So much to see and do on campus in May. It starts with Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month events celebrating the achievements and contributions of Asian, Desi and Pacific Island Americans — visit the Division of Equity and Inclusion’s site for upcoming events — and continues with the Filmed by Bike Festival for Bike Month, the Native American Student Union’s Mother’s Day Powwow, and the return of ASUO’s popular Spring Street Faire, featuring delicious food and fine artisan wares.
Performance/celebration
The ASUO’s annual Spring Street Faire is back in the heart of campus May 10. Browse artisan booths and sample an abundance of appetizing cuisine from various food vendors.
The Native American Student Union presents its 55th Mother’s Day Powwow. Experience Native American culture through food, dance, drumming and more at MacArthur Court May 12-14.
Join the UO Women’s Center May 26 to celebrate the 23rd annual OUT/LOUD Queer and Trans Performance Fest. Centering on a theme of “LGBTQIA2S+ Laughter and Radical Joy,” come out and party and enjoy an amazing performance by a queer comedian.
Cinema
“May the Fourth Be With You” when Ducks After Dark presents “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,” on May 4, in the Erb Memorial Union’s Redwood Auditorium. This second film in the Star Wars franchise picks up the story three years after the destruction of Darth Vader’s Death Star and the Imperial fleet. On tap May 18 is “Shazam! Fury of the Gods.” In this sequel based on the DC Comics character, Billy Batson and his fellow foster kids are still learning how to juggle teenage life with their adult superhero alter egos. Free for UO community members with a valid UO ID.
Learn how Native Americans are reclaiming their spiritual, political and cultural identities through food sovereignty at the Food Justice Movie Night screening of “Gather,” May 16 at the EMU.
Celebrate Bike Month! The UO’s Outdoor Program and LiveMove Club are partnering with local bicycle nonprofits and the city of Eugene to present the Filmed by Bike Festival, a series of independent short movies from around the world based on the central theme of cycling and the outdoors. With the theme “LEAP: Local Equitable Access to Pedaling,” the film festival will also include a raffle, a film competition, a community group ride to the Straub Hall venue, and pizza. Guest speakers will discuss accessibility, equity, inclusion and diversity in the biking community, followed by a Q&A.
Art
Get creative at the EMU Craft Center May 6 and Make a Zine.
In cooperation with the Holden Center, the Craft Center will host this workshop designed to provide makers with inspiration and opportunity to create their own zine with markers, stamps and other collage materials.
Explore upcyling techniques through the medium of T-shirts at a Visiting Artist Workshop with upcycle fashion/product designer Mitra Gruwell at the EMU Craft Center May 20.
Theater
Need a little comedy relief? On May 6 at the Robinson Theatre, University Theatre opens “Twelfth Night,” one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies about the trials and foibles of twins separated by storm and shipwreck. The play continues May 12, 13, 19 and 20 at 7:30 p.m. and May 14 at 2 p.m.
Exhibitions
Opening May 6 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is “The First Metal: Arts & Crafts Copper,” the first exhibition to focus on copper metalwork in the Arts and Crafts movement in the U.S and U.K., with additional works from Germany, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The exhibition includes a range of hand-wrought copper works by many of the premier metalsmiths working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Through May 19, student work from UO printmaking is on view at the Adell McMillan Gallery in the Erb Memorial Union. Also on display in the gallery through spring term is a Visiting Artist Exhibit from upcycle fashion/product designer and sewist Mitra Gruwell.
The Oregon Folklife Network, the state of Oregon’s folk and traditional arts program administered by the Museum of Natural and Cultural History, offers several exhibitions including “Hooks, Yarns & Bars,” showcasing the donated crocheted items from a group of inmates in the Oregon State Correctional Institution.
Learn about the history of the Willamette Valley’s hop farms in “Hop Culture in Oregon,” which traces 150 years of hops cultivation through worker profiles, farm tools, historical photographs and a short documentary.
Lectures
On May 3 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art interdisciplinary artist Tania Candiani will discuss her work, which Incorporates sound, video, painting, sculpture, performance, textiles and installation art to comment on environmental concerns, indigenous rights and feminism.
“Slavic Immigrant Artists in the Northwest” presents on May 10 at the Knight Dream lab, Vera Brosgol, an author and illustrator of the critically acclaimed graphic novel “Be Prepared” and the upcoming “Memory Jars.” Brosgol will provide insights into her creative process, inspirations and experiences as a Russian immigrant artist in the U.S.
Join printmaker and sculpture artist Yoonmi Nam May 11 for a Visiting Artist Lecture Series “Generally Meant to Be Discarded.” A professor of printmaking at the University of Kansas, Nam has shown her work nationally and internationally. Her lecture will focus on her background as a printmaker and how printmaking informs her sculptural works. Lectures are also livestreamed and archived on YouTube.
On May 25, the Visiting Artist Lecture Series will host artist Julia Fish for “Home/Work: Paintings, Picture-thinking & Notes in Progress.” Fish will present an overview of earlier and recent paintings and her practice of keeping a studio notebook of her contributions to exhibition catalogs as well as the work of other artists.
On May 17, as part of the exhibition “What We Leave Behind,” artist Sandra Ramos will hold a Zoom webinar, “Encounters with Contemporary Art.” Ramos will discuss themes in her artwork of diaspora, social dislocation and challenges encountered as a result of immigration.
May 21, Rebecca Dobkin, professor of anthropology and curator of Native American art at Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University and author of “The Art of Ceremony: Voices of Renewal from Indigenous Oregon,” will present a David and Anne McCosh Memorial Lecture, “Weaving Sovereignty: The Art of Ceremony in Indigenous Oregon.” Dobkin will discuss how Indigenous customary practices of plant-tending, harvesting and weaving can contribute to broader conversations about art-making and tribal sovereignty in the Northwest. The lecture supports the UO’s Common Reading of “Braiding Sweetgrass” by Robin Wall Kimmerer and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s Common Seeing exhibition “Our Shared Breath: Creativity and Community.”
Join photographer, printmaker and sculptor Sandra C. Fernández for an Artist Talk on May 24 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art to learn about her interdisciplinary approach to art-making and interest in memory, immigration and feminism. Her work is featured in the exhibition “An Unfinished Journey: Embodying the Feminist City.”
In the 1980s and ‘90s, a series of political measures attacking the civil rights of the LGBTQ+ community shook Oregon. On May 18 at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History Galleria, “Anti-LGBTQ+ Bills, Then and Now,” a panel discussion led by Alison Gash with storytellers Debora Landforce, Harriet Merrick and David Fidanque, will reflect on the civil rights movement.
Music
At Beall Concert Hall: Celebrate International Tuba Day at a free concert May 2 featuring tuba and euphonium and the UO Tuba-Euphonium Ensemble. Come out May 4, for a performance by the Oregon Wind Symphony. The Oregon Jazz Ensemble performs May 5.
Don’t miss the Oregon Clarinet Symposium May 5 at Collier House featuring artist recitals, master classes, a clinic, clarinet choir and vendor exhibits.
Streaming resources
Explore UO Libraries digital libraries collections highlighting the many important contributions by women, including the Doris Ulmann Photograph Collection, Guild of Women Binders: A Social Movement in Printing History and Remarkable Works by Women Authors.
The UO Channel features a variety of livestreamed events, Department of Art Visiting Artist Lecture Series videos, guest speakers and more.
—By Sharleen Nelson, University Communications
—Top Image: A scene from the Filmed by Bike Festival