Betty and the Boy kick off a new season Museum After Hours May 10

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s music series Museum After Hours features a concert by Betty and the Boy on Friday, May 10 from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. The doors open at 6 p.m.

Museum After Hours features music, art, and food. The galleries will be open throughout the event and a special tour of “The Female Figure: Artistic Multiplicities,” will be led by Exhibition Coordinator Jessi DiTillio at intermission.  A small plate menu will be offered for sale by Marché Museum Café complemented by no-host bar serving Ninkasi beer and Sylvan Ridge wine.

Betty and the Boy has a sound that defies simple categorization. Though the quintet’s string-laden melodies occasionally anchor them in the territories of folk, bluegrass, or minim­ali­st rock, they’re more at home in the cracks in-between.

Betty and the Boy originally started as a modest duo with a solid belief in performing original music compositions. Meeting in a small town in Montana and relocating their music to Eugene, Oregon, Bettreena Jaeger and Josh Harvey combine their contrary influences to write and perform their minimalistic melodies on street corners and stages across the Northwest.

With banjo, guitar, mandolin and a variety of other sounds played by new friends living in the Eugene area (Jon Conlon on bass, Michelle Whitlock on violin and Nanci McDonald on cello), these songsters will steal your heart with memorable and haunting ballads about love and loss. Spare, meditative, and poetic, their songs scintillate with grit. Betty and the Boy have given voice to the quirky edges of youth, honing ragged emotion into their artful and spunky new tunes.

Tickets are $5 and free to JSMA members. They can be purchased at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, by calling 346-3027 or in-person at 1430 Johnson Lane, University of Oregon campus, Eugene.

Future Museum After Hours events are scheduled for June 21, August 9 and October 11.

Museum After Hours is sponsored by Northwest Community Credit Union and McKenzie River Broadcasting.

- by Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art