Welcome to the Anderson Collection
Stanford University's free museum of modern and contemporary American art

Open Wed - Sun

11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Advance reservations not required.
Click here for group visits.

Artwork

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Artwork

Fall Euphony

Artwork

Collage and Ink Figure Study No. 35 [Joan Brown]

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Honing the art of observation, and observing art

…story of Francis, one of the most acclaimed post-World War II painters in America. “Francis planned on becoming a doctor, but was injured in a training accident during World War II,” Naftalis said. The injury resulted in an extended stay in the hospital, where Francis was encouraged to apply his medical observation skills to painting. Slowing down One important takeaway for him from the course, Cartmell said, was learning to observe without jump…

Helen Frankenthaler came from wealth and privilege. Her art transcends that.

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Up Close: One Painting Tours With Artists

A project of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University Hosted by art historian and the associate director of ITALIC at Stanford, Kim Beil, the micro-video series “Up Close: One Painting Tours with Artists” focuses on a single object in the Anderson Collection, sparking dialogue with a guest artist. This project is made possible by a grant from Stanford Arts and the Anderson Collection at Stanford University. Artist Rebekah Goldstein explor…

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The Magic of The Anderson Collection

…esigned Stanford Bing Concert Hall. The architects took their inspiration from the Andersons’ home – a classic postwar California ranch house comprised of a series of interconnected rooms. “We sought to reflect the intimacy and informality with which the Andersons lived with art”, shared Olcott. From the exterior, the Anderson looks like another beautiful building on campus, blending courteously with its neighbors without

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Stanford unveils the Anderson Collection: New museum dedicated to renowned works of American art

…eye for artistic innovation as much as anything.  Since the collection is idiosyncratic and personal, explained architect Olcott, he focused his design for the museum on three goals: “informality, casualness and accessibility.” The museum, he says, “reflects the way the Andersons lived with art in their ranch-style home.” To that end, the floor plan is open, eschewing small rooms. Visitors can wander freely, without direc…

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American Progress: Wendy Red Star’s Exhibition at the Anderson Collection

…oyant force that would lead her to create an exhibition for Stanford University ten years later. Wendy Red Star: American Progress revisits her old malaise with regard to the displacement of Native Americans and the native fauna from their lands as an intensely racialized civilization spread across North America, from coast to coast, following a self-proclaimed destiny. “You are without relatives” inscribes the last spike of the trans…

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Stanford Builds Arts District With $36 Million Postwar Museum

Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Frank Stella are some of the stars of the Anderson Collection of postwar American art, opening this weekend at a new $36 million museum at Stanford University in California. For Stanford, which first made its reputation as an engineering school, the building is the second of three projects to create an arts district around its flagship museum, the Cantor Center. The nearby $112 million Bing Concert Hall opened in…

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Hunk, Moo Anderson give modern art masterpieces to Stanford

Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson didn’t know much about art – they’d dabbled in antiques – before they first visited Paris in 1964 and made their way into the Louvre. “We became so enamored with the visual experience that on the way home, we looked at each other and said, ‘How could all this have been going on and we not have been a part of it?’ ” said Harry “Hunk” Anderson. The muse…

Previewing the Anderson Collection at Stanford University

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Stanford Opens a Museum Highlighting American Art

…ract expressionism—”the first really great American art movement that had international acceptance,” as Mr. Anderson says. “And we wanted to be a part of it.” It took two years of “wooing and wining and dining” various collectors and dealers to get Jackson Pollock’s “Lucifer.” They also bought pieces by Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Franz Kline. “This collection is built without a cura…

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Meet Manuel Neri’s Muses: ‘Assertion of the Figure’ highlights the models behind the sculpture

…wn as his “alborada patina” (alborada meaning “dawn” in Spanish). Does knowing that Neri and Brown were married for a time influence the impact or meaning of the work? The drawing features a more recognizable woman, with a round belly and shoulder-length, stringy dark hair. He gives her a right eye and a nose but then blends the cheek down to the neck without making an attempt to draw in the lines of a mouth or her lips. T…

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Forms That Don’t Yet Exist: Kiyan Williams Interviewed by Louis Bury

Kiyan Williams is not afraid to get dirty in quite literal ways. From a performance in which they emerged from a trash bag beside a New York City dumpster (Trash and Treasure [2014]) to a sculpture of uplifted, zombie-esque arms made from soil and installed without permission on the riverbank of a colonial-era slave dock site (Reaching Towards Warmer Suns [2020]), their art places them in intimate relation with the abject and the taboo so as to…

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Why Artist Wendy Red Star Centered Indigenous People in Her Abstracted Revision of the Iconic Manifest Destiny Painting ‘American Progress’

…pon the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869; that spike, which is inscribed with Stanford’s name among others, is now in the university’s Cantor Arts Center collection. Red Star has recreated Stanford’s golden last spike as part of a carved foam sculpture where it pierces a buffalo skull. It is inscribed with the Crow insult “You are without relatives,” but more closely means that an individual is nothing without family or communi…

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The Anderson Collection at Stanford: An Uplifting Experience

The Anderson Collection at Stanford: An Uplifting Experience Posted: 09/24/2014 2:51 pm EDT  Updated: 2 hours ago Visiting the newly-opened Anderson Collection at Stanford requires taking everything — your body and your expectations — up a level. After entering the building’s main lobby — which will cost you nothing as the Anderson is free — you will ascend a grand staircase that plateaus at the building&#8217…

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The Cantor and Anderson Collection offer free membership to Class of 2020

The Cantor and Anderson Collection offer free membership to Class of 2020…

Hostile Terrain 94
Exhibition

Hostile Terrain 94

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A private art collection becomes a Stanford collection on Sunday, Sept. 21

…nting and sculpture. “What a remarkable moment we have arrived at – the opening of the Anderson Collection and the creation of a 21st-century home for a collection that will forever change the way students learn, faculty teaches and community engages with these outstanding modern and contemporary American artworks,” said Jason Linetzky, director of the Anderson Collection. “We could not have achieved this milestone without the e…