Art of the Athlete is a museum education program that provides engagement for UO student-athletes through the visual arts and service to children with disabilities. This past summer, 15 student-athletes enrolled in a studio workshop taught by JSMA director of education Lisa Abia-Smith and teaching artist Katie Gillard. Over the course of four weeks, the students learning diverse art techniques, including painting, mixed media sculpture, and photo transfer. They studied the work of contemporary portrait painter Kehinde Wiley and created their own version of a “Wiley-inspired” self-portrait, placing themselves in a classical pose or one found in their individual sports. 

This year’s exhibition features the work of the following student athletes: Casey Benson; men’s basketball; Jordan Bell, men’s basketball; Dwayne Benjamin, men’s basketball; DeForest Buckner, football; Megan Conder, women’s golf; Tyrell Crosby, football; Tony Brooks-James, football; Jalen Jelks, football; Jordyn Fox, acro and tumbling; Janita Iamaleava, women’s basketball; Glen Ihenacho, football; Canton Kaumatule, football; Haniteli Lousi, football; Austin Maloata, football; Tui Talia, football; and Kira Wagoner, women’s soccer.

Art of the Athlete IV is sponsored by the UO Arts and Administration Program and UO Athletics.

Printmaking fits fluidly into visionary Oregon artist Rick Bartow’s larger body of work, which includes pastel and graphite drawing, acrylic painting, and wood and mixed-media sculpture. Bartow acknowledges his position as just one mark-maker in the long lineage of artists and storytellers that dates back to the beginning of humanity. He often draws from the heritage of his paternal family, members of the Wiyot tribe of Northern California, and blends their likenesses and histories with the elements of self-portraiture that characterize his larger body of work. The 10 combinations of monotype, drypoint, and chine-collé included in this exhibition were created by Bartow in collaboration with Mika Boyd, printmaking/fibers studio technician in the Department of Art, for the JSMA permanent collection during Spring 2015. University of Oregon students were invited to observe Bartow’s process over a series of printmaking sessions and create their own works in response during the Spring and Summer terms under the guidance of Charlene Liu, associate professor, and printmaking coordinator, Bryan Putnam, adjunct instructor in printmaking, and other faculty in the Department of Art.

This project and a 30-minute documentary about the prints’ creation were generously funded by a Ford Family Foundation Exhibition and Documentation Support grant and Ballinger Endowment funds. The JSMA’s retrospective exhibition, Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain, is now traveling and will be exhibited at the following venues through 2018: Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, IAIA, Santa Fe; The Heard Museum, Phoenix; WSU Museum of Art, Pullman; and the Autry National Center, Los Angeles.

The sweeping political and societal changes that occurred in Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries motivated artists to contemplate, and often to confront, the implications of those transformations through their works. This exhibition features prints by five prominent European satirists who did just that: British artists James Gillray and William Hogarth, Spanish artist Francisco Goya, and French artists Honoré Daumier and Paul Gavarni.

The mode of satire, which gives a humorous face to what are often biting critiques of modern-day society, was a natural fit for the medium of printmaking. Prints were less expensive to create and collect and thus allowed for widespread distribution of an artist’s ideas. The prints on view offer contemporary audiences a unique lens through which to view the decadence and decline of the European aristocracy, the rise of the middle class, and changing attitudes about the Church and morality.

The exhibition was organized by Chyna Bounds, a graduate student in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, under the guidance of curators June Black and Johanna G. Seasonwein.

Painter and printmaker Enrique Chagoya describes his work as a “conceptual fusion of opposite cultural realities” and employs what he calls “reverse anthropology.” His provocative works incorporate diverse symbolic elements from pre-Columbian mythology, Western religious iconography, and American popular culture. Chagoya often appropriates the visual tropes of Western modernism in his works, just as the masters of Modern art cannibalized so-called primitive forms without properly contextualizing them.

This exhibition highlights some of Chagoya’s most fascinating pieces: artist’s books that take their form from pre-Columbian codices and combine chine-collé, letterpress, lithography, and woodcut printing techniques to create rich, multi-layered compositions. His contemporary codices illustrate an imagined world in which the European conquest of the New World failed and the normative culture of the Americas is based in indigenous ideology.

Sponsored  by Jordan D. Schnitzer