…nd others about as definitive of New York’s Pop art moment as any small constellation could be. The couple also bestowed more than 600 contemporary works in limited editions on the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, prints and drawings department of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Thinking of their gifts to SFMOMA and the Fine Arts Museums, Hunk said that with the Stanford gift, “we’re building a sort of golden trian…

…amily’s remarkable collection go to a place that would curate it in perpetuity, so that it could be used, shared and seen, reflected his philosophy that art can and should inspire all of us. All of us at Stanford will always have the deepest affection for Hunk as a generous, big-hearted man.” To date, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University has been seen by nearly 250,000 visitors. Every work in the museum is viewable online and the collec…

…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…

…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…

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…

…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…

…Peru as well as his mother’s roots in Arizona. The notion that he is the offspring of two cultures suggests his art is a visual manifestation of Spanish colonialism and Indigenous origins. The potential limitations of this framework are eroded by Ore-Giron himself in podcasts and interviews in which he generously shares his messy creative process of finding inspiration in a legion of sources: gold, Peruvian public monuments to agrarian reform, m…

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…

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

…dersons, collecting has always been an evolutionary process. At the time they brought the Pollock home, they had almost no place to hang it because, as Putter recalled, the more public rooms of the house were already filled with her parents’ earlier acquisitions, by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, and Frederick Carl Frieseke; a Renoir was moved from Putter’s room to make way for the Pollock. The collecting bug bit them in 1964, on…

…ctors past and present: Connie Wolf of the Cantor Arts Center, Neal Benezraof the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, former Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco director Harry Parker and its current director, Colin Bailey, and Jason Linetzsky, head of the Anderson. The museum, open to the public for free, was intended to help in “cementing relationships across cultures,” Hunk Anderson said, and, he added, “make a great university a little bit grea…

…ol: abstract expressionists here, minimalists there, and so on. Moving from gallery to gallery, you can feel the Andersons developing their eyes as collectors: the abstract-expressionist work is spectacular—I was particularly taken with an Adolph Gottlieb, two Motherwells, and, happily, the red-orange Rothko I remembered from college—but there is also a sense of checking off names on a must-have list. The choices from there become a bit less perf…

…and Z Gallerie buys. It was interior designer Jon de la Cruz who suggested the couple consider elevating their acquisitions. Four years later, the walls of their 1905 Craftsman are decorated with contemporary works from the likes of John Chiara, Gabriel Orozco, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra and Hiroshi Sugimoto. “We started buying a few pieces, learning a little bit more and discovering some more artists,” Allison Rose says. “It just kind of snowba…

…I was looking at a painting that covered an entire wall, when two older women walked into the room, immersed in a conversation about his color choices. I wanted to participate: There is something easy about conversations with older people. As I attempted to come up with a question about Francis’s work, one turned to me and asked: “Isn’t it too abstract? What do you think?” “Yes, it’s a bit too abstract for me. I am not very into modern art. This…