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Ann Hamilton (American, born 1956) Signal, 2010. Archival pigment print on newsprint and metal, 45 x 67 x 3 in. Museum collection, Purchased with funds from the Margo Ramsing Bequest, 2013: 41.1

Call and Response

February 20, 2016 to August 21, 2016

Call and Response brings together four recent acquisitions that invite viewers to consider our own role in artistic communication.  The title is derived from a technique in music, where a melody sung by one person is echoed by another. The process is thus collaborative, and participants take turns as creator and audience. Call and Response was inspired by the JSMA’s recent acquisition of Ann Hamilton’s Signal (2010). Through her multi-media installations, Hamilton asks questions regarding place, identity, and the role of language, text and voice in human communication and ways of knowing. In her statement about her 2010 installation at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis, Missouri, stylus, a project for which Signal was originally intended, Hamilton wrote, “If the call is the origin of speech, then the hand—raised to touch, or signal at a distance—is its silent counterpart.”  Hamilton’s signaling hand is thus a silent marker of the artist’s act of creation as well as an acknowledgement of the visitor’s presence. Other works on view engage the viewer through sound and sight. Nina Katchadourian’s Acca Dacca Diptych (2011) is part of a larger project, Seat Assignment, created during the artist’s travels by plane. Filming herself in the airplane lavatory using only a camera phone and materials available at hand, Katchadourian fashioned self-portraits that mimic the works of Netherlandish portraiture. Humorously, the portraits come to life as the artist begins to lip-synch to songs of rock band AC/DC. Peter Sarkisian’s Book 2 (2012), a commission in honor of former UO President Richard Lariviere, is a commentary on the loss of writing as a form of communication in contemporary society, while Ken Matsubara’s Eiffel Tower, Repetition Series (2014), which juxtapose old photographs with modern technology, is a meditation on past and present, absence and presence.  By acknowledging and engaging the viewer’s presence, the works in Call and Response thus draw us into the act of creation.

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Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst: Relationship

April 20, 2016 to June 26, 2016

Relationship, created by Zackary Drucker and Rhys Ernst, debuted at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. The JSMA exhibition features 26 photographs from the project, which chronicles Drucker and Ernst's private moments, from 2008 to 2013, as an opposite-oriented transgender couple, during which time Ernst transitioned from female to male and Drucker transitioned from male to female. Throughout the series, Drucker and Ernst portray each other and themselves as both whole and fragmented subjects—figures and bodies obscured by objects or reflected in mirror--and situated within environments ranging from domestic interiors to lush, outdoor settings. Included in the exhibition is Drucker and Ernst's video collaboration, She Gone Rogue, featuring Drucker and Ernst with legendary transgender performers Holly Woodlawn, Vaginal Davis, and Flawless Sabrina.

Drucker is an independent media, photography, and performance artist whose work has been exhibited internationally in museums, galleries, and film festivals, including the Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1, the Hammer Museum, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Drucker is also a transgender artist who breaks down the way we think about gender, sexuality, and seeing. Ernst is a filmmaker and artist who works across forms and modalities to investigate transgender identity, masculinity, and the intersection of gender and narrative construction. Drucker and Ernst are co-producers of the Amazon TV series Transparent.

Relationship is made possible with support from a JSMA Academic Support Grant, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Division of Equity and Inclusion, and is part of the “Queer Productions” series, organized by the Department of English.

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Gerda Peterich (American, born Germany, 1906–74) Pearl Primus Performing her “African Ceremonial” Dance, ca. 1945. Gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 in. U.O. Collection, Am56:Pe1..1.

Strike a Pose: Images of Dance from the JSMA’s Collections

February 10, 2016 to June 05, 2016

Strike a Pose features images from the world of dance drawn from the JSMA’s collection of photography. Many of the works on view were acquired by what was then known as the University of Oregon Museum of Art after they were included in an exhibition of “Dance in Art” in 1963. Representing photographers and dancers active in the United States in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, the images capture a variety of styles of dance, including African, Indian, jazz, modern, and ballet.

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Christine Bourdette (American, born 1952)
Chrome plated wood and resin, 40 inches (diameter)
This work was acquired with the assistance of The Ford Family Foundation through a special grant program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission and with the Van Duyn Acquisition Endowment Fund

Shaping the Collection: 50 Years of Pacific Northwest Sculpture at the JSMA

December 19, 2015 to September 04, 2016

This installation highlights artists, donors, and collecting interests that have contributed to the museum’s holdings of Pacific Northwest sculpture over the past fifty years. Among the works on view are selections from the Virginia Haseltine Collection of Pacific Northwest art, gifts from artists, works acquired with the assistance of The Ford Family Foundation through a special grant program managed by the Oregon Arts Commission, and new purchases. These examples suggest the variety of materials and artistic practices explored in Oregon and Washington since the mid-twentieth century. Founded as a museum of Asian art, the University of Oregon Museum of Art (now the JSMA) held no examples of sculpture from our own region for its first thirty years. It wasn’t until the 1960s, with a gift of works from collector and arts advocate Virginia Haseltine, that the museum began to focus on collecting works from what Haseltine called “this time and place.”

A common thread in this exhibition is experimentation, with an emphasis on the fluidity between artistic disciplines. Robert Sperry (1927-98) painted in the style of the Abstract Expressionists before embarking on an innovative career in ceramics. The bold three-dimensional forms of Mel Katz (born 1932), fabricated in steel, Formica, or other industrial materials, bring his line drawings into real space. Reinterpretations of the human figure and natural world are also present. For former UO professor Jan Zach (1914-86), the human condition, the female form, and plant life and natural phenomena inspired expressive wood and metal creations. Christine Bourdette (born 1952), whose early paintings engaged spatial concepts,  playfully abstracts or simplifies the human figure as a tool for political exploration and philosophical meditation in her sculptures and installations. The twenty-five artists represented in this exhibition reflect only a small cross-section of the JSMA’s collection of regional sculpture, but a gathering of their works pays homage to the legacy of Haseltine’s vision. All are considered artists of the Pacific Northwest due to their individual contributions to the regional arts ecology and their personal and professional ties to the area. Many spent significant portions of their lives here, but their biographies (available for review in the binder in this gallery) reflect their diverse backgrounds, educations, and lasting impacts in and beyond the region.

 

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Squeak Carnwath (American, born 1947)
Memorial, 2006
Intaglio and lithograph, Edition 1 of 8 AP, 16-7/8 x 16-7/8 in
Loan courtesy the artist

 

Everyday Is Not The Same: Squeak Carnwath’s Prints and Papers

February 06, 2016 to April 10, 2016

Contemporary American painter Squeak Carnwath is currently a tenured professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In her work, she combines personal references and icons from anthropology and art history with purely visual elements, and creates thought-provoking combinations of text and image. Regardless of media, everything relates back to the act of painting. The title of the exhibition is taken from a line in one of Carnwath’s poems, which appears in text on the surface of several of her prints. A selection of her “Crazy Papers” will also be on view. According to Carnwath, in an interview with Richard Whittaker in 1993, “Art doesn’t illustrate a premise or an ideology. It asks questions. It won’t give you any answers really. It’s more ambiguous.”

This project and Carnwath's lecture on Thursday, February 11 (co-sponsored by the Dept. of Art 2015-16 Lecture Series) are funded by an Academic Support Grant submitted by Laura Vandenburgh, Associate Professor, Painting & Drawing/Painting & Drawing Coordinator.

 

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Warrington Colescott (American, born 1921)
Sunday Service from the Wisconsin Sesquicentennial Portfolio, 2001
Hard-ground, soft-ground and aquatint on paper, 22-1/2 x 31-1/8 inches (image)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Janet Ann Bond Sutter and Thomas Henry Sutter

Scrimmage: Football in American Art from the Civil War to the Present

July 30, 2016 to December 31, 2016

Scrimmage: Football in American Art from the Civil War to the Present investigates the history of football imagery by prominent American artists and photographers beginning with Winslow Homer’s engravings for Harper’s Weekly at the close of the Civil War and culminating with the work of contemporary artists such as Catherine Opie and Shaun Leonardo. The artworks, which represent a variety of media including prints, paintings, sculpture, photographs and video, attest to the fact that football has played a significant role in American cultural history for the last 150 years. Scrimmage is the first scholarly exhibition to survey football imagery in depth and to demonstrate that a multitude of artists have made important images of this quintessentially American sport.

An illustrated catalogue published by the JSMA with interpretive essays by curators Frickman and Knapp, and contributing writers Albert Bimper, Robert Gudmestad, and Michael Oriard, as well as a selected illustrated checklist with artist biographies written by three recent M.A. Art History graduates (Lindsay M. Keast ’14, Stephanie Dunn ’15, and Christie Hajela ’15), will accompany the exhibition. Scrimmage is co-organized the Colorado State University Art Museum, Fort Collins, CO; co-curated by Linny Frickman, Director, Colorado State Universty Art Museum, and Danielle Knapp, McCosh Associate Curator, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Scrimmage: Football in American Art from the Civil War to the Present is supported by RBC Wealth Management; the Coeta and Donald Barker Changing Exhibitions Endowment; the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; the University of Oregon Office of Advancement; Harold and Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation; Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation; FUNd Endowment at Colorado State University; the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Fund; City of Fort Collins Fort Fund and Cultural Resources Board; and JSMA members.

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