Gertrude Bass Warner (May 14, 1863 – July 29, 1951) was an American twentieth-century art collector, with particular interests in Asian art, religious artifacts, daily-life textiles, ceramics, paintings, and photographs. She lived, traveled, and collected art in East Asia from 1904 to 1938. In 1922 she became the curator for life and first director of the University of Oregon Museum of Art (today, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art) at the University of Oregon, helping to design the historic building with famed architect Ellis F. Lawrence. She had the museum built to house the collection of more than 3,700 works of art, the Murray Warner Collection of Oriental Art, named after her late husband, Murray Warner. She donated the collection to the university in 1933. She traveled throughout China, Japan, Korea, and Russia purchasing works of art and artifacts, taking photographs, and writing extensive field notes. She visited thousands of cultural sites and studied Shinto, Buddhism, and Chinese and Japanese etiquette, and the human experience, and became an innovator in the promotion of Asian art and culture appreciation, Asian studies, and multiculturalism. She is considered a female pioneer of museum studies.[1][2]
Today, Warner's legacy includes the material collection at the JSMA, the Murray Warner Collection of Asian Art, which includes 3,700 objects, and the Gertrude Bass Warner Collection: hundreds of papers, letters, journals, manuscripts (including the unpublished "When West Meets East"), and thousands of photographs, rare nōsatsu or senjafuda (votives slips), and hand-tinted lantern slides comprising the Gertrude Bass Warner Collection, managed by University of Oregon Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA) in cooperation with Oregon Digital and the JSMA.