I Am More Than Who You See was created by Lisa Abia-Smith, director of education and Senior Instructor faculty for PPPM, and is inspired by Cephas Williams' 56 Black Men campaign. These museum education programs and exhibitions center around a series of annual workshops held for UO students focusing on identity and misrepresentation.

This year’s project was led and curated by photographers Malik Lovette (Class of 2018) and UO art student Kayla Lockwood. The exhibition documents multiple community conversations with UO students, primarily students of color, and documents their experiences surrounding stereotyping. The project team represented each participants’ authentic view of their identity with the critical and reflective dispositions that accompany their personal development.  

Morris Graves’s still life paintings and studies of objects engaged his interests in furniture design, domestic spaces, symbolism, and transcendental consciousness. During the 1930s and 1940s, Graves experimented with materials (including newsprint, cardboard, rice paper, and a window shade) and subject matter ranging from the commonplace to the surreal. On the Surface is drawn primarily from the JSMA’s Graves at Oregon collection and includes two photographs of the artist and his home by Mary Randlett (American, 1924-2019). 

 
JSMA Black Lives Matter Artist Grant Program Exhibition Virtual Tour

“There is a vitality and urgency to the works we’ll be presenting, and a wide range of moods, visual strategies, and voices. We are gratified to be presenting these artists and this art as we continue long-term work to dismantle the legacies of white supremacy and create a more just society.”

-John Weber

In July the museum will open a major group exhibition in the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Gallery featuring works by artists who received the JSMA Black Lives Matter Artist Grant Program awards. Encompassing drawing, painting, video, performance, photography, installations, sculpture, and digital works, the exhibition highlights work by younger and emerging artists from the Eugene area, with representation by artists from Ashland and Bend as well. 

Proposed and generously funded by Jordan Schnitzer through The Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation & the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation to recognize artists making work in support of Black Lives Matter, the grant program spanned the JSMAs of the University of Oregon, Portland State University, and Washington State University. Each artist received a cash award of $2500, and the opportunity to participate in the exhibition. The UO JSMA collaborated with the campus’s Lyllye Reynolds-Parker Black Cultural Center to assemble a selection panel to pick the grant winners. 

The grant award selection panel particularly sought out younger and emerging artists for whom the grant could make a real difference while paying close attention to artists’ connections to the Black Lives Matter movement.  Works on view will reflect a variety of approaches and mediums, but most of the works are figurative and representational, with photography and video most strongly represented.  

ARTIST GRANTEES: 

John Adair | Eugene

Mika Aono | Eugene

Gabriel Barrera | Ashland

Gabby Beauvais | Eugene

Kathleen Caprario and Gregory S. Black | Springfield and Eugene

Marco Elliott | Eugene

Marina Hajek | Eugene

Jasmine Jackson | Eugene/Beaverton

Mya Lansing | Veneta

Ana-Maurine Lara | Eugene

Anthony Adonis Lewis | Ashland

Stormie True | Eugene

Malik Lovette | Eugene

Tumelo Michael Moloi | Eugene

Naomi Meyer | Eugene

Artemas Ori | Eugene

Michael Perkins | Creswell

Josh Sands | Cottage Grove

Aaron Thompson | Eugene

MO WO | Bend 

Thank you to everyone that joined us for an evening of art, music, and community at the reception celebrating the artists who received the UO Black Lives Matter Artist Grant, a joint program of the JSMA and the Lyllye Reynolds-Parker Black Cultural Center. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, Japan’s Tokugawa military regime was in decline. News about political and social events that would previously have been censored began to flood the publication industry during the twilight of the Edo period (1615-1868). With the establishment of the Meiji period (1868-1912), one of the new imperial government’s major modernization efforts was to encourage Western-style journalists to cover, comment, and even critique and satirize, domestic and international events. Japanese writers and artists embraced new media, including newspapers, political cartoons, and comic strips published using intaglio and lithographic technologies that were faster and more economical than labor-intensive traditional woodblock prints. Those involved in the earlier woodblock industry struggled to keep up with the times and began to cultivate new genres such as “brocade newspapers” (shinbun nishiki-e), “civilization pictures” (kaika-e) and propaganda prints depicting the Sino-Japanese (1894-95) and Russo-Japanese (1904-05) warfronts. 

This exhibition explores Meiji-period news and reportage in the context of both its Japanese precursors and contemporaneous journalism in other print media. Co-curated by Art History Professor Akiko Walley, East Asian Languages and Literatures Professor Glynne Walley, and Chief Curator Anne Rose Kitagawa, it features more than 30 loans from two remarkably rich local resources, the Lavenberg Collection of Japanese Prints, and the Lee & Mary Jean Michels Collection, along with works from the UO Library’s Special Collections and the museum’s permanent collection.

For the past thirteen 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, Art, Hope and Resilience, encouraged students to share their own stories from 2020 through words and images. The selected artwork documents their experience of the challenges witnessed this past year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, racism and violence, and fires which displaced many of our fellow Oregonians. The works of art reveal the resilience of each student and their hope for a brighter future. 
 

The JSMA recognizes the teachers, parents, and administrators from the following schools, who submitted artwork.
Thank you for making art an integral part of your students’ lives:

Baker Web Academy, Eugene 

El Camino del Río Elementary School, Eugene

Cascade Middle School, Eugene

Eugene Online Academy, Eugene

Kelly Middle School, Eugene

McCornack Elementary School, Eugene

Oak Hill School, Eugene

Pleasant Hill Elementary School, Pleasant Hill

Ridgeline Montessori Public Charter School, Eugene

Roosevelt Middle School, Eugene

South Eugene High School, Eugene

St. Paul Parish School, Eugene

Teach Northwest, Springfield

Support for this exhibition is made possible by The Cheryl and Allyn Ford Educational Outreach Endowment.

Observing, processing, experimenting, arranging: Libby Wadsworth has been busy in her Eugene studio over the last year.  Her practice spans multiple media, including letterpress printmaking, painting, and photography, in which she teases open written language with her thoughtfully composed visual arrangements. Always InFormation presents new work created almost entirely during the COVID-19 pandemic that demonstrates Wadsworth’s evolving interest in blurring the distinctions between text and image. Handset letters of the alphabet operate as aesthetic objects as they float, break apart, or recede into space. Our eyes receive the information, but are we viewers, or readers?

Working in series, Wadsworth subtly presents different moments of investigation and contemplation: in fractures, one of several bodies of work created during this time of collective crisis and social distancing, selected words and pairings dance around shards of a broken teacup. Her latest oil paintings on canvas set text, still life objects, and natural motifs into action, as drips and layers of paint frame stenciled letters. Throughout Always InFormation, Wadsworth finds both the tension and the beauty that exists in our present moment and the spaces “in between” our words and experiences. This exhibition and an accompanying catalog are made possible by the Hartz FUNd for Contemporary Art.

Coming soon: Pre-order now to receive your copy of Libby Wadsworth: Always InFormation in December.

Pre-order catalog now

Libby Wadsworth: Always InFormation (72 pages) documents Eugene artist Libby Wadsworth’s exhibition in the Artist Project Space (on view July 24 through November 7, 2021). This fully illustrated catalogue includes an essay by McCosh Curator Danielle Knapp, an interview between JSMA Executive Director John Weber and Wadsworth, an artist’s statement and résumé, and the exhibition checklist.

This catalog was made possible by the JSMA’s Hartz FUNd for Contemporary Art.