Exhibit features works in paper by Cuban artist Elsa Mora

An exhibit featuring works painstakingly made solely of paper and glue by Cuban artist Elsa Mora will be on display at the UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art starting Aug. 29.

The exhibit, “Paper Weight,” will be on view in the Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Gallery through Jan. 20.

“For the last 11 years, Mora has explored the expressive potential of paper,” said Jill Hartz, the museum’s executive director and exhibition curator. “She sees the malleability of this material as a metaphor for the mind and its ability to morph and adapt.”

Mora’s 2D and 3D pieces are inspired by the mind’s five cognitive faculties: consciousness, perception, thinking, judgment and memory. Thematically, Mora is interested in studying the intricacies of the human brain, the wonders that it can produce and its potential for destruction and chaos. Her work as a whole reflects on universal issues of identity, connectivity and survival.

Mora will discuss her recent work in a gallery talk Friday, Sept. 21, at 4 p.m. The talk will be followed by a public reception from 7 to 9 p.m.

A recipient of the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists, Mora was born and raised in Cuba and moved to Los Angeles in 2001, where she lived until 2014. She currently resides in upstate New York with her husband, William Horberg, and their two children.

Mora’s work has been exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide, and her work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; the Long Beach Museum of Art; and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.

Mora has collaborated as an illustrator with such organizations as the Museum of Modern Art, Chronicle Books, The New York Review of Books, Penguin Random House, The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan and teNeues, among others. She has taught at the Vocational School of Arts in Camaguey, Cuba, and has been a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco State University, The Art Institute of Boston, MoMA Design Store, and National Gallery of Art, among others.