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.

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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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Palette Cleanser: A new campus museum quietly serves up a visual banquet

Palette Cleanser: A new campus museum quietly serves up a visual banquet. By Lydia Lee It’s tempting for designers to try to turn art museums into works of art themselves. But what if the client’s directive is just the opposite? A new campus museum in the Bay Area by the New York–based firm Ennead Architects may disappoint those hoping for a bigger architectural statement. However, as designed to house the 121 works of the Anderson Collection,…

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Anderson Collection a modern art trove not to be missed

About twice a month, Mary Margaret Anderson pays a visit to the museum on the Stanford campus that bears her last name. Moo, as she is better known, usually chats with the staff before declaring, “I’m off to see my friends.” Those friends are the more than 100 works of art, including paintings and sculptures, that she and her husband, Harry (“Hunk”), along with their daughter, Mary Patricia (“Putter”) Anderson Pence, gave to the university sever…

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Creations of Space and Light

By Anna Koster For The Daily News Pushing boundaries has been the life work of Robert Irwin. His six-decade exploration of perception as the fundamental issue of art has expanded ideas of what art can be and can do. Irwin will speak about his work on March 10 at Stanford’s Cemex Auditorium. Irwin, born in 1928, in Long Beach, started as a painter in the 1950s with an abstract expressionist style, but quickly began removing all that was not…

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Site-specific student projects now on view!

  COCOON On view March 2 – April 4, 2016 Cocoon is the result of CEE32H: Responsive Structures, offered by Stanford Architecture.  This design build course focused on the structural and spatial possibilities of welded wire mesh, for the design of a contemplation space.  The installation encourages introspection and pause for students, passers-by, and visitors to the Anderson Collection.  The progression of arches provides a spatial t…

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Hot Art Bling the New Thing on the Peninsula

The coming relaunch of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has lots of people buzzing in anticipation. But downtown San Francisco is not the only place where truly exciting things are happening on the visual arts front. Super-star artist James Turrell, for instance, is touching down in Palo Alto with a pocket-sized exhibition this week, ahead of a major retrospective of his work at The Los Angeles County Museum of Art in late May. Turrell is…

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Suit up: Step into the Vibrant, Colorful and Furry World of Artist Nick Cave

The audience for Nick Cave’s Soundsuits isn’t really the audience. To put it another way, people looking at the artist’s tall, bright, faceless garments from the outside are part of the audience. But another important audience member is the one wearing a Soundsuit: the person inside. Although visitors to the new exhibition can’t try on the suits, seeing them in person is just as good and not quite as tricky. At the two-…

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The Anderson Collection at Stanford University receives new gifts of art

BY ROBIN WANDER The Anderson Collection at Stanford University accepted 13 gifts of art into the museum’s permanent collection this academic year. These are the first acquisitions since the museum opened in 2014, originally as a non-collecting institution, and the first gifts not from the Anderson family. The new direction is a welcome one for students, faculty, the Stanford community, the Anderson family and beyond. Anderson Collection patr…

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New Gifts Expand the Anderson Collection at Stanford

he Anderson Collection at Stanford University accepted 13 gifts of art into the museum’s permanent collection this past year. These are the first acquisitions since the museum opened in 2014, and the first gifts not from the Anderson family. New to the collection is Bill Jensen’s watercolor and gouache Study for Denial, 1985-86; three sculptural works and eight works on paper ranging from 1958 to 1997 by Manuel Neri; and Mary Weatherford’s black…

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Getting it down on paper: A different aspect of the Anderson Collection on view

Getting it down on paper A different aspect of the Anderson Collection on view by Sheryl Nonnenberg / Palo Alto Weekly Philip Guston’s untitled ink-on-paper work is featured at Anderson Collection’s latest exhibition. Image courtesy of Anderson Collection. Visitors to the Anderson Collection at Stanford University can experience a wide range of art movements (virtually every major development after 1945) and media. The museum…

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The Museum of Hunk, Moo & Putter: The Anderson Collection at Stanford will Rock You

Tom Teicholz Contributor Arts I write about culture and the cult of luxury On a recent trip to San Francisco, I decided to make a short detour to the Anderson Collection at Stanford University (easily reachable by public transport from San Francisco or from the airport) – it is very much worth the trip. The Anderson Collection is very much focused on American Art of the 20thCentury in general, with a specific concentration on West Coast…

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Anderson Collection at Stanford marks fifth anniversary

The museum, located in the arts district on the Stanford campus, celebrates with three new exhibitions and an open house by Sheryl Nonnenberg / Palo Alto Weekly Artist Jim Campbell’s LED-based pieces often use a grid format with blinking lights or blurred black-and-white film backgrounds. Photo by Betty Noguchi/Anderson Collection. The Anderson Collection at Stanford will celebrate its fifth anniversary on Saturday, Sept. 21, with a ga…

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Anderson Collection at Stanford University announces the acquisition of two major works by Pollock, de Kooning

The donation by the late Mary Margaret “Moo” Anderson comes as the museum commemorates its fifth anniversary and launches a new fundraising effort. BY BETH GIUDICESSI To mark its fifth anniversary, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University was gifted two major works of art, Jackson Pollock’s 1944 Totem Lesson 1 and Willem de Kooning’s c. 1949 Gansevoort Street, by its eponymous supporter Mary Margaret “Moo” Anderson. Anderson donate…

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Eamon Ore-Giron Named to Presidential Residency at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University

Celebrated abstract painter explores the visual possibilities of cross-cultural aesthetics and expression through large-scale geometric works June 18, 2020 STANFORD, CA–In the Stanford tradition of providing a home for art and artists who advance dialogue on contemporary issues, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University will welcome visual artist Eamon Ore-Giron to campus for the 2020-2021 Presidential Residency on the Future of the Arts. “…

Stanford art museums, Frost Amphitheater begin to reopen

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A new start for art at Stanford: Cantor Arts Center and Anderson Collection reopen

A new start for art at Stanford: Cantor Arts Center and Anderson Collection reopen Sheryl Nonnenberg 7-8 minutes After more than a year of closure, Stanford University’s major art museums — Cantor Arts Center and the Anderson Collection at Stanford — are open again. A visit to campus reveals that, while some things have remained the same (the venerable Rodin sculpture collection, for example), there have been some significant c…

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Anderson Collection paintings on summer holiday next door at the Cantor

When the Anderson Collection at Stanford University temporarily closed for interior maintenance for the summer, five visitor-favorites from the permanent collection crossed the lawn to take up temporary residence at the Cantor Arts Center. The works are by Richard Diebenkorn, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, who count among the most influential artists active in American abstraction from the 1940s to the 1970s…

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Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star creatively engages with the Stanford community

By Robin Wander Wendy Red Star: American Progress on view at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University is a solo exhibition of works by the artist Wendy Red Star, who was raised on the Apsáalooke (Crow) reservation in Montana. With historical research, Stanford student collaborations, large-scale installations, and images of sovereignty, Red Star asks viewers to grapple with the layered complexity of American history. On view on the first…

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

Artist Wendy Red Star was usually a sleepy freshman during her 9 a.m. intro to art history class at Montana State University during the early 2000s. But one morning, her professor projected a slide of John Gast’s American Progress (1872) onto the lecture hall’s massive screen. It jolted her awake. The iconic painting is meant to promote the idea of Manifest Destiny, centering on an oversized Lady Columbia who illuminates a path for white settler…

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Stephanie Syjuco Goes Full Color

Stephanie Syjuco Goes Full Color The politics of color photography explored in new exhibit There’s a colorchecker at the center of Stephanie Syjuco’s collage Pileup (Brass Bells). It’s 24 squares of color contained within a black frame. The artist arranges sheaves of paper, journals, letters and photographs around the colorchecker to create a disorderly narrative. If there’s a plot, the world’s greatest detective might be able to piece together…