… 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…

…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…

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…

…like Alexander Calder and Tara Donovan. Then came a blockbuster by a Japanese group called teamlab, which makes ancient Japanese art come alive in floor-to-ceiling digital animations.   From her vantage point to the south, Kimball looked on with some envy as Pace drew in 45,000 people in less than three months. “That teamlab animation is something to marvel at,” Kimball says. “It’s immersive. It’s so animated. There’s so much to look at.” K…

…dersons were captivated by an exhibition of the French 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 be…

…statues of Confederate criminals throughout the United States, and so there was a public conversation happening about, “what is 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 espec…

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…

…tead by, in her own words, “the things that were literally falling off the edge of the canvas.” In the painting, as the white settlers enter into the frame by the East and expand westward, with domesticated animals and cutting-edge technology, hordes of Native Americans flee along with the bison and other wild animals before heading into the edge of the painting (and history) into oblivion. However, displacement of one body by another is accompan…

A new solo exhibition of works by Sam Francis at the Anderson Collection celebrates the hundredth anniversary of the artist’s birth and highlights his multifaceted connection to the Palo Alto community and the Anderson family. On view through March 3, 2024, this intimate presentation of works in the Wisch Family Gallery is anchored by two large-scale paintings from the museum’s permanent collection, Red in Red (1955), an early work created while…