Welcome to the Anderson Collection
Stanford University's free museum of modern and contemporary American art
A&E Digest: Student scholarships, fashion for a cause and more This week’s A&E news by Elizabeth Schwyzer / Palo Alto Weekly Twenty-seven student artists from Santa Clara and San Mateo counties have been awarded scholarships for by the Community School of Music and Arts. Photo courtesy of CSMA. This week, students win art scholarships, a film on feminist art screens at Stanford and international fashion designers sell their goods…
Tom Teicholz Contributor Arts I write about culture and the cult of luxury On a recent trip to San Francisco, I decided to make a short detour to the Anderson Collection at Stanford University (easily reachable by public transport from San Francisco or from the airport) – it is very much worth the trip. The Anderson Collection is very much focused on American Art of the 20thCentury in general, with a specific concentration on West Coast…
From ancient pottery and medicinal clay to 3D-printed joints and pajamas that restore athletes’ muscles, the use of ceramics for objects rooted in decoration, ritual and utility is as old as it is expansive. The practices of four living artists whose exploration of the medium provides commentary on its past and insight for the future are presented in Formed & Fired: Contemporary American Ceramics at the Anderson Collection at Stanford Univer…
New acquisition by David Park on view at the Anderson Collection The museum reopens to the public on Wednesday, Sept. 22, 2021. ROBIN WANDER | September 15, 2021 Late last year, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University received a gift from two individuals, one who has been giving the gift of time to the museum for years and the other an alumnus. Keith Jantzen and his husband, Scott Beth, ’82, donated Untitled (Portrait of Tom Jef…
Lately, I have been feeling like a Sally Rooney character: a little lost, a little gloomy, a little unsure about the decisions I have been making. So, I went to the Anderson Collection on a Saturday morning by myself, because museums have a calming effect on me. I needed to find my center again. As I entered the Anderson Collection, I climbed up the stairs to reach the permanent collection. I was in the middle of a room surrounded by large canv…
Jason Linetzky, Director, Anderson Collection at Stanford University Jason Linetzky has spent the better part of his 20-year career working with one of the world’s most coveted private collections of 20th-century American art: the Anderson Collection. The collection was built over the last 50 years by Bay Area residents Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, and by their daughter, Mary Patricia Anderson Pence. The core of the collection, pledged…
Mary Margaret ‘Moo’ Anderson speaks with technicians during the hanging of the collection. – ©L.A. Cicero This weekend Stanford will officially become home to the core of the Anderson Collection, one of the world’s most outstanding private assemblies of post–World War II American art. The collection is a gift from Harry W. “Hunk” and Mary Margaret “Moo” Anderson and their daughter, Mary Patrici…
Palette Cleanser: A new campus 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,…
Getting it down on paper A different aspect of the Anderson Collection on view by Sheryl Nonnenberg / Palo Alto Weekly Philip Guston’s untitled ink-on-paper work is featured at Anderson Collection’s latest exhibition. Image courtesy of Anderson Collection. Visitors to the Anderson Collection at Stanford University can experience a wide range of art movements (virtually every major development after 1945) and media. The museum…
Stepping into the Wisch Family Gallery at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University evokes a polar desert’s quiet and dangerous beauty. Centered amidst large-scale photographs of a pristine white, icy environment, an otherworldly ultramarine-blue sphere measuring slightly over 3 feet in diameter rests on a bed of what appears to be snow. The sphere, representing Rigil Kentaurus, the third-brightest star in the night sky, is a key element o…
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…
Among the 121 major pieces of postwar American art he has given to Stanford, Harry W. “Hunk” Anderson has bled for just one — Frank Stella’s “Zeltweg,” a heavy, nine-piece, mixed-media painting that resembles a kids’ slot car track. So when it arrives by heavy Freightliner on a mid-August morning, Anderson and his wife, Mary Margaret (Hunk and Moo, as they are known to just about everyone who has ever met them), come by to see its installation a…
For the past 44 years, a pivotal painting in the evolution of American Modern art in the exhausted aftermath of World War II has hung in a private home in an affluent San Francisco suburb — first in a child’s bedroom and then over a dining room credenza. Jackson Pollock’s “Lucifer” (1947) is the canvas in which the artist’s tentative experiments with a revolutionary new way of painting first took flight. Now the pa…
