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

…s 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, a choice selection of postwar A…

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Anderson Collection pieces lock in a home at Stanford

…in New York, where he co-founded a company to manage the school’s cafeteria. He then came West to establish Saga in Menlo Park, a national company distributing dorm food to college campuses across the United States. Museums far and wide courted the Andersons, but, logically, the art collection paid for by college cafeteria food belongs on a college campus. The deal, struck in 2011, was that Stanford would supply a new building, at a cost of $36 m…

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Hostile Terrain 94
Exhibition

Hostile Terrain 94

Presidential Residency on the Future of the Arts 2020-2021

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Stanford Gets “Left of Center”

…her mother’s death. She transports the complications of grief onto the canvas. She bends the body and its internal torment further even than Francis Bacon, until the physical self dissolves into unrecognizable curves and angles. “Left of Center” doesn’t feel stale and dated. Abstract work like this just makes the past seem more alive than the present. Left of Center Thru Sep 2020, Free Anderson Collection, Stanford Unive…

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

…e world. That resonated with me in terms of remaking norms around gender identity. My earliest performances were interventions in public spaces. Those performances gave me a language to describe experiences in my personal life. LB A language in the sense of a performance-studies vocabulary or a language in the sense of choreographic movements? KW Both. Performance studies gave me a vocabulary to understand how power, history, and social norms are…

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Stephanie Syjuco: White Balance/Color Cast | Anderson Collection at Stanford University

…gings from H&M, Target, and the Gap. Syjuco bought the clothes with her credit card and later returned them. In the portraits you see tags still attached, hanging signifiers. Stephanie Syjuco, Cargo Cults: Head Bundle (Small), 2016. Courtesy the artist, Catharine Clark Gallery, and RYAN LEE Gallery In 2019 Syjuco spent two weeks at the Missouri Historical Society looking for photographs of the Philippine Village at the 1904 World’s Fair. Bloc…

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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…

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Apsáalooke artist Wendy Red Star creatively engages with the Stanford community

…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 floor of the museum through Aug. 28, the exhibition is informed by Red Star’s cultural heritage and engagemen…

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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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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…

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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…

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Senate visits the arts district to discuss the humanities

…ets 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 of the School of Humanities and Sciences. “The outcome of the last campaign, in terms of new programs, new facilities and, in some areas, new faculty, has been remarkably transformative.” Saller and Debra Satz, senior associate de…

Stanford trustees visit new art collection, approve construction

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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…

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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…

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Stanford: The New Art Place To Be

Many in the art world have been anticipating the opening on Sept. 21 of the collection of Harry and Mary Margaret Anderson at Stanford — even from afar. In 2011, the couple donated 1 21 works of contemporary art, filled with paintings by the likes of Pollock, Diebenkorn, Rothko Elsworth Kelly, de Kooning, Joan Mitchell (Begin Again IV at left), and Elizabeth Murray, to name a few, to Stanford on the condition that it build galleries to house the…

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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…

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

…derson Collection at Stanford University: David Park, ‘Four Women,’ 1959, oil on canvas, 57 x 75 3/8 in., courtesy Hackett | Mill, San Francisco The Anderson Collection at Stanford University has reached another on-schedule milestone in the trek toward beginning construction this summer and opening its doors in 2014. The Stanford Board of Trustees approved Ennead Architects‘ building design at their meeting this week. The Anders…