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.

News

A&E Digest

…aesthetics to create radical statements with lasting cultural impact. Following the film, Leeson will take part in a panel discussion with Feminist Art Historian and critic Moira Roth, Stanford chair of Theater and Performance Studies Jennifer DeVere Brody and others. For more information about the event, go to anderson.stanford.edu or call 650-721-6055. FASHION FOR A CAUSE … One of a kind textiles, jewelry, bags, children’s clothes…

News

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

…ture collection, for example), there have been some significant changes at both museums since they last welcomed in-person visitors. In addition to current health policies such as mask mandates, timed tickets and social distancing rules, perhaps the most notable difference can be found at the Cantor, which is now being led by two interim directors, Elizabeth Mitchell and Maude Brezinski. Mitchell, who is the curator of prints, drawings and photog…

News

New acquisition by David Park on view at the Anderson Collection

…becoming available to the community to enjoy. “We are dedicating this gift to the museum’s staff and volunteers in honor and recognition of all they do to share their passion with others for modern and contemporary art. We feel strongly that the Anderson Collection is the perfect home for this wonderful painting, reflecting Park’s artistic vision and his life-long embrace of learning and teaching,” the couple said. In her research on the Anderso…

News

Contemplations on modern art

…een to wake up to the colors and the lines of “Lucifer” everyday. There was a piece that looked like a Rorschach inkblot, a large chaotic dark shape on a white background. Like Rorshcach, who asked people to tell him what they were seeing in his famous inkblots, I questioned how to interpret this painting and thought about what was going on in the artist’s mind. Was he going through a chaotic period in his life? Is it fear he is trying to draw? A…

Exhibition

Jim Campbell

Exhibition

Wendy Red Star: American Progress

News

Anderson Collection at Stanford University to be displayed in an elegant new home

…#8220;The building for the Anderson Collection at Stanford University and the McMurtry building are magnificent, much-needed additions to this campus,” said Leslie Hume, chair of the Board of Trustees, in December. “Like the Cantor Arts Center and Bing Concert Hall, they make tangible Stanford’s commitment to the arts and the central role of the arts in a liberal education. As you arrive on campus and enter this wonderful arts d…

News

Full House

…little housecleaning: Last year, they gave 121 pieces to Stanford University. The Anderson Collection will open in September in a new gallery, designed by Richard Olcott of Ennead Architects, on the Stanford campus. “They consider themselves custodians of the work they collect,” says Jason Linetzky, the director of the Anderson Collection at Stanford. But, he adds, “they’re very down-to-earth and casual about how they live with the art.” A Reno…

News

Stanford: The New Art Place To Be

…and one illustrated book.” Andy Warhol’s archive of 3,600 contact sheets and accompanying negatives: “Through an invitation-only competition among some of the nation’s leading art museums, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts selected the Cantor Arts Center as the permanent home of Warhol’s archive of contact sheets and negatives. They’ll all be digitized, too.   Read much more background and about the plans for these three collections…

News

Anderson Collection has a new home

…Woman Standing – Pink” (1954-55), a lush, pastel-toned oil of a voluptuous nude who looks like she’s in the clutches of a garbage compactor. The art is organized loosely into about a dozen sections, such as Dumb Objects, California Funk, Geometric Abstraction, (the distinctly L.A.) Light & Space/Finish Fetish and The Shaped Canvas. The latter is where Frank Stella’s elephantine “Zeltweg” (1981) doesn’t so m…

News

Stanford Opens a Museum Highlighting American Art

…3,500-square-foot building to house the Anderson Collection, 121 contemporary artworks donated by the Andersons, including major artwork by Jackson Pollock, Richard Diebenkorn and Ellsworth Kelly, among others. The couple married in 1950. During an around-the-world trip in 1964, they were overwhelmed by the Impressionist art on view in Paris. “On the way home, we may have had a glass of wine too much, but we decided to put together a great…

Stanford trustees visit new art collection, approve construction

News

Senate visits the arts district to discuss the humanities

… Anderson Collection at Stanford University, the Faculty Senate gave members the opportunity to visit the newest addition to the university’s growing arts district and to take guided tours of the galleries. “I hope one thing that gets accomplished this afternoon is that you have the chance to see – for those of you who don’t spend time in this area – just how much the arts district is blossoming,” said Richard Saller, dean…

News

Honing the art of observation, and observing art

…he course. The clinical portion of the course drew Cartmell, but so too did the opportunity to see the treasures in the Cantor Center and the Anderson Collection. Two of those treasures, Lucifer (1947), by Jackson Pollock, and Red in Red (1955), by Sam Francis, in the Anderson collection, made Cartmell see how works of art “can be made up of numerous small elements, coming together to form a larger image, much like cells coming together to form a…

News

Anderson Collection a modern art trove not to be missed

…t bug. “The Andersons didn’t study art history, and they’re not classically trained as art historians or experts in the arts,” says Jason Linetzky, the Anderson Collection’s founding director. He began working with the family around 2001, providing exhibition assistance as well as installation and curatorial support. “They just started looking and collecting, without much direction, until they met two people on (the Stanford) campus: Al Elsen and…

News

Harry ‘Hunk’ Anderson, modern art collector and philanthropist, dies at 95

…ch Impressionists. They bought their first works, by Picasso and Matisse, and started building a collection that included American Modernists Georgia O’Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove. In 1969, they made a switch from the Impressionists and Modernists to postwar American art. The timing was perfect. There wasn’t as much competition to drive up the prices and they went straight for the best in the New York school — Jackson Pollock, Mark Ro…

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“Reaching Towards Warmer Suns”: A Q&A with artist Kiyan Williams ’13

…s the role of public art,” “what is the role of monuments to white male war criminals.” Given all of that, I was inspired to create a public artwork, a monument rooted in a different aesthetic and conceptual framework. TSD: Could you go more into depth about why you choose to use soil in so much of your artwork, and especially in conveying your different messages both historically and politically? KW: When I was an undergrad, I took a class with…

News

Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star creatively engages with the Stanford community

…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 floor of the museum through Aug. 28, the exhibition is informed by Red Star’s cultural heritage and engagement with many forms of creative expression. She addresses the racism, displacement, a…

News

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

…le, the Apsáalooke artist depicts her grandmother, her father, herself and her daughter, all around the same age in a piece that weaves their genealogy together. “We, as federally recognized Native people, are the only people in the U.S. that have to carry around cards. How much blood quantum we have. And so I happen to have the right amount of blood, but my child doesn’t.” With this piece, Red Star rages against the fact that, according to…

News

The Anderson Collection celebrates the 100th anniversary of Sam Francis’ birthday

…the French tradition of color and light – as embodied in the work of Matisse, Bonnard, and Monet – had a lasting influence on his practice. While abroad, he forged a style that was unmistakably his own, as evidenced in Red in Red, and became one of the most well-known American artists of his generation in Western Europe and Japan, where he first traveled in 1957 and would come to spend significant periods of his later life. “The addition of Red i…