Current Exhibitions

Artists, Constellations and Connections: Feminist Futures has been organized by the JSMA and seven members of the UO Department of Art as part of the 50th anniversary of the Center for the Study of Women in Society. Placing current work by studio art faculty alongside and in conversation with works they have selected from the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s permanent collection, the exhibition explores critical questions about artmaking, history, the future, and feminist models of intersectional inquiry in the current moment of great social, political, and environmental change. 

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society (CSWS), the museum has organized a special exhibition entitled Half the Sky: Women in Chinese Art, referencing by Chairman Mao Zedong’s 1968 quotation “Women hold up half the sky,” meaning that they are the equal of men. The varied works on display attest to the remarkable resilience and creativity of women despite their relatively low status in traditional Chinese society due to Confucian and Buddhist value systems that deemed them to be inferior.

In conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the University of Oregon’s Center for the Study of Women in Society, the exhibition “Woman was the Sun” celebrates Japanese women through paintings, calligraphy, prints, sculpture, and decorative art from the permanent collection. The artists represented range from 19th-century Buddhist poet, calligrapher, and ceramicist Otagaki Rengetsu (1791-1875) through cutting-edge contemporary artists Kusama Yayoi (born 1929) and Aoshima Chiho (born 1974), and include calligrapher Shinoda Tōkō (1913-2021), printmakers Minami Keiko (1911-2004), Iwami Reika (1927-2020), Oda Mayumi (born 1941), Betty Nobue Kano (born 1944), and Ozeki Ritsuko (born 1971), and prints by three generations of Yoshida artists: grandmother Yoshida Fujio (1887-1987), mother Yoshida Chizuko (1924- 2017), and daughter Yoshida Ayomi (born 1958). The installation also features female subjects such as religious and literary figures, warriors, heroines, villains, and demons, along with a selection of Japanese artworks intended for curricular use.

Drawing on the JSMA’s Margo Grant Walsh Twentieth Century Silver and Metalwork Collection and a select number of private and museum loans, the exhibition will present a range of hand-wrought copper works by many of the premier metalsmiths working in late 19th and early 20th century Britain, the United States, and beyond.