From founder Maude Kerns’ “Untitled” watercolor to current art center staff member Marsha Maverick Wells’ drawing of “Tracy on the White Sheepskin,” the goal of Legacy: 75th Anniversary Exhibit at Maude Kerns Art Center, as curated by the executive director Michael Fisher, was to “tell the history through the art.” It’s on display until June 20.

Marsha Maverick Wells is the artist’s name of Marsha Shankman, publicity coordinator at MKAC for 30 years. She has been taking classes at the center for just as long as she’s worked there, particularly studios offering models with no instruction.        

Shankman is on a committee that aims to preserve the legacy of artist Maude Kerns (1876-1965). She says Kerns displayed her art at the Museum of Non-objective Painting, now the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. I can easily imagine it, too, since Kerns’ abstract and spiritually motivated paintings have a lot in common with the artworks of Wassily Kandinsky, whose philosophical treatise “Concerning the Spiritual in Art” was written in 1912 and published for the Museum of Non-objective Painting in 1946.   

Looking at her work, you are instantly brought to the beginnings of modernism, when “modern” art was actually modern. Her paintings are recognizable as belonging to that moment in art history, yet her name is not. That may be because instead of staying in New York City as it was becoming the art center of the world, Kerns moved back to her home state Oregon to reunite with family and live near the community in which she was raised. 

In Eugene she worked as an art professor at the University of Oregon, with a focus on art education, and created the art center that now carries her name. The anniversary show has 75 artists in it — one for each year MKAC has existed. 

It was hard, Fisher says, about selecting the works, to keep the amount down to “just” 75. He could have included 175 artworks.  

The building that houses MKAC was originally a chapel, so Fisher borrowed an original pew for this show, a bench that sits at the far end of the main gallery with a grand view of all the art. 

He came to MKAC as an intern from UO and was then hired as an exhibit coordinator. He became the executive director a few years before the pandemic struck, not only saw the center through that unprecedented time, when it was physically closed, but helped it advance.

Today, Fisher describes the art center as “thriving.” 

Besides offering classes, housing an exhibition space, gift shop and two onsite affiliated art organizations, including the popular Club Mud ceramics studio, last year the center acquired its first offsite art studio, Whiteaker Printmakers.    

All artists in the Legacy show have an affiliation with MKAC. For example, the late Mike Van was a founding member who earned his MFA from UO in 1957, taught art at South Eugene High School for about 30 years, and is represented by White Lotus Gallery in Eugene. He exhibited at Maude Kerns for five decades. His art  on display in the show is “Belted Armadillo,” a curious and wonderfully intricate illustration of an armadillo sporting an array of belts.

Margaret Coe and Mark Clarke (1935-2016) were both instructors at MKAC. In 2017 they were given a retrospective exhibit at Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art titled Our Lives in Paint. Clarke’s artwork “Young Woman in Chair” is an acrylic painting from 2004. 

Coe’s still life of flowers is an oil painting called “A Love Lost.” 

Rogene Mañas took a watercolor class at Maude Kerns when she moved to Eugene in 1973. She had no money, she says, and “was gifted a scholarship.” Her near life-size mixed-media “The Soul of America” is an arresting portrait of a woman cloaked in an American flag. It is done with a medium called “paper clay” and constructed of words that ask for civil rights and liberties. 

After she took classes at MKAC, Mañas became a volunteer and then a member. “It changed my life,” she wrote on her blog in 2020 during the pandemic. 

Ron Tore Janson’s acrylic painting “Hidden Figures” (2001) hangs above an elevated stage. Janson was an executive director at Maude Kerns from 1965 to 1971. You can’t miss his large abstract painting, in part due to the purple color palette, and thanks to its placement by the director of exhibits, Liberty Rossel. It was the first artwork I saw, directly opposite the entrance on the far wall. 

Only when I got close to it did I start looking for the figures. 

That’s the way the whole show works, I think. At first glance, this is an exhibit about history, longevity and art. But when you get closer, it’s about people — a community who, by helping run an art center, supports one another.

Maude Kerns Art Center is located at 1910 East 15th Avenue. A fundraiser is 5 pm to 7 pm Saturday, June 21. Tickets are $75 and are available at MKArtCenter.org.