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…

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-…

Stanford Gets ‘Left of Center’ New exhibition of nonrepresentational abstraction opens a world of possibilities October 9, 2019 by Jeffrey Edalatpour My heartbeat accelerated when I caught a glimpse of Joan Mitchell’s Before, Again IV from the bottom of the wide steps that lead up to the main gallery upstairs. Her periwinkle- and rust-colored scribbles were the welcoming salvo into abstract expressionism that I’d been w…

Gansevoort Street (1949) by Willem de Kooning depicts the meatpacking district of Manhattan in the postwar years. Photo: Anderson Collection The Anderson Collection at Stanford University is adding major works by midcentury masters Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, officials announced Monday, Oct. 28. “Totem Lesson 1,” painted in 1944 by Pollock, and “Gansevoort Street” (1949) by de Kooning will both be on public display starting Wednesday,…

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…

As I walked into the Anderson Collection on a Saturday morning, I stumbled upon a contemporary exhibition on Sam Francis, a Bay Area artist. Before reading the descriptions, I strolled around the room past some abstract expressionism and self-portraits that resembled sketches. I started to read the descriptions on the walls, and learned that Francis spent time in Japan, where he was influenced by local culture. I was looking at a painting that…