Marisa Williamson: Welcome Back

CFAR Banner at 510 Oak
Marisa Williamson: Welcome Back
On View: October 2026- January 2027
Location: 510 Oak Street, Eugene, OR 97401

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.

This banner was commissioned under an open call by CFAR Researcher-in-Residence Jabari Zuberi. The curatorial approach was to ask how art can contribute to changing the material conditions and social relations that shape people’s lives. Drawing from dialectical materialism, its curatorial approach considers art as both a product of those conditions and a means of intervening in them. Who makes an image, whose interests it serves, and how it reaches a public are central to what that image can do. The project moves beyond representation, observation, and contemplation as the primary measures of creative success, asking what the work makes possible for the people who encounter it. Through its production, content, and public presence, the banner aims to connect visual experience to the conditions of everyday life and the possibility of collective action. At its core is a question: what does it mean for art to take changing the world seriously?