Marisa Williamson: Welcome Back

About this event

CFAR Banner at 510 Oak, presented by the University of Oregon Department of Art and Center for Art Research

Welcome Back is a digital collage featuring a survey of historic figures; indigenous elders, colonizers, artists, and the majestic landscapes and visual narratives they occupied, captured, and made home. “Welcome Back” buries the warm language of the new academic year under layers of shadowy history. It was created as an homage to the timelessness of confrontation. “We’ll come back!” it seems to read. It is an homage to the personae who haunt and cohabit our world and embody the complex ethos of the American west.

Marisa Williamson is a project-based artist who works in video, image-making, installation, writing and performance around themes of history, race, feminism, and technology. Williamson’s projects map the past onto geographies of the present. Her work has been featured in exhibitions throughout the US, as well as in Rome, Berlin, Switzerland, and Buenos Aires. Her work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Virginia Humanities, The Graham Foundation, and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. She was a 2012 participant in the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 2014-2015. Williamson holds a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from CalArts. She is a 2026-2027 Fellow at the Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, on leave from the University of Virginia where she is an Assistant Professor of Studio Art.