Kerns, Maude I.

1876 - 1965

American

UO Faculty (AAA, Head of "Normal Arts"1921-1947); UO Undergraduate Student (?-1899); painter; professor

studied U of O; California School of Fine Arts (San Francisco); Columbia Maude I. Kerns was a pioneering modernist painter, arts educator, and one of the founders of the Eugene Art Center in 1950, now named the Maude Kerns Art Center. Kerns studied art education at Columbia University (1904-1906), and then spent time in Europe, where she was exposed to and influenced by the works of Kandinsky and Mondrian. She became the first head of the University of Oregon’s Art Education Department in 1922, a position she retained for 25 years, until her retirement. In 1928 she traveled around the world, including a three month visit to Japan with her close friend Gertrude Bass Warner, founder of the University of Oregon Museum since renamed the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. In the1930s, she began spending summers studying with Hans Hoffman and Alexander Archipenko, and her style became increasingly less realistic, and more non-objective. From 1942 to 1951 she showed her work at what is now the Guggenheim Museum in New York. During this time her non-objective paintings traveled around the United States and Europe, and she exhibited with artists such as Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. Danielle Knapp After completing her studies at the Teachers College of Columbia University in 1906, Oregon-born painter and printmaker Maude Kerns taught high school in Seattle and spent one year studying modern art in Europe. She accepted the position as head of the newly created Department of Art at the University of Oregon in 1921. In 1928, Kerns took a leave of absence in order to travel the world, during which time she visited China, Egypt, Europe, India, Israel, Japan, and the Philippines. While in Japan, she stayed with her close friend Gertrude Bass Warner (1863-1951), the founder of the University of Oregon Museum of Art (now the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art), and studied traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking and tempera painting. Upon her return to the United States, several of the works she made during her travels were displayed at the University of Oregon’s Gerlinger Hall and at the Portland Art Museum. She continued to paint in a representational manner until the early 1930s. Kerns’ paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Museum of Northwest Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Hallie Ford Museum, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum, the Microsoft Corporation, as well as numerous private collections.

Maude Kerns Exhibition subject

Northwest Paintings, 1961 featured artist

The American Scene: Painting and Drawing subject