Our core mission is to enhance and further the academic mission of the University of Oregon


The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is an integral academic and cultural resource for the university community. The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is committed to exceptional teaching, research, discovery, and service. We believe strongly in the power of original works of art to enrich lives, demonstrate connections across cultures, and foster the development of collaboration, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. As a labratory for active learning, the JSMA believes that art and artists can help generate change in people’s lives and in society.

Experience the Museum

Faculty are welcome to use the museum's collections, exhibitions, educational programs, and facilities to support teaching, research, and special events.

Schedule a Visit

Visit the Galleries

Faculty are welcome to schedule a class visit to the museum to enhance student understanding of course topics. 

Students and faculty may visit the museum on their own Wednesday through Sunday. Admission is always free for faculty, staff, and students; just show your university ID at the admission desk.

Access the Collection

Faculty may use the museum collection, including objects not on view, to enhance student understanding of course topics. Students and their instructor may view a selection of artwork in the Collections Lab, Gilkey Research Center, Papé Reception Hall depending on the size of the class and works requested.

Collections: Access a World of art and ideas

The museum’s collection includes over 18,000 works of art. Would you like to access artwork not on view? You can arrange for work to be presented in our Gilkey Research Center that will deepen your students’ understanding of course materials or support independent research. Our collections are also accessible online.

Discover the Collection
A gallery space with a red wall and a blue wall with several paintings. The two paintings on the right are very colorful abstract, while the two on the left are of abstract human figures and are more muted.

Shared Visions: Accessing private collections with JSMA

Access the art of internationally recognized artists from around the world from private holdings. Through our Shared Visions program, we are able to bring masterworks to the public for a limited viewing period. Past and present works are accompanied by a Research Guide.

Explore Shared Visions

Explore resources from our current exhibitions

Discover our current exhibitions and explore the resources created for them (virtual tours, videos with the artist, catalogues and more) which you can use in your class.

A beautiful blossoming tree in full bloom with white flowers, captured at night. The tree is positioned next to a red wall, with a modern highway and light poles illuminated in the distance. The moon is visible in the dark sky, adding to the serene and vibrant atmosphere.

Twenty-Four Seasons: Critical Temporality and Qiu Zhijie’s Light Writing

Coeta and Donald Barker Changing Exhibitions Gallery

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This installation presents a series of 24 large-scale digital prints created by the artist Qiu Zhijie (born 1969) and explores critical questions about temporality from multiple perspective as well as the effect of time on individuals, politics, and social change.

Includes:
  • Virtual Tour
painting of three people with strings between them

My Heart May Be Satisfied Common Seeing 2025

Focus Gallery

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Now entering its fifteenth year, the UO Common Reading program cultivates campus-wide engagement and programming around a shared book that is selected for its capacity to generate cross-cultural understanding, broaden perspectives, and create dialogue between students, faculty, and staff. 

Includes:
  • Virtual Tour
a drawing of a branch in black ink on tan paper

David McCosh: Parallel with Nature

Focus Gallery

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A wide-ranging body of work completed by David McCosh (1903-81) in his Eugene studio, typically in the evenings, came to be known as his “Night Drawings.” These exercises on paper were more than simple ink or oil drawings of the specific landscape situations that McCosh keenly observed. Rather, they were opportunities for the artist to challenge his own process of seeing and knowing a familiar subject. He worked freely and intuitively, creating a large number of these works throughout the 1950s and 60s. Imagery ranged from elegant line drawings suggesting branches to energetic tangles of trees and forest floors. Each demonstrates McCosh’s superb command of his materials and the statement by French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, an artist whom McCosh frequently referenced in his own philosophy of painting, that “art is a harmony parallel with nature.” Featured works are drawn from the JSMA’s permanent collection and from the McCosh Memorial Collection. 

Includes:
  • Virtual Tour
Installation image of a projected art, very dark, black and white.

MFA Art Exhibition 2025

Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Gallery

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The University of Oregon MFA Art Exhibition 2025 culminates three years of independent research and experimentation by a cohort of five artists whose various practices engage a broad range of inquiry. This year, the MFA exhibition returns to the JSMA, making the work accessible to the UO and Eugene community, while celebrating the MFA graduates’ efforts in the professional standard of the museum setting. The 2025 cohort is Adam DeSorbo, Xinyu Liu, Kate Montgomery, Jens Pettersen, and Gracie Rothering. The five artists showcased in this exhibition represent a diverse range of media and practices, spanning ecology and personal/cultural memory, to the bridge between death and the living world, symbolic institutional gateways, and ideas about abstraction through the materiality of painting.

Includes:
  • Virtual Tour
View Past Exhibition Resources