Works from the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon

Russell Childers (1915-1998) was born on a ranch in rural Oregon. Unable to care for him, his family sent him at the age of eleven to Fairview Training Center, which was a state-run residential facility for adults and children with developmental disabilities. In the 38 years he lived at Fairview, Childers learned woodcarving, working from photographs in magazines and newspapers. He moved to a foster home in Lebanon, Oregon, in 1964, where he continued to develop his sculpturing techniques. His work has been widely recognized for its attention to detail and its ability to evoke powerful memories of childhood. Childers’ sculptures lead viewers to wonder about the uses and effects of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment in the early twentieth century, when those with developmental disabilities were dismissed as “feeble minded” and often housed together with those labeled “insane.”  

Questions: 

1. Do we interpret this sculpture of a mother and two sons as sad or poignant given that we know Childers was separated from his family at the age of 11? 
2. How do we put together this intimate and insightful creation with the knowledge that Childers was diagnosed as “feeble-minded” and placed in an institution in 1926? 

Yayoi Kusama (1929– ) is a Japanese painter, sculpture, writer, and installation artist who has exhibited her work all over the world. Kusama has openly connected her artwork to her experiences of mental distress, including time spent in a Tokyo mental hospital, where she admitted herself voluntarily. Her brightly colored, patterned, sometimes mirrored artworks in a range of media express the intricacies of the human imagination as it encounters external and internal worlds.  

Questions: 

1. Does this sculpture of a pumpkin, with its bright colors, dots, and shiny surfaces invoke a distressed and conflicted mind? And/or is the sculpture an expression that confronts that distress in a particular way? 
2. How does this sculpture invite the viewer into its world? Is the viewer drawn into a new way of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and being? 

Tom Cramer (1960– ) was born in Portland, Oregon. His drawings, wood burnings, and relief paintings take the viewer into that mysterious realm where the artist’s imagination meets the natural world on the one hand and the larger cosmos on the other. His work often seems to poise on the edge of madness but also on the edge of creation, bringing to life visually provocative worlds that also take the viewer deep into the intricacies of natural forms.  

Explore Cramer’s work further in a Gallery talk with Cramer and Richard Speer, the guest curator who created the exhibit Journey to the Third Dimension in 2019 at the JSMA. 

Gallery Talk: Tom Cramer and Richard Speer  

Questions: 

1. Why is this painting titled Hummingbird? Does the title make the viewer see the painting differently than if it were untitled? How does this title draw the viewer in? 
2. How does this painting introduce the viewer to new ways of perceiving the world? Are those new ways a kind of madness? 

Binh Danh (1977- ) is a Vietnamese-American artist and photographer. He emigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1979. His work focuses primarily on the Vietnam War era, exploring cultural and personal memory interwoven with the long-term effects of trauma and war. Danh’s work links mental and emotional distress to war and politics, asking the viewer to consider where individual consciousness and memory blur into political violence, familial and community trauma, and the brutal destruction of ancestral lands. 

Questions: 

1. What are the effects Binh Danh has created in this print? How does the print invoke personhood, identity, memory? 
2. How does the image invoke both loss and survival?  
3. How does the artist blend the human and natural worlds and to what effect?