This summer, people walking past the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art will see a banner with a striking image of a painting that is on display

It depicts a girl, no more than six years old, with haunting blue eyes gazing out of the frame. Her tilted face, the curls in her hair and her pre-industrial era clothes appear fluid, or melting, as she drifts into a trance. British artist Glenn Brown’s “Daydream Nation” is a stunning sight.

“Transmutations/Glenn Brown: What’s Old is New Again” is on display at the JSMA until August 19. The exhibit marks the first time the JSMA’s Masterworks on Loan program has collaborated with multiple private collectors to display a variety of an artist’s work. It contains five drawings, two paintings and one sculpture by Brown. Both longtime art aficionados and people who have never set foot in an art museum can appreciate his work for its sheer beauty. The drawings and paintings capture Brown’s mesmerizing use of color and brushwork. The sculpture speaks to Brown’s capability in other mediums.

In 2014, the Masterworks on Loan program at the JSMA appeared on the cover of The New York Times. The story revealed how art collectors avoid millions of dollars in “use taxes” by donating recently-purchased artworks to museums in states without the tax before they ship the pieces home. Due to the program, the JSMA currently displays works by world-renowned artists such as Henri Matisse, Joan Miró and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

“This is a rare opportunity for Eugene in particular,” Emily Shinn, a University of Oregon graduate student of art history, said. Shinn wrote an essay discussing the artwork for a hardcover catalog that accompanies the exhibit. “He’s very very famous in Great Britain. All of these works have been shown in galleries across Europe so it’s a big deal to have them here all at once,” Shinn said.

Brown’s unique style allows him to create pieces unlike any people have ever seen, according to Shinn. He blends artistic techniques and concepts that are apparent in the works of multiple artists into his own individual pieces — a style called “appropriation.” He looks for inspiration in the work of artists particularly from the Renaissance period such as Rembrandt. Brown’s art becomes entirely new but eerily reminiscent of the pieces that initially inspired him. They are modern transformations, or mutations, of classic artworks from bygone eras.

Brown’s painting “This Island Earth” at the JSMA represents how his work can appeal to both people with no knowledge of art history as well as art scholars such as Shinn.

The nearly nine feet tall black and white painting looks like a Renaissance masterpiece from the underworld. Long, flowing brush strokes depict ghostly figures surrounding a saint-like entity holding a baby. They don’t have any discernible facial features. They look tormented. The longer people look at the painting. The more distorted, disembodied faces appear around the subjects.

“It’s fascinating because I want to read religious symbolism in it, but there’s nothing overly religious about it at all,” Shinn said.

One of the donors of the exhibit told Shinn that her daughter saw the painting and said it reminded her of the dementors from the Harry Potter series. “It totally could have been an influence for him – who knows,” Shinn said, enjoying the thought that Brown could have taken an idea from Harry Potter.

That’s what makes Brown’s use of appropriation intriguing to Shinn. It embraces how artists can be influenced by a Renaissance painting and contemporary novels like Harry Potter at the same time. It makes art accessible to people who may occupy completely different worlds.

In Shinn’s essay in the exhibit’s catalog, she features a quote from Brown that encapsulates how he views his style: “All of the knowledge of all of the art we’ve ever seen is with us when we paint, when I paint.”

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. On Wednesdays the museum is open until 8 p.m.

Follow Max Egener on Twitter @maxegener.

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How does a U.S. Supreme Court justice become a pop culture icon in her 80s? She writes impressively lyrical, liberal-leaning dissenting opinions of the Court’s conservative decisions.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has her face printed on t-shirts, socks, coffee mugs and bumper stickers. Some people have even gotten tattoos of her. And now, Ginsburg is the focus of the new documentary, “RBG.”

The film explores how Ginsburg consistently defied norms in the U.S. legal system, which was far more male-dominated than it is today. Thirty-six percent of people in legal professions are women today, according to the American Bar Association. In the film, Ginsburg discusses how the Dean of Harvard Law asked her and other female law students how they could justify taking the spot from a qualified man.

But as American Civil Liberties Union legal fellow and creator of “The Notorious R.B.G.” Tumblr account, Shana Knizhnik, says in the film, not many people know about Ginsburg’s personal life and long legal career. Viewers of “RBG” will leave the theater with a better understanding of the woman behind those scathing dissents.

Beginning with her days as a child in Brooklyn, New York, the film chronicles Ginsburg’s life. It shows her days as an undergraduate at Cornell University where she met her late husband, Martin Ginsburg. After she graduated from law school, firms in New York City would not hire her because she was a woman. But she was able to work as a professor at Columbia Law School, and that’s when her advocacy for women’s rights began. Her successes as an advocate for women’s rights would take her to the Supreme Court.

Ginsburg’s profoundly supportive relationship with her husband becomes a focal point of the film early on.

“He was the first boy I knew who cared that I had a brain,” Ginsburg said about the early days of her relationship with Martin.

Martin, a successful tax lawyer in New York, did not hesitate to have Ginsburg’s career take priority, which is uncommon even by today’s standards. While she was pushing boundaries out in the legal world, he was breaking ground at home by taking care of their two children.

“My wife doesn’t give me any advice about cooking and I don’t give her any advice about the law,” Martin Ginsburg said during a previously recorded interview that’s featured in the film.

The film’s original interviews with Ginsburg reveal sides of her the public rarely sees such as her delightfully unsophisticated sense of humor.

At one point, the film’s interviewers show Ginsburg a Saturday Night Live Weekend Update clip from February 2017 in which Kate McKinnon plays an exceptionally flamboyant version of Ginsburg. Her adult children, Jane and James, joke that she’s out of touch with her own pop culture references because she doesn’t know how to turn on her TV.

“It’s marvelously funny,” Ginsburg said as she watched the clip and cracked up laughing.

Directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen use interviews with Ginsburg’s friends, family and colleagues to tell her story. Other interviews with women’s rights activists such as Gloria Steinem and politicians such as former president Bill Clinton and Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah broaden the intimate perspective of Ginsburg that the film provides.

“I knew I was going to name her within fifteen minutes,” Clinton said about his 1993 interview with Ginsburg for the Supreme Court seat. He says he was struck by how quickly the interview became a friendly conversation about how they could move the country forward through law.

Twice in the film, Ginsburg reads a quote from abolitionist Sarah Grimké that epitomizes her approach to life: “I ask no favors for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks.”

“RBG” is now playing at the Bijou Art Cinemas theater on East 13th Avenue in Eugene. Student tickets are $7 with a valid student ID.

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When University of Oregon junior Adrian Sampedro Cruz started his shift for Safe Ride one evening last fall, he thought it would be another typical Thursday night. Seven nights a week, Safe Ride employees drive UO students, faculty and staff across campus and throughout the greater Eugene area to help prevent assault. Cleaning up an overly intoxicated student’s vomit in the van is usually the worst situation he has to deal with during a shift. But Sampedro Cruz’s night wasn’t typical.

He was driving back toward campus on the Ferry Street Bridge near Whole Foods when he saw that a motorcyclist had crashed. He got out of the vehicle to investigate and realized that the rider had been thrown from the motorcycle and was lying unconscious in the grass on the side of the road. Sampedro Cruz called 911. A minute later another car drove up. The driver was a doctor.

“He checked the guy out and was like, ‘He has no pulse,’” Sampedro Cruz said. A Eugene Police Department tweet from that night confirmed that the incident was fatal.

The Office of the Dean of Students reached out to Sampedro Cruz following that night and UOPD gave him the phone numbers of counseling resources. He says his co-workers at Safe Ride were supportive. They offered to let him take time off, but he continued to work for Safe Ride.

“In situations like that, I am better off keeping myself busy,” he said.

Sampedro Cruz says the tragic events of that night have only made him more passionate about working to ensure public safety with Safe Ride. Having a dedicated, efficient workforce of employees, like Sampedro Cruz, is essential for campus ride services — ridership data shows that the demand for rides is far greater than what employees can provide.

University of Oregon junior Adrian Sampedro Cruz says he works for Safe Ride because the service helps keep students and staff out of harm’s way. (Adam Eberhardt/Daily Emerald)

Employees and volunteers with Safe Ride and UO’s two other ride services — Designated Driver Shuttle and Campus Shuttle — don’t see their jobs as a sacrifice of their weekend nights. They feel as though they provide a vital public service.

DDS offers rides on a first-come, first-serve basis to help prevent drunk driving. The Center for Disease Control reports that 29 people in the US die daily in DUI incidents.

Campus Shuttle, which was introduced last January, operates on three bus-like routes, offering students another alternative to walking home alone at night.

But these ride services are operating at full capacity. Every year they are forced to turn away thousands of ride requests. Many ride service employees worry about the safety of the people they turn away late at night.

In fiscal year 2017, Safe Ride gave 22,086 rides, but was forced to turn away 7,515 ride requests — that’s 25 percent of their total ride requests. Since the beginning of fiscal year 2018, which began last July, Safe Ride has already turned away 9,781 ride requests.

DDS is facing a similar issue. It gave 11,834 rides in 2017, but only recently started collecting turnaway data. DDS has turned away 980 rides so far this year.

In response to the turnaway issue, UOPD and the Division of Student Life used emergency funds to create the UO Campus Shuttle with four vans in January 2018. DDS co-director Josh Carpenter says, “The UO Campus Shuttle has made both ours and Safe Ride’s lives significantly easier,” despite both services having to turn away more people this year than any year prior.

But according to UOPD spokesman Kelly McIver, funding for the Campus Shuttle is only budgeted until the end of this year.

“It’s something that was essentially one-time, scraped-together funding,” McIver said. “It’s nothing that has been programmed into regular, recurring funding year to year, so we really have no idea yet what’s going to happen with that for next year and beyond.”

UOPD Safe Rides program manager Ashley McCrea says that the rapid growth in demand for campus ride services is due in part to growing awareness of the programs. A string of eight robberies that occurred near campus in early 2018 contributed to the demand for rides, according to McCrea.

First-year UO student Stephanie Schofield started volunteering for Safe Ride in the middle of winter term when the robberies were still happening. She wanted to give back to a service that she and her sorority sisters used frequently. During the string of robberies, she says she was impressed that Safe Ride drivers went out of their way to check on people walking on campus alone.

“It was hectic,” Schofield said. “People would get in the car and be really worried, but thankful we were there. We knew that if we saw someone alone on the side of the street, we needed to roll down our window and ask them if they needed a ride. We do that already if we’re not driving someone else, but it seemed more urgent at the time.”

Schofield said that concern for students outweighs any bitterness Safe Ride employees might have about working weekend shifts when their friends are out partying. It’s worth it to them to help make sure students get home safely.

“During the robberies we knew that it was important to just make riders feel comfortable and safe,” Schofield said.

DDS co-director Carpenter says he worries about what happens to students when he has to turn them away for a ride.

“A lot of the people we drive are intoxicated,” Carpenter said. “When we turn people down, I just hope they know it’s not worth it to drive themselves instead. I wonder how many people find another ride or call a taxi. We always notify people of other options.”

Carpenter says he knows many people who have gotten DUIs. Getting a DUI is the last thing someone should worry about if they choose to drive drunk, according to Carpenter. But he has witnessed the negative effect getting a DUI has on someone’s life. He says that’s what drives his commitment to working for DDS.

Sampedro Cruz, the Safe Ride driver who discovered the motorcycle crash, also wonders what people do when Safe Ride turns them away for a ride. He says he hopes they don’t end up walking.

“Some days when we have so many turnaways, I just see it as evidence that we need to continue growing,” Sampedro Cruz says. “Not just Safe Ride, but all the ride services.”

Safe Ride and DDS have expanded in the last year, due in part to a recent change in their ASUO organization status. But this year’s ridership data show that the growth of campus ride services hasn’t solved the turnaway problem.

Prior to last summer, Safe Ride and DDS were student-run ASUO programs. Now they are ASUO-affiliated university departments with faculty oversight from UOPD. Ashley McCrea was hired by UOPD as the manager of the ride services. She says Safe Ride and DDS were outgrowing the ASUO-program model and needed to become ASUO-affiliated university departments with larger budgets.

When they were ASUO programs, the 2016-17 budgets of Safe Ride and DDS were $158,253 and $122,990, respectively. Now that they are departments, their combined budget for 2017-18 is $454,970. That $173,727 increase allowed Safe Ride and DDS to add another van to each of their fleets this year.

Safe Ride also increased its paid staff from 37 to 63 while DDS increased its paid staff from 30 to 37. Safe Ride has 49 volunteers and DDS has 20.

Since UOPD hired McCrea last summer, she has been collecting ridership data to identify how the services could improve.

“During the first five or six months when we were looking at the data, we realized we have an issue,” McCrea said. “We weren’t serving our students.”

McIver says that UOPD is committed to doing anything it can to help ensure that students get home safely. He will continue to assess how UOPD can increase safety on campus using McCrea’s analyses of ridership data.

In April, the Eugene City Council lifted its ban on rideshare companies. McIver says UOPD will closely monitor how the reemergence of rideshare services like Uber and Lyft in Eugene will affect ridership numbers for campus ride services.

Sampedro Cruz hopes the future ASUO and UOPD budgets for all three ride services expand. He says he’ll continue working for Safe Ride as much as he can. He acknowledges that if the services don’t expand, it will be increasingly difficult to make sure people get home safely.

“I get asked a lot why I work so much,” Sampedro Cruz said. “And I always say it’s because I know that if I can just prevent one person from being harmed then it’s all worth it.”

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This Saturday, people across the United States will be tempted to don sombreros and drink excessive quantities of tequila in celebration of a significant date in Mexican history, Cinco de Mayo.

But on Wednesday, May 2, over 80 University of Oregon students and community members gathered at the Museum of Natural and Cultural History to learn about the history of Cinco de Mayo and have a conversation about the way the holiday is portrayed in the U.S. They discussed how stereotypical celebrations of the holiday in the states misrepresent Mexican culture and belittle the day’s historical significance. UO Professor of Spanish Analisa Taylor led the discussion, which was the final “Ideas on Tap” event of the year.

During her lecture, “Mock Celebrations of Mexican Culture in Occupied America,” Taylor said that although many people in the U.S. use the day as an excuse to get drunk, Cinco de Mayo actually commemorates the Mexican Army’s unlikely victory over the French Empire at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. Fearing bankruptcy following two civil wars, Mexican President Benito Juárez issued a moratorium on all foreign debt payments in 1861. The moratorium prompted Britain, Spain and France — to whom Mexico was indebted — to send naval forces to Mexico to intervene. At the Battle of Pueblo, the French army outnumbered the Mexicans by more than 2-to-1.

“Mexican children learn about the Battle of Pueblo at a young age,” Taylor said. But according to her, people in Mexico don’t take the day off, and they certainly don’t use the day as an excuse to get drunk. Commemorations of the battle are more about creating a proud national narrative in schools rather than celebrating a holiday, Taylor said.

Following the discussion about Cinco de Mayo’s history, Taylor presented five responses to a survey conducted by her colleague in the Department of Romance Languages, Claudia Holguín Mendoza. The survey asked UO Latinx students how they think Cinco de Mayo is celebrated in the U.S. today.

“It’s only a reason to have a party for the U.S.,” Taylor said reading one response to the survey. “The majority of people do not understand what Cinco de Mayo represents.”

Many people in the audience echoed the ideas Taylor presented in the survey’s responses when asked about how they perceive the holiday.

“I thought [the event] started an important dialogue about the often overlooked history of Cinco de Mayo and how we can combat the racist interpretations of the holiday in modern-day America,” senior Spanish and accounting double-major Emily Huang told the Emerald after the event.

Huang said she thought the event was important, but she added that these events can be like “speaking into an echo chamber,” in which the people who attend are already savvy to the event’s message. To combat that issue, Huang uses social media to convey important social information to a broader audience than those who attend such events.

“Every year when [Cinco de Mayo] rolls around I try to share a PSA about cultural appropriation on Facebook,” Huang said.

Professor Taylor, who led the discussion, concluded the event by stating that people in the U.S. have the potential to reframe the current misconceptions about Cinco de Mayo in a positive way.

“We can understand that celebrating Cinco de Mayo is about celebrating Mexican valor, Mexican ingeniousness and Mexican history,” Taylor said. “It doesn’t have to be about participating in a derogatory ritual. It really could be something positive.”

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Eugene is at the center of a legal battle that has been called “the biggest court case on the planet,” said University of Oregon Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center director, Mary Wood, at seventh annual UO Climate Change Research Symposium on April 25.

The lawsuit, brought by 21 young plaintiffs and represented by the Eugene-based nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, claims that the U.S. government is denying people’s constitutional right to life and liberty by not doing enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change.

In November 2016, Eugene-based U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the case could proceed to trial. In March, a federal appeals court rejected an attempt by the Trump administration to halt the lawsuit. The trial date is now set for Oct. 29, 2018.

Until now, the effort to persuade the U.S. government to address climate change has been led by activists and scientists, not lawyers. But Wood says people have realized that making the U.S. government take meaningful action is going to require a widespread interdisciplinary approach.

“One discipline alone can’t save the planet’s life systems,” Wood told the Emerald via email. “It’s going to take a huge effort using assembled talent.”

The research symposium sought to assemble the wide range of people researching climate change at UO and catalyze conversations about their work, according to UO Political Science professor Ronald Mitchell, who organized the event. The day-long symposium took place in the Museum of Natural and Cultural History surrounded by the “H2O Today” exhibit. The event featured lectures and panel discussions by faculty and graduate researchers from an array of departments such as environmental studies, economics and sociology.

“Finding even one day in a year to really sit around and talk to people about their work is challenging,” Mitchell said. “This is the most interdisciplinary problem in the world, and if we don’t make an effort to understand what the economists and lawyers and landscape architects are doing, we’re not going to solve the problem.”

The event drew representatives from the climate change advocacy group “350 Eugene” as well as UO faculty who aren’t doing climate change research but are simply interested in learning how they can better incorporate climate change information into their teaching.

Education studies professor Sarah Stapleton told the Emerald that K-12 teachers struggle to find the confidence to talk to young students about climate change. K-12 teachers in the U.S. are often reluctant to talk about topics outside of the subjects they teach, according to Stapleton. That makes talking about climate change in the classroom difficult because it’s so interdisciplinary. She says the politicized nature of climate change has also added to teachers’ reluctance to talk about the issue.

Events like the research symposium help Stapleton understand how she can best prepare future educators to address topics concerning climate change.

As a part of the UO CCRG’s goal to spur interdisciplinary collaboration, the group created a page on its website to help UO faculty incorporate climate change information into their teaching. It features facts, YouTube videos and teaching exercises oriented toward getting faculty in all university departments talking to students about climate.

“It’s just inspiring for me to hear all these people from different fields attacking the issue in different ways,” Stapleton said. “It’s really helpful for me.”

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Throughout the last decade, Marvel Studios has produced 18 feature-length films, six Netflix television series and three ABC television series. With characters such as Spider-Man, The Hulk and Black Panther as its guides, Marvel has revolutionized the media industry, according to University of Oregon professor of English and Comic Studies, Ben Saunders.

Now, Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture (MoPOP) is featuring Marvel Comics’ nearly 80-year history in its largest exhibition ever staged. The exhibit, called “Marvel: Universe of Superheroes,” will open on April 21.

The exhibit marks a turning point for Marvel. Superheroes are no longer just for people who read comic books or participate in cosplaying subcultures. The company is now an influential part of mainstream popular culture, according to Saunders who curated the exhibit.

Saunders and his collaborators included pieces in the exhibit that show the comic book industry’s humble beginnings and it’s current influence. Over 300 Marvel artifacts including original books and artwork, life-sized sculptures of superheroes, movie costumes and props will be on display. Interactive pieces that transport viewers into the Marvel universe accompany the artifacts. One interactive piece will be a first-person immersive display of Tony Stark’s lab from “Iron Man.”

Movies like Black Panther have advanced media norms by making the first superhero movie with a Black leading role and an entirely Black central cast. But Saunders says he thinks Marvel’s original artists and writers, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, deserve more of the credit for producing socially-progressive content than Marvel Studios does. Each of Marvel Studios movies is based on Lee and Kirby’s original characters.

When it comes to superheroes, “the comics have always been quite a bit further ahead of other media forms in terms of their commitments to diversity and inclusivity,” Saunders said. “To be honest, I think there’s still a long long way to go in that respect for Marvel Studios.”

Saunders says Marvel Studios’ “true bravery” comes from their ambitious business model. No other media company with a similar reach — Black Panther is now one of the high-grossing films of all time — has been able to produce movies and television series at the rate that Marvel Studios has.

“They have changed the model of franchise filmmaking,” Saunders said. “When ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ opens in a couple of weeks, that will be the 19th Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. It’s beyond incredible.”

The social and political issues regarding race and power that Lee and Kirby addressed by creating characters like Black Panther are still relevant today. Marvel Studios’ courage comes from noticing the presence of those issues today and ambitiously breathing new life into Lee and Kirby’s characters for a massive audience, according to Saunders.

It wasn’t easy for Saunders to curate an exhibit that encapsulated the vast, complex 80-year history of Marvel. He says it was hard for him and his collaborators like Randy Duncan, a comic book scholar and professor at Henderson State University in Arkansas, to step back from their academic knowledge. They needed to have avid fans as well as people who have never seen a Marvel movie enjoy the exhibit. “The difficulty sometimes is that you know too much,” Saunders said.

He says he wanted to create multiple tiers of depth into Marvel’s history at the exhibit. On the surface, exhibit pieces are accessible to everyone, but fans who have been following Marvel for decades will have the opportunity to delve deeper into the history. People can stand and read about the history for hours with pieces like digital interactive essays aiding them.

Saunders says he’s still amazed by the creative labor of Marvel’s original artists and the effect that labor has had on people, especially on him. “Jack Kirby had a superpower,” Saunders said. “It’s the ability to create these stories.”

People interested in attending MoPOP events during the exhibit’s opening weekend can find schedule details and ticket prices here. Marvel Studios’ next movie, “Avengers: Infinity War,” will be in theaters everywhere on April 23.

Correction: An earlier version of this story suggested that Saunders said all comics generally were further ahead of other media forms in terms of diversity of inclusivity when in fact he said specifically superhero comic books and their characters were further ahead of other media forms regarding diversity and inclusivity. This story has been updated to reflect that opinion.

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When former National Geographic executive photo and environment editor, Dennis Dimick, flies across the United States, he tries to get a window seat. He hopes for clear skies over areas facing unprecedented water, snowpack and land use challenges, such as the Southwest. Sometimes he gets a chance to take a photo of the Earth from above with his iPhone. Although he’s a reluctant flier because commercial jets burn large amounts of fuel, he says those rare flights are a bonus opportunity to document how people are changing the landscape.

Dimick visited the University of Oregon last week to discuss what some scientists are calling the “Anthropocene” — a new geologic era defined by the ability to detect human impact in sediment records anywhere on the globe millions of years into the future. His visit included attending undergraduate and graduate classes, a trip to the Hoodoo Ski Area and a lecture titled “The Human Age: Our Anthropocene Conundrum.” The UO School of Journalism and Communication Media Center for Science and Technology, which launched in the fall of 2017, invited Dimick back to his home state for the week.

Since he left National Geographic in 2015, Dimick has worked to inspire the next generation of environmental photojournalists. He travels the country meeting with college students and giving lectures at universities and conferences. He sees it as his duty to pass on the knowledge he has gained throughout his career. The natural world looks different than it did when Dimick was young, and he believes it’s important for people to document that change.

Dimick grew up on a hay and sheep farm just south of Lake Oswego, Oregon. As a kid, he wanted to be a forest ranger. When he was 8 years old, he mailed a letter to the Forest Service asking to be stationed in one of Oregon’s many forest fire lookouts for the summer. The Service wrote back and graciously told him to come back in 10 years.

As a teenager, Dimick baled hay on his family’s farm to pay for school at Oregon State University, where he majored in general agriculture. At the end of his freshman year, Dimick bought a camera, and his lifelong passion for photography began.

“I was inspired by my beginnings on the landscape, as well as my education,” Dimick said during his lecture. “But early on, I learned that the things we perceive as injuries or insults can be a part of what people become.”

In the early 1980s, the Federal Highway Administration began construction of Interstate 205, which now runs between Oregon and Washington. Dimick’s family had to turn over 37 acres of its farm to the federal government for the project.

“With progress there is a price, and that became a very visceral truth for me at a young age,” Dimick said.

Early in his career, Dimick worked as a photographer for several newspapers, including the “News-Register” in McMinnville, Oregon, the “East Oregonian” in Pendleton and the “Union-Bulletin” in Walla Walla, Washington. Dimick ended his newspaper work at the “Courier-Journal” in Louisville, Kentucky.

In 1980, he started working for “National Geographic” as a photographer. During his 35-year tenure at the magazine, Dimick worked on projects exploring how humans are transforming the planet in the name of progress. His work earned him some of the most prestigious photography awards in the U.S., including the National Press Photographers Association’s Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award.

“People don’t know where their water comes from,” Dimick said. “They don’t know where their food comes from; they don’t know where their energy comes from.” Dimick said that National Geographic was trying to artfully show people where their everyday resources come from.

Dimick and his former National Geographic colleague, Jim Richardson, recently launched the “Eyes on Earth” project. They write about their experiences at National Geographic on the project’s website and provide advice to aspiring environmental photojournalists. The website also features plenty of inspirational photos.

He says young people trying to start a career in the industry should focus on photographing environments that show cause and effect and tell a story all in one photo.

“Causation is the reason or force creating change,” writes Dimick on the Eyes on Earth website. “Pictures of environmental effects are relatively easy. Pictures of causation are difficult — but immensely more powerful.”

Dimick says he thinks photography has the potential to affect people like no other medium can. He says people, including him, respond viscerally to photos that tell a story and reveal changes in the environment.

According to Dimick, there’s value in showing people across the Southwest U.S. how people are living in Cape Town, South Africa, for example. He thinks the lifestyle in Cape Town can teach Americans in the Southwest important lessons about living in an increasingly water-deprived region.

During the Q&A session following Dimick’s lecture, a student asked him whether or not he’s optimistic about the planet’s environmental future. “Yeah I am, because you people are here,” Dimick said referring to the room of students. Many people in the audience laughed at his answer.

“No seriously,” Dimick said. “I can list off the ten best ways individuals can help fight climate change, but you all are going to be the next generation of policy-makers and storytellers.”

More of Dimick’s work can be viewed on his personal website here.

Correction: The version of this story in print stated that Dimick went rafting on the Mckenzie River with students. He went to the Mckenzie River, but did not go rafting.

Correction: An earlier version of this story stated Dimick was a photographer for National Geographic. He was the magazine’s photo and environment editor.

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University of Oregon physics professor Timothy Jenkins has been passionate about science and music since a young age. Growing up on a farm in Ridgefield, Washington, about 25 miles north of Portland, Jenkins enjoyed singing in his church choir. At the same time, he cultivated an interest in science from reading sci-fi novels. A book mobile drove around Ridgefield and delivered books by sci-fi authors such as Isaac Asimov to Jenkins’ farm.

He has been teaching physics at UO since 1992 and he’s been playing guitar since he was 14. Rock, blues and folk by bands such as The Beatles, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Mississippi John Hurt captivated Jenkins as a teenager and in college.

Now, he primarily instructs a general physics course, but he also teaches a class on the physics of sound during the summer. He says that music and science are more connected than people often think, and that his interest in both is common in his field.

“Galileo said something along the lines of, ‘The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,’” Jenkins said. “But that applies to music as well.”

Jenkins is one example in a long list of physicists who are also gifted musicians. The most well-known person from that list is Albert Einstein, who played the violin. According to a 1980 article by Durham Morning Herald music reviewer Peregrine White, “A well-worn fiddle case accompanied [Einstein] wherever he went.”

“A lot of people think of science as strictly an intellectual pursuit, but it’s a creative pursuit as well,” Jenkins said. “Certainly music helps in the creative process.”

Recent studies by researchers such as neuroscientist Anita Collins show that being exposed to music at a young age and playing an instrument throughout life have a plethora of benefits for the brain. Playing music helps create the pathways in the brain that are useful in thinking about the world scientifically. In a 2014 “TED-Ed” video, Collins discusses how playing an instrument combines the linguistic and mathematical thinking present in the left hemisphere of the brain with the more creative thinking present in the right hemisphere.

“Playing a musical instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once,” Collins said in the video. The full brain engagement that comes with playing music promotes the creative thinking that may help a physicist solve a problem or develop a new theory.

Jenkins says that his scientific understanding of acoustic vibrations has also made him a better guitar player and performer. It allows him to think about the sounds he’s making in a more intimate way, and that allows him to be more creative when he plays.

He has the opportunity to teach a blend of music and science through his summertime  course at UO, which draws students from both the physics and music departments. He says it’s intriguing to see how students from both departments think about assignments differently.

For in-class assignments, Jenkins first makes students solve problems on their own. Then he has students do the same problems in groups. He pairs students with a strong music backgrounds with students who have a strong science backgrounds. He says that when students with different backgrounds work together, they do better. The process of justifying their approach to a student with a different background forces students to clarify their thinking and learn different ways to solve the same problem.

Jenkins plans to retire from his work at UO at the end of 2019, and he’s looking forward to having more time to focus on music and play more gigs. He plays about two or three shows a year right now, including an annual show at the Creswell Fourth of July parade where he plays for an hour at the historical museum in town.

“I just want to play more shows,” Jenkins said. “I’ve always done a lot of Anglo-American folk songs so I’d love to do a big tour through the United Kingdom at some point after I retire.”

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The renowned, Eugene-based artist Keith Achepohl said that his works currently on display in the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art are “all about the life and death of plants.” The exhibit, “Vision of Nature/Vessel of Beauty,” will remain in the JSMA Barker Gallery until April 29. However, on Feb. 24, the local community learned that Achepohl passed away in his Eugene home while surrounded by family, according to his obituary in the Register-Guard.

“The works in the exhibition represent six years of an artist’s life — in this case, an artist who is nearing the completion of his own life,” Jill Hartz, who co-curated the exhibit, told the Register-Guard in February.

The JSMA exhibit includes nine distinct but related explorations of objects from nature. One exploration is called “Tree Conversations;” another is “Skunk Cabbage.” Each exploration is grouped separately in the gallery and consists of multiple artworks. Achepohl used an impressively wide variety of media including pencil, acrylic, collage and oil to create the pieces.

A three-week residency at the Morris Graves Foundation’s 150-acre forested artists’ retreat on the Northern California coast called “The Lake” inspired Achepohl to create these pieces. Graves was a colleague of Achepohl and an esteemed artist from the Pacific Northwest who died in 2001. According to the Foundation, upon Graves’ death, “The Lake” became a place to incubate artists interested in utilizing the abundance of nature available in the area. In the past, Achepohl had described his residence at “The Lake” by saying it was like “going to a monastery.”

Through its depictions of the smallest natural objects and minute details, the works implore viewers to look at nature in a way they never have before. Many of the paintings show a single decaying leaf, while others show the minuscule fibers of a lively, grassy plant’s root system. The pieces range from intensely detailed to indiscernible and abstract. Achepohl acknowledges life and death equally in these pieces as he uses vibrant earth colors coupled with the muddled blacks and greys of charcoal.

“The closer you get to it, the better experience you’ll have with it,” Achepohl said about the intimacy viewers feel with the natural objects in his paintings during a February interview with UO’s Oregon Humanities Center.

During the OHC interview, Achepohl said he encountered many people while living in Eugene for the past ten years who told him, “I just came back from a walk in the forest.” When he asked them what they saw, Achepohl found that most people were puzzled by the question and simply say that they saw trees.

“Often they don’t know what they saw, ‘cause they didn’t bother to look. Oh, what a waste, you know?” Achepohl said.

During the decade Achepohl lived in Eugene, his ability to meditate on the often forgotten details of life and translate them into his work made an impression on the directors of the JSMA. He served on the JSMA’s Leadership Council and Collections Committee, gifted and loaned numerous works of art from his own collections and participated in many UO classes and museum events.

“It was a joy to see so many of Keith’s friends and family experience his work alongside our community of museum visitors,” read the JSMA’s post on their website following Achepohl’s death.

“Vision of Nature/Vessel of Beauty” is on display through April 29. The JSMA is open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays. Entry is $5, $3 for people 62 and up and free for members, UO students and faculty.

The post Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art exhibit ‘Vision of Nature/Vessel of Beauty’ begs viewers to look closer at the natural world appeared first on Emerald Media.

The renowned, Eugene-based artist Keith Achepohl said that his works currently on display in the University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art are “all about the life and death of plants.” The exhibit, “Vision of Nature/Vessel of Beauty,” will remain in the JSMA Barker Gallery until April 29. However, on Feb. 24, the local community learned that Achepohl passed away in his Eugene home while surrounded by family, according to his obituary in the Register-Guard.

“The works in the exhibition represent six years of an artist’s life — in this case, an artist who is nearing the completion of his own life,” Jill Hartz, who co-curated the exhibit, told the Register-Guard in February.

The JSMA exhibit includes nine distinct but related explorations of objects from nature. One exploration is called “Tree Conversations;” another is “Skunk Cabbage.” Each exploration is grouped separately in the gallery and consists of multiple artworks. Achepohl used an impressively wide variety of media including pencil, acrylic, collage and oil to create the pieces.

A three-week residency at the Morris Graves Foundation’s 150-acre forested artists’ retreat on the Northern California coast called “The Lake” inspired Achepohl to create these pieces. Graves was a colleague of Achepohl and an esteemed artist from the Pacific Northwest who died in 2001. According to the Foundation, upon Graves’ death, “The Lake” became a place to incubate artists interested in utilizing the abundance of nature available in the area. In the past, Achepohl had described his residence at “The Lake” by saying it was like “going to a monastery.”

Through its depictions of the smallest natural objects and minute details, the works implore viewers to look at nature in a way they never have before. Many of the paintings show a single decaying leaf, while others show the minuscule fibers of a lively, grassy plant’s root system. The pieces range from intensely detailed to indiscernible and abstract. Achepohl acknowledges life and death equally in these pieces as he uses vibrant earth colors coupled with the muddled blacks and greys of charcoal.

“The closer you get to it, the better experience you’ll have with it,” Achepohl said about the intimacy viewers feel with the natural objects in his paintings during a February interview with UO’s Oregon Humanities Center.

During the OHC interview, Achepohl said he encountered many people while living in Eugene for the past ten years who told him, “I just came back from a walk in the forest.” When he asked them what they saw, Achepohl found that most people were puzzled by the question and simply say that they saw trees.

“Often they don’t know what they saw, ‘cause they didn’t bother to look. Oh, what a waste, you know?” Achepohl said.

During the decade Achepohl lived in Eugene, his ability to meditate on the often forgotten details of life and translate them into his work made an impression on the directors of the JSMA. He served on the JSMA’s Leadership Council and Collections Committee, gifted and loaned numerous works of art from his own collections and participated in many UO classes and museum events.

“It was a joy to see so many of Keith’s friends and family experience his work alongside our community of museum visitors,” read the JSMA’s post on their website following Achepohl’s death.

“Vision of Nature/Vessel of Beauty” is on display through April 29. The JSMA is open from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays. Entry is $5, $3 for people 62 and up and free for members, UO students and faculty.

The post Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art exhibit ‘Vision of Nature/Vessel of Beauty’ begs viewers to look closer at the natural world appeared first on Emerald Media.