métis), Brenda Mallory (Cherokee), Lillian Pitt (Warm Springs, Wasco, and Yakama), Gail Tremblay (Mi'kmaq and Onondaga), Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee), and Shirod Younker (Coquille, Coos, and Umpqua, b. 1972). JSMA is especially grateful to the Museum of Natural and Cultural History for lending work from their collection. For more information about the UO’s Common Reading and to find out how members of the UO Community can access a digital copy of Braiding Sweetgrass, visit https://fyp.uoregon.edu/common-reading-2021-2022-braiding-sweetgrass.

The JSMA is located on Kalapuya ilihi, the traditional indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. Following treaties between 1851 and 1855, Kalapuya people were dispossessed of their indigenous homeland by the United States government and forcibly removed to the Coast Reservation in Western Oregon. Today, Kalapuya descendants are primarily citizens of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, and they continue to make important contributions to their communities, to the UO, to Oregon, and to the world. In following the Indigenous protocol of acknowledging the original people of the land we occupy, we also extend our respect to the nine federally recognized Indigenous nations of Oregon: the Burns Paiute Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, the Coquille Indian Tribe, the Cow Creek Band of Umpqua Tribe of Indians, and the Klamath Tribes. We express our respect to the many more tribes who have ancestral connections to this territory, as well as to all other displaced Indigenous peoples who call Oregon home.

Salvador Dalí (Spanish, 1904-89) remains a fabled central figure of the Surrealist movement, which blossomed in Paris in the early 1930s as a collaborative vision amongst painters, poets, and intent on exploring untraveled realms of dreams, the unconscious, and serendipitous possibility. Mythologized as a painter of surreal landscapes filled with melting clock, fantastical creatures, and eccentric visions of the human body, Dalí was also a prolific draftsman, printmaker, and illustrator. The Catalan artist contributed watercolors, lithographs, woodcuts, and etchings to celebrated texts; and created his own print series with such diverse themes as ancient mythology, the circus, botany, cooking, cultural satire, and religious histories. 2019-21 curatorial extern Emily Shinn curated this selection of works from Dalí’s series The Divine Comedy (1963) and The Twelve Tribes of Israel (1972-73). 

The work of Myrna Báez (Puerto Rican, 1931-2018) and Norma Vila Rivero (Puerto Rican, born 1982) is a poetic meditation on the relationship between figure and landscape in Puerto Rico, a place where identity and nature are closely connected. Silkscreen and woodcut prints by Báez and new photographs by Vila Rivero present dramatic vistas charged with presence, absence, and memory. Images of stillness and solitude explore the psychological significance of the island’s natural environment and its imprint on the body. 

Myrna Báez’s atmospheric scenes speak intimately of contemplation and introspection on the threshold of Puerto Rico’s dramatic topography and skies. She charged her images with the spirit and thrust of nature and self-composed individuality, which related to her lifelong advocacy for environmental conservation and self-determination. Windows and other framing devices activate an interplay between interior and exterior spaces, reality and projections of the imagination. Báez exalted and reveled in nuances of light and color that convey a specific time of day, mood, and climatic condition. 

Norma Vila Rivero's work offers a critical look at the transformation of Puerto Rico’s environment. Inspired by two themes, landscape and absence, she conveys a wake-up call about the effects of economic growth on environmental sustainability and the island’s inhabitants. This selection of new works, from her ongoing research project "A Metaphor Against Oblivion," records the aftereffects of disproportionate development without long-term planning and the privatization and subsequent overexploitation of natural resources. This type of development usually prioritizes foreigners over citizens. Working with the metaphor “the skin of memory,” Vila Rivero stencils onto the backs of family, friends, and colleagues a representation of the absence that lingers in the individual and collective memory of Puerto Ricans. After this, she photographs the person marked by the memory of what no longer exists in the corresponding place, and the image serves as a testimonial or record of the specific event.

Tiempo suspendido | Suspended Time celebrates the recent gift of ten silkscreen and woodcut prints by Myrna Báez from the artist’s estate to the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. The museum extends its gratitude to Margarita Fernández Zavala, Dessie Martínez, and Teresa Brigantti Bengochea for facilitating the donation to the JSMA’s collection. New work by Norma Vila Rivero from her series “A Metaphor Against Oblivion” is supported in part by the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures (NALAC), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Southwest Airlines, and the Surdna Foundation through a grant from the NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant Program.

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