Billboard at 510 Oak Ester Partegàs: Building Blocks  On View: February through April, 2025 at 510 Oak Street, Eugene, OR 97403

Ester Partegàs (Barcelona, 1972) has shown extensively nationally and internationally. Most recent shows include The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2025), Ballroom Marfa (2024), TEA Tenerife (2023), Palazzo Delle Exposizione, Rome (2023) NoguerasBlanchard, Madrid (2022); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2021); Essex Flowers, NY (2021); Pure Joy, Marfa TX (2020); Conde Duque, Madrid (2020); The Drawing Center, NY (2019); the Museum of the City of NY (2019); Transborder Biennial/Bienal Transfronteriza, El Paso Museum of Art + Museo de Arte Ciudad Juárez (2018), MACBA Barcelona (2018).

She has been the recipient of the 2022-2023 Rome Prize for Visual Arts at the American Academy in Rome, a 2014 Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Fellowship, and a 2004 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2004), among others. An artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX; MacDowell. She has been faculty at the Yale School of Art, Skowhegan, Virginia Commonwealth University, SUNY Purchase, and since 2017 teaches at Parsons School of Design. Based in New York City, she is a part-time resident of Marfa, TX, and Barcelona.

New work by Mary Hanley.

"My work is inspired by visually representing the adoration, joy, and whimsy I experience daily from my loved ones, treasured objects, and sacred, simple rituals. I emphasize how I feel through color and beauty and by having fun experimenting with styles and techniques. I am compiling a paper doll house to gather pieces of places and ideas and playfully organize them to show how I inhabit my life and home."

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Map to location of Foyer Gallery in Lawrence Hall

Presented by the Center for Art Research

Here for The Now Department of Art Visiting Faculty Exhibition: Kevin Kripper, Briar Marsh Pine, Michael Rey, Gabie Strong, Claire Webb

February 28- March 16, 2025 510 Oak St, Eugene, OR 97401 Gallery Hours: Saturdays & Sundays from noon- 4:00 p.m. and by appointment

Opening reception: Friday, February 28 from 4:40-7:00 p.m. 4:30-5:00 p.m.: Artist Walkthrough 5:00-6:30 p.m.: Reception 6:30-7:00 p.m.: Performance

First Friday ArtWalk: Friday, March 7 from 5:30-7:00 p.m. 6:00-7:00 p.m.: Performance

In an assembly of works, our Visiting Faculty in the Department of Art present their individual practices which are specific to medium and simultaneously expand the notion and condition of the contemporary within art practice. Their concerns reflect the complexity of a bordered yet global world that we find ourselves within and enlist the inner and the outer conditions of being human – our ability to question, imagine and rebuild within the webs of production and consumption. 

Through these works, thought provoking questions emerge, capturing a sense of rebellion in relation to our current environment – whether in reference to the continual archived disasters associated with our climate, the rapidly changing relationship between humans and machine or a queering of landscape through re-registering tropes of masculinity. Further entanglements unfold within the unconscious and become embedded in forms, materials and processes that allow our imagination to meander between our current material culture and the broader vocabulary of elemental phenomena. These elements invite us to experience the tactility of the world around us as well as our tendency to ascribe meaning or find affinities in form even under the most abstract conditions.

University of Oregon Visiting Artist Lecture Series Presented by the Department of Art and Center for Art Research

In this presentation, Ari Melenciano will share a survey of her recent works that use imagination in critical forms. Each reveals vibrant opportunities to imagine the worlds within and around us with depth and expanding possibility, ranging from explorations of the collective subconscious with AI, collecting ancestral memories through sound and dance, or through archiving future worlds through celestial botany.

Ari Melenciano has cultivated an expansive practice within the arts, technology, design, culture, and pedagogy. Her natural ability to combine many disciplines reveals their interconnectedness and reimagines their conventions for new possibilities. Her art practice ranges from using improvisational dance as an ethnomusicological research instrument, to exploring AI through both critical and imaginative lenses, to sonic composition using botanical data. Her work has been exhibited around the world from Dubai's Museum of the Future to the Studio Museum in Harlem. She's a frequent international public speaker, and occasionally designs and teaches courses at New York University, Hunter College, Parsons, and the Pratt Institute. She's the founder of Afrotectopia, a social institution that imagines new possibilities at the nexus of art, design, technology, and culture. Afrotectopia has taken many forms including festivals, think tanks, summer camp, adult continued education programming, international residency, and incubators. Currently, Afrotectopia is on a book tour to promote their recently published kitchen table art book titled, Black Metal, which came out of an incubator between Afrotectopia, MIT Media Lab's Space Exploration Initiative, and NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program. And previously, she was a creative technologist at Google's Creative Lab. Some work she did while at Google included creating technologies using machine learning on hardware devices the size of a finger, contributing creative direction for the Google for Africa campaign, and creative strategy for generative AI development.