The Craft Center is thrilled to welcome Laura McClain as our Spring 2026 Visiting Artist. Laura McClain is a wet felting artist and educator who works with wool to create functional and expressive décor, accessories, and wearables. At the heart of her practice is a method she calls Felt by Feel—a playful, embodied conversation between maker and material that allows her to stay connected to the wool’s changing textures, while tapping into her own responses as the work evolves. Laura has been creating with fiber arts since childhood and brings a balance of technical knowledge, curiosity, and fun to her teaching. To learn more about Laura McClain, please visit www.lauramcclain.art. Exhibition On View: March 30 - June 12 The Craft Center Gallery is located on the 2nd floor of the Erb Memorial Union by the Adell McMillan Gallery. Artist Talk & Reception: April 24, 12pm-1pm Join us at the Craft Center for an inspiring artist talk with Laura McClain. This event is free and open to the public. Please register at myemu.uoregon.edu. (Community Members without a Community Card must email craftctr@uoregon.edu to be added to our roster.)

Wet Felting Workshop: April 24, 1pm-4pm This hands-on workshop introduces wet felting, guiding you as you transform soft wool fibers into a strong, cohesive piece of felt. Using merino wool, water, soap, heat, and pressure, you’ll layer, embellish, and shape fibers by hand while learning how the material changes at each stage. This workshop is free. Registration is required at myemu.uoregon.edu. You must have a UO ID or Community Card to register. Space is limited.

CFAR Banner at 510 Oak

Utilizing the visual language of color calibration charts and contemporary stock photography, this image collage offers the viewer an amalgamation of references that could at first appear to be celebratory. Mashed together are depictions of beauty regiments, skin tone makeup charts, piles of foods and ethnic spices, sumptuous desserts, tropical vacation landscapes, pastoral farmlands, and community building moments of togetherness. On closer inspection, the frictions and ironies begin to surface, suggesting an anxious shift in contemporary politics masked by upbeat advertising language and colorful veneer.

Long interested in how visual displays can camouflage more complex realities, Syjuco purchased the majority of these images from commercial stock photography sites, juxtaposing them in a way that teases out conflicting meanings. Included is one large image she staged in her studio, as well as multiple color calibration charts that are meant to check for “correct color” — a fraught metaphor for our times.

Stephanie Syjuco works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. Born in the Philippines in 1974, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award and a Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work is in numerous collections, including at The Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, The Getty Museum, SFMOMA, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC in 2019–20 and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. She is a Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley and lives in Oakland, California.

Learn how to use generative AI more effectively at UO Microsoft AI Days, hosted by Information Services with trainers from Microsoft.

• Free, interactive 90-minute workshops for faculty, staff, and students.
• Try out AI prompting tips at this fun UO prompt-a-thon.
• Practice in Copilot. Build skills you can use anywhere.
• Watch demos. Get coaching. Ask questions. Improve your results.
• Employees only: Get a sneak peek of Microsoft 365 Copilot, the subscription-based AI for Word, Excel, and other apps. 

Registration is recommended to save your spot.

Please bring a laptop.

• Day 1: Tuesday, May 19
  • 9:00–10:30 a.m.: Technology enthusiasts—such as IT staff, AI Council members, and ADAPT Initiative members.
  • 10:30 a.m.–noon: Staff. Learn how to quickly draft effective emails and reports, analyze data, prepare action plans, and more.
  • 1:00–2:30 p.m.: Faculty (option 1). Learn how Copilot Chat can best help you draft emails and task lists, develop syllabi and grading rubrics, analyze data, and more.
  • 2:30–4:00 p.m.: Student Build-a-thon: Learn how to use Copilot to build a product or business from scratch. The session concludes with an elevator pitch-style competition, where you can share and showcase your product or business ideas. Hands-on interactive session. Please bring a fully charged laptop and charging cable. Power outlets may be limited.
• Day 2: Wednesday, May 20
  • 10:30 a.m.–noon: Faculty (option 2). Learn how Copilot Chat can best help you draft emails and task lists, develop syllabi and grading rubrics, analyze data, and more.
  • 2:30–4:00 p.m.: Any employees—faculty, staff, graduate employees, student employees, and others. Learn how to quickly draft effective emails and reports, develop syllabi and grading rubrics, analyze data, prepare action plans, and more.

(Image: monticellllo - stock.adobe.com)