“Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea” — history as seen or experienced through the eyes of 48 artists

(Above: Detail from The Protagonist of an Endless Story, 1993 oil-on-canvas by Angel Rodríguez-Diaz, on display as part of the Many Wests exhibit at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon.)

Posted by Randi Bjornstad

Oil-on-canvas painting by Kaila Farrell-Smith (Klamath Modoc, born 1982)., titled Enrollment. Painted in 2014, it measures 36×72 inches.

It’s a busy season of the year, but for a quiet break from shopping, cooking, decorating, entertaining, or any other frenetic activity, consider a stop at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon and take in an important — and breathtaking — exhibit called Many Wests.

The show is on display through Dec. 18, its third stop on a five-stop national tour of the United States. It started at the Boise Art Museum in Idaho, in July, then moved to the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, Wash., before arriving in Eugene. Next it goes to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City before finishing closing out the tour at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

The full title of the exhibit is Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea. Rather than perpetuating the myths and stereotypes of the West as it is so often expressed through movies, cowboy novels, stereotypes, and dismissive views of peoples not of European background, it includes work by 48 artists who portray the West through their own experience and sometimes family histories that reach far back past too often stultifying modern concepts of American history to complex ancient social and cultural civilizations.

That history includes far more than the experience of white settlers, and this much deeper look at the West is represented by artists whose experiences encompass not only Indigenous influences but also Asian American, Black, and Mesoamerican.

Danielle Knapp, McCosh curator at the  UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, was a member of the team that organized the Many Wests exhibition.

“The Smithsonian Institution developed this concept and the idea of sharing it with art museums in western regions,” Knapp said. “In 2018, they reached out to us. The first planning meeting was supposed to be in February 2020, when each of the participating museums would present works they had or had access to, and then curate as a committee the pieces that would be included.”

Of course, the pandemic put a halt to the launching of the traveling exhibit until mid-2022, but the planning and refining continued throughout, as the curators divided the available art into broad categories of “caretakers, memory makers, and groundbreakers.”

Buck, a self-portrtait painted by Oregon artist Rick Bartow (Mad River Wiyot) in 2015, a year before his death. The acrylic on canvas piece is 72×72 inches.

“The idea of caretakers included care of self, land, culture, and language, kind of a call to action,” Knapp said. One of the artists included in that section of the Many Wests show is one of the last self-portraits by Rick Bartow, a well-known and widely revered Native American artist — and Vietnam veteran, songwriter, musician and member of the Wiyot tribe — who lived on the Oregon coast until his death at age 69 in 2016.

Besides paintings, Many Wests offers art in the form of sculpture, photography, mixed-media, and film, all devoted to the concept of telling the true story of the West by confronting misconceptions, acknowledging racist attitudes and actions, and celebrating the richness of the communities and accomplishments achieved through many previous centuries. It challenges the concept of Manifest Destiny, the idea that European-based culture was ordained by God to have dominion over other cultures and peoples.

Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea

When: Through Dec. 18, 2022

Where: Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 130 Johnson Lane, University of Oregon campus

Hours: 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday

Admission: $5 adults, $3 for ages 62+, free to youths 18 years and younger, and to UO faculty and staff and museum members

Information: jsma.uoregon.edu