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.

"A continuation of the Shoopus Chromatic Foam series, this set of vinyl works focuses on Shoopus and the relationship with the color blue. What absurdity and playfulness can be found through the means of blue? And when will someone finally give me a slice of blueberry cheesecake?"

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Map to location of Foyer Gallery in Lawrence Hall

The University of Oregon Department of Art is pleased to present a lecture and exhibition by Sarah Nance (MFA ’13), made possible by the Laverne Krause Lectures and Exhibitions endowment.  

"For evaporated seas combines several bodies of work made in response to what I call 'archived landscapes.' These are sites that have exhibited multiple distinct geologic identities over time, such as a subsurface meteor crater or mountain range that was once a sea reef. I collect geologic and experiential data from these sites and use it to guide my material interactions with things like mylar film, knitting patterns, and opera. 

I think of the works I make in response to these environments as shrouds that vary from handworked textiles to vocal performances. When installed on site, the shrouds become additional surface layers that contribute to the complex geologic strata of their terrains. They also point to the entwined human and geologic histories of these places, and mourn the products of those entanglements."

- Sarah Nance, 2025

Sarah Nance (MFA, '13) is an interdisciplinary artist based in installation and fiber. She explores entanglements of geologic processes and human experience in archived, constructed, and speculative terrains. Her time spent living in the geologies of Oregon, Iceland, eastern Canada, and the Driftless Area of the Midwest has been significant in the development of her research, much of which continues to be based in these regions. Nance is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Practice in the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Binghamton in New York. She has previously held professorships in Interdisciplinary Art at SMU (Dallas, TX), Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University (Montréal, QC), and Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA). Her work has been performed and exhibited widely at venues in China, France, Canada, Iceland, South Korea, Germany, and Italy, as well as across the U.S.

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

The lecture will be followed by an exhibtion reception for Sarah Nance: "for evaporated seas" in the Laverne Krause Gallery.

Nance creates shrouds for “archived” landscapes—environments, such as former inland seas, that are now observable only through fossil records, artifacts, or recorded data. These shrouds vary from handworked textiles to experimental vocal performances and, when installed on site, become surface layers that point to complex records of deep time. In her most recent work, Nance focuses on the complex visual experience of shininess and its ability to disorient and obscure. She considers the mirage in particular, as a phenomenon that creates slippages in a landscape’s boundaries in time and space. 

Sarah Nance (MFA, '13)  is an interdisciplinary artist based in installation and fiber. She explores entanglements of geologic processes and human experience in archived, constructed, and speculative terrains. Her time spent living in the geologies of Oregon, Iceland, eastern Canada, and the Driftless Area of the Midwest has been significant in the development of her research, much of which continues to be based in these regions. Nance is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Practice in the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Binghamton in New York. She has previously held professorships in Interdisciplinary Art at SMU (Dallas, TX), Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University (Montréal, QC), and Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA). Her work has been performed and exhibited widely at venues in China, France, Canada, Iceland, South Korea, Germany, and Italy, as well as across the U.S.

This lecture and exhibition are made possible by the Laverne Krause Lectures and Exhibitions endowment.   

Reception will immediate follow the lecture.

The University of Oregon Department of Art is pleased to present a lecture and exhibition by Sarah Nance (MFA ’13), made possible by the Laverne Krause Lectures and Exhibitions endowment.  

"For evaporated seas combines several bodies of work made in response to what I call 'archived landscapes.' These are sites that have exhibited multiple distinct geologic identities over time, such as a subsurface meteor crater or mountain range that was once a sea reef. I collect geologic and experiential data from these sites and use it to guide my material interactions with things like mylar film, knitting patterns, and opera. 

I think of the works I make in response to these environments as shrouds that vary from handworked textiles to vocal performances. When installed on site, the shrouds become additional surface layers that contribute to the complex geologic strata of their terrains. They also point to the entwined human and geologic histories of these places, and mourn the products of those entanglements."

- Sarah Nance, 2025

Sarah Nance (MFA, '13) is an interdisciplinary artist based in installation and fiber. She explores entanglements of geologic processes and human experience in archived, constructed, and speculative terrains. Her time spent living in the geologies of Oregon, Iceland, eastern Canada, and the Driftless Area of the Midwest has been significant in the development of her research, much of which continues to be based in these regions. Nance is currently Assistant Professor of Integrated Practice in the Harpur College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY-Binghamton in New York. She has previously held professorships in Interdisciplinary Art at SMU (Dallas, TX), Fibres & Material Practices at Concordia University (Montréal, QC), and Fiber at Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA). Her work has been performed and exhibited widely at venues in China, France, Canada, Iceland, South Korea, Germany, and Italy, as well as across the U.S.

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.

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

This talk will cover Christina Fernandez's performance for camera work from the very beginning of her photographic practice as an undergrad student at UCLA to the present, including new work that addresses the female body, aging and sexuality. Fernandez has often used her own body before the camera as a stand in for the collective Latina, both becoming or playing the role of an historical/mythical figure, a family member, and as herself.

Christina Fernandez (b. 1965) a Los Angeles–based artist, has spent over three decades conducting rich explorations of migration, labor, gender, her Mexican American identity, and the capacities of photography itself. She earned her BA at UCLA in 1989 and her MFA at Cal Arts in 1996. She is an associate professor at Cerritos College in Norwalk, California. Fernandez’s projects have been in major exhibitions including Shifting Landscapes (Whitney Museum of American art) Home - So Different, So Appealing (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2017), Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2008). Her work has been exhibited at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many other venues. In 2021, Fernandez was one of the first artists honored with the prestigious Latinx Artist Fellowship and Christina Fernandez: Multiple Exposures is the first major monographic museum exhibition of her work. 

This lecture is made possible by the George and Matilda Fowler Endowment Fund.