Dressed in a dark gray suit and Nike running shoes, Jordan Schnitzer addresses a small crowd of UO alumni, staff and students who are gathered on the second floor of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. It is Oct. 20 and Schnitzer is unveiling the museum’s latest exhibition, Strange Weather, the night before it opens to the public.
Looming behind him, a massive wall-to-wall installation extends in every direction, daring the audience to come closer. Schnitzer takes a brief pause, pulls his cellphone from his pocket and omits a loud “Hey” throughout the gallery. The man on the other side of the phone is Leonardo Drew, the creator of the energetic installation that the crowd has spent the last half hour seated in front of.
Drew came of age in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and spent many of his formative years sifting through the landfill located across from the housing project his family lived in. While his work is not made from found objects, the jagged quality of his materials emulates a similar feeling. Titled “215B,” the work contextualizes itself in the Strange Weather exhibition as an explosion whose source is open to the viewer’s interpretation.
“Each iteration has taken on a different form,” Drew said to the crowd via a FaceTime call with Schnitzer. “In the end these works morph into a space or composition that is afforded by it. It’s always changing or transforming.”
Drew is one of many influential artists whose work was selected for Strange Weather, which opened on Oct. 21 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, located in the heart of the UO campus.
The exhibit features art that spans the course of 50 years from 1970 to 2020. The works are strung together by their collective acknowledgement of the impact and history of forced migrations, industrialization, human trauma and global capitalism.
“This exhibition has art that grabs you and shakes you and makes you think,” Schnitzer said.
Another notable artist featured in the exhibition is Kehinde Wiley, a Brooklyn-based painter, sculptor and videographer. Wiley’s work places people of color inside Old Master-style paintings. Commissioned by former President Barack Obama, Wiley became the first African-American artist to paint a U.S. presidential portrait for the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
Wiley’s presence in the Strange Weather exhibit comes in the form of a large-scale painting titled “The World Stage: Marechal Floriano Peixoto II.” The painting features two men dressed in casual streetwear, surrounded by a background of yellow and orange tropical flowers and toucans. Wiley’s work deals with issues of identity and marginalization and weaves themes of the natural world throughout.
Identity is a subject that many of the pieces in Strange Weather work to address. “In the end, one thing you’ll see about this exhibition is we’re all human beings,” Schnitzer said. “So we only know what we know by the experiences we’ve had.”
Wendy Red Star’s photo series, “Four Seasons,” addresses identity by challenging the stereotypical portrayal of Native Americans in art and popular culture. The self-portraits featured in Strange Weather position Red Star in contrived scenes of inflatable animals and unnatural materials. Utilizing eye-catching backdrops and colors, Red Star works to challenge the viewer’s perceptions of femininity and Native culture through her photographs.
Named Strange Weather for the range of atmospheric conditions that encompass both nature and humanity, all of the works in the exhibit have a tie to the natural world.
Strange Weather is woven together and explained by a Toni Morrison quote, which reads, “By and by all trace is gone, and what is forgotten is not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there. The rest is weather. Not the breath of the disremembered and unaccounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather.”
Other artists whose works are on display include Carlos Almaraz, Carlos Amorales, Leonardo Drew, Joe Feddersen, Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, James Lavadour, Nicola López, Hung Liu, Julie Mehretu, Alison Saar, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, Charles Wilbert White and Terry Winters.
“Life is a continuum of issues that we all face,” Schnitzer said. “But if you have a passion for the arts and you can get away to a gallery or museum, art on the street, and just for that moment be taken away with the breadth and depth of that artist speaking out to you, maybe, just maybe, you go back to face those issues with a different perspective.”
The Strange Weather exhibit runs at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art until April 7 and is free to students.
