Mary Patricia “Putter” Anderson Pence’s voice quavered at the microphone, for good reason. The Sept. 19 opening of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University was an “incredible journey,” she said, not only for the school, but for her parents, Harry W. “Hunk” Anderson, a food distribution company magnate, and his wife, Mary Margaret, a.k.a. “Moo.” The quiet couple’s trove of modern and contemporary art, regarded among the world’s finest, fill…

…uilding, aiming to recreate their own intimate experience of the art. Stanford tapped Ennead, which had recently completed a concert hall on campus, to design the new exhibition space. “The premise of the whole endeavor was to make it about the art and only about the art,” says Richard Olcott, design principal at the firm. Ennead’s first commission at Stanford, more than 15 years ago, was a self-effacing addition to the neighboring Cantor A…

…n won’t say why Pace picked Palo Alto over more obvious choices like San Francisco or Los Angeles. But the local community is happy about the choice. “People in the art world are so excited that Pace would choose to come to Silicon Valley,” says Cathy Kimball, executive director of the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. Pace started on the Peninsula with a “pop-up” gallery in Menlo Park in a converted Tesla showroom, slated for demolition so…

…le reading letters, but people seem to get very emotional over it.” Details here. Robert Hawkins entertains the Comedy Day audience (Photo: Dan Dion/Comedy Day) Sept 18: Comedy Day is back in Golden Gate Park. This free (Cheap Thrill) event is a chance to see veterans of the Bay Area comedy scene and new ones you haven’t heard of yet. Johnny Steele, Will Durst, Donald Lacey, Natasha Muse, Loren Kraut, Kabir Kabeezy Singh, Joshua Raoul Brody, (r…

…ces in our space by puppeteer Basil Twist, choreographer and performer Molissa Fenley, members of the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) community and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Stanford’s ensemble-in-residence. In a similar way, having students visit from all disciplines across campus, and visitors with various interests from across the community, allows for cross-pollination of ideas, scholarship and discussion. B…

…signed by authors or artists. The printed materials, housed in the Denning Family Resource Center at the museum, help fulfill the educational mission of the Anderson Collection and has become a vital library and teaching space within the museum. But for Moo, nothing compared to seeing artwork in person. “It’s good to study art in books, but something happens in the presence of the original – it affects the brain, taste, feelings and more,” she co…

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…

…know that artists bring new ways of thinking to contemporary issues. As such, do you have advice for scholars or community members who are looking to artists to help make sense of challenging times? The advice I have to scholars is, if you are not working out the issues of the times and addressing inquiries that we are a part of, retire and make room for people who are actually doing the work of making the world more equal and addressing the past…

…relation with the abject and the taboo so as to meditate on the human body’s capacities as well as its fraught, complex gender and racial histories. In particular, Williams has developed a homespun repertoire of gestures—throwing, rubbing, patting, licking, whipping—to manipulate the material of soil. Sometimes these gestures comprise the content of a public performance; other times, they take place behind the scenes and are evident only as scul…

…yled to highlight popular fantasies associated with “ethnic” patterning and costume. The double-take required to comprehend the history and the commentary is where a perspective shift takes place. Stephanie Syjuco, “Cargo Cults: Head Bundle (Small),” 2016. Pigmented inkjet print. Edition of 15 + 2AP; 21 x 16 inches framed. (Image credit: Courtesy of the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York) For Linetzky…