Art Museum - University of Oregon - Eugene, OR - American Guide Series on Waymarking.com

The ART MUSEUM (open by permission), centered in the SW. quad facing W. toward Kincaid St., a gift of alumni and friends, built in 1930, is an imposing brick building that shelters the rare and extensive Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art, given to the university by Gertrude Bass Warner as a memorial to her husband. The collection was started by Major and Mrs. Warner while living in Shanghai, China. In the Chinese group are many paintings by the old masters of China, tapestries and embroideries, cinnabar, jades, porcelains, and ancient bronzes. Among the Japanese rarities are old prints, brocades, temple hangings and altar cloths, embroideries, lacquer, a great palanquin two centuries old, and delicate works in silver, bronze, copper, pewter, and wood. The Korean collection contains ornamental screens, old bronzes, and a chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The Murray Warner Museum Library of 3,500 volumes, dealing with the history, literature, art, and life of Oriental countries, fills a room in the museum, and current magazines on art and life in the Far East are in the reading room.

An addition to the original 1929-30 museum nearly doubled its size and enabled expanded gallery space, an educational suite, an interactive discovery gallery, a café, an enlarged museum store, and a hall available for public rental. In May 2004, the building was renamed the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in honor of the donor who has committed a multimillion dollar endowment in support of the renovation.