Eons:
Unraveling Time

Exhibition Catalog

Opening Reception

Join us at the Schneider Museum of Art on Thursday, October 15, from 5–7 pm as we celebrate the opening of our latest exhibition. Enjoy complimentary wine and hors d’oeuvres while mingling with fellow art enthusiasts, and take the opportunity to meet select artists in attendance. Experience the artwork, connect with the creative voices behind it, and be part of a vibrant evening of art and community.

About the Exhibition

Time is often imagined as linear, a sequence of moments moving steadily from past to present toward an unknown future. Yet artists have long understood that time is far more complex. It loops, overlaps, fractures, heals, and returns. Memory reshapes history. Stories are retold. Materials carry the evidence of countless hands, generations, and lived experiences. In Eons: Unraveling Time, these layered understandings of time become tangible through works that weave together personal narratives, cultural histories, mythology, labor, and imagination. 

Curated by Maria de Los Angeles, this exhibition brings together eleven artists whose practices span painting, sculpture, photography, installation, printmaking, textiles, and video. While their materials and visual languages differ, each artist considers time not simply as chronology, but as something embodied, stitched into fabric, embedded in memory, carried through ritual, and transformed through acts of making. Their works remind us that creation itself is an accumulation of moments, each gesture building upon those that came before while opening possibilities for what comes next. 

Throughout the exhibition, traditions emerge as both material and metaphor. Threads are woven, unraveled, repaired, and rewoven, reflecting histories that are never fixed but continually reconstructed. These gestures speak not only to craft, but to resilience, adaptation, and community. They remind us that our individual stories are inseparable from larger cultural narratives and that meaning is often found in the connections forged between seemingly disparate experiences. 

Maria de Los Angeles has assembled an exhibition that is as visually compelling as it is intellectually generous. Rather than offering definitive answers, Eons invites contemplation. It encourages us to move slowly through the galleries, discovering relationships between works that unfold over time and reward careful looking. The exhibition asks us to consider how myths continue to shape contemporary life, how memory becomes material, and how artists transform inherited histories into new ways of seeing. 

At a moment when the pace of contemporary life often leaves little room for reflection, Eons: Unraveling Time offers something increasingly rare: an invitation to pause. To look carefully. To recognize that time is not only something we measure, but something we continually make, inherit, remember, and reimagine. 

The Schneider Museum of Art is honored to present this exhibition and grateful for the extraordinary contributions of the participating artists, lenders, and supporters who made it possible. We are especially indebted to Maria de Los Angeles for her thoughtful curatorial vision and to Dr. Jennie Hirsh, whose insightful essay situates these works within broader histories of mythology, storytelling, and artistic practice. Together, their perspectives illuminate the rich dialogue at the heart of this project. In addition, I’d like to acknowledge the Schneider Museum of Art’s staff and support team, Maureen Williams, our Museum Preparator and Gallery Manager, Emily McPeck, our Associate Director of Administration and Communication, our student staff, and our Museum Council; Cindy Barnard, Roberta Bhasin, Sandy Friend, Michele Fulkerson, Mary Gardiner, Pam Leandro-Notch, and Vivian Stubblefield, Dustin Walcher, Ph.D. Interim Dean of Arts, Business, and Communication; catalog design by David Ruppe and printing by Brown Printing in Portland, OR. 

Scott Malbaurn
Executive Director
Schneider Museum of Art 

About the Artists

Ryan Bonilla

Ryan Bonilla is a Filipino-born multimedia artist whose practice encompasses photography, installation, and image-making. After moving to New York at an early age, Bonilla was deeply influenced by the city’s skate, street, fashion, and art cultures. His photographic work captures the spontaneity, energy, and intimacy of everyday life, often reflecting on identity, place, movement, and contemporary culture. Bonilla has exhibited internationally, including at Art Basel and SCOPE, and his work is held in the collection of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. He lives and works in New York and Jersey City.

Cody Bustamante

Cody Bustamante is a Southern Oregon–based painter and draftsman whose work moves between representation and abstraction. Born in Los Angeles, Bustamante’s Mexican American heritage, along with his longstanding interest in science, history, nature, and the visual cultures of Mexico and Central America, informs his imaginative compositions. His paintings and drawings often combine recognizable forms with ambiguous spaces, creating visual worlds populated by enigmatic figures, symbols, and structures. Bustamante is an Emeritus Professor of Art at Southern Oregon University, and his work is held by the Portland Art Museum, University of Oregon, Oregon State University, Southern Oregon University, and other public and private collections.

Laurel Bustamante

Laurel Bustamante is a Southern Oregon painter known for meticulously rendered, intimate paintings that conjure strange and fantastical worlds. Working primarily in gouache, she creates miniature landscapes populated by imagined flora, fauna, and otherworldly forms. Her highly detailed compositions evoke traditions ranging from Persian miniatures and natural-history illustration to the fantastical imagery of Hieronymus Bosch, while remaining distinctly contemporary. Bustamante received her BFA from Southern Oregon University and has exhibited extensively in Oregon and nationally. She lives and works outside Jacksonville, Oregon.

MK Guth

MK Guth is a Portland-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores relationships, social exchange, memory, ritual, and the ways people create meaning together. Working across installation, sculpture, performance, video, and participatory projects, Guth frequently incorporates donated, repurposed, and everyday materials into works that transform ordinary acts and objects into occasions for connection. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Portland Art Museum, Boise Art Museum, and Melbourne International Arts Festival. Guth received a Hallie Ford Fellowship and the Betty Bowen Special Recognition Award. She earned an MFA from New York University.

Maria de Los Angeles

Maria de Los Angeles is a Mexican-born American artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores migration, belonging, identity, and cultural memory. Working across drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, performance, muralism, and wearable sculpture, she frequently uses the body and clothing as vehicles for examining personal and collective identity. De Los Angeles received her BFA from Pratt Institute and MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has been an artist in residence at institutions including MASS MoCA, El Museo del Barrio, LACMA, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and the Schneider Museum of Art. She is currently Assistant Director of Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art and lives in Jersey City.

Charlene Liu & Isami Ching

Charlene Liu and Isami Ching are Oregon-based artists who maintain both individual and collaborative practices. Their work brings together printmaking, sculpture, drawing, video, digital processes, and installation to explore perception, memory, cultural identity, domestic life, and the relationship between pattern and chaos. Liu, born in Taiwan, is a Professor of Art and Printmaking at the University of Oregon and works extensively with woodcut and print-based processes informed by landscape and East Asian visual traditions. Ching, a Teaching Professor at the University of Oregon, works across sculpture, drawing, art and technology, and printmaking, exploring the intersections of the formal, technological, arbitrary, and mystical. Their collaborative projects often draw from family histories and everyday rituals, transforming lived experience into layered visual environments.

Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos)

Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) is a multidisciplinary artist from the Umpqua River Valley on the South Coast of Oregon. Her practice encompasses painting, photography, printmaking, weaving, ceramics, and large-scale installation, bringing together ancestral traditions and contemporary materials to address Indigenous identity, ecological and social justice, education, and Indigenous feminism. Siestreem comes from a family of artists and educators and was mentored by Lillian Pitt, with additional training in traditional weaving from Greg Archuleta and Greg A. Robinson. She earned a BS from Portland State University and an MFA with distinction from Pratt Institute. In 2025, she was inducted into the National Academy of Design and named a Hallie Ford Fellow in the Visual Arts. Her work is held in collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Portland Art Museum; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; and Missoula Art Museum.

Gerry Snyder

Gerry Snyder is an American artist whose paintings and drawings examine mythology, religion, cultural history, power, and the contradictions embedded within contemporary life. Born in Idaho, Snyder worked a wide range of jobs throughout the Northwest before earning a BFA in Painting from the University of Oregon and an MA in Art & Media from New York University. His work combines an eccentric, highly developed visual language with incisive critiques of fundamentalism, nationalism, white supremacy, and patriarchal structures. Snyder’s work has been exhibited at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, and Museum of Modern Art Gallery in Sofia, Bulgaria, and is held in the collections of the Whitney, de Young Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and New Mexico Museum of Art.

Alex Valentine

Alex Valentine is an artist, publisher, and designer whose practice explores contemporary image production through printmaking, digital technologies, color, and pattern. His recent work employs commercial printing processes and cybergraphic mark-making to investigate the relationship between humans and touch-based interfaces. Valentine often layers and recombines sections of his own limited-edition prints, creating complex visual systems that simultaneously reference digital imagery and traditional print culture. He is a co-founder of No Coast Editions, an artist-book and editions publisher, and co-director of the Chicago Art Book Fair. Valentine is currently Printshop Coordinator and a Senior Critic in Painting/Printmaking at the Yale School of Art.

William Warden

William Warden is an artist whose materially rich paintings bring together pigment, oil, fabric, linen, silk, thread, and other tactile materials. His works often occupy a space between painting and textile, emphasizing layering, surface, construction, and the physical evidence of the artist’s hand. In works such as Halting Oracle and Untitled, Warden uses stitched and layered materials to create abstract compositions that suggest fragments, signs, and systems without resolving into a single narrative. His inclusion in Eons: Unraveling Time places this materially grounded practice within the exhibition’s larger consideration of labor, memory, accumulated histories, and the passage of time.