…asingly global world. This year, around half a dozen new museums and arts centres are opening on campuses across the country, from Columbia University in New York to Rice University in Texas. They come on the heels of recently completed projects at Stanford in California, Harvard in Massachusetts and Yale in Connecticut. This multi-million-dollar investment in culture is fuelled by several factors: administrators’ recognition that the arts can pr…

…ght: MGM/Photofest) “Unexpected angles reveal fresh visions of what these works were and are,” Valladares writes in the exhibition text. He describes the selections as “openly personal,” rooted in his own love of film. Pairings include Mark Rothko’s Pink and White Over Red (1957) and the fiery poster for Vincente Minelli’s 1958 drama Some Came Running. Behind dramatic illustrations of a young Shirley MacClaine, Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, the…

The Cantor Arts Center and Anderson Collection at Stanford University miss seeing you. We are eager to welcome you back to campus, share art and connect over ideas. Now through August 31, 2020, we are offering all Stanford graduates in the class of 2020 one year of free Ambassador membership ($100 value*) to both museums. Each membership covers up to two adults and children within a single household. To get your FREE membership, fill out t…

…cy are poet and playwright Inua Ellams, musician Nitin Sawhney and visual artists Kahlil Joseph and Kerry Tribe. In addition to participating in public events and student programs, Joseph incubated the two-channel video projection BLKNWS at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford and Tribe organized joint installations at the Cantor and Anderson Collection. “Presidential Residency artists have played an important role in helping us reconsider how we u…

…e transcontinental railroad in 1869; that spike, which is inscribed with Stanford’s name among others, is now in the university’s Cantor Arts Center collection. Red Star has recreated Stanford’s golden last spike as part of a carved foam sculpture where it pierces a buffalo skull. It is inscribed with the Crow insult “You are without relatives,” but more closely means that an individual is nothing without family or community, Red Star explained,…

…ers, bricks), colored green-screen green, blank for superimposition. Color-calibration charts show up throughout the exhibition: as objects, they have a pop appeal, grids of cyan and yellow and magenta. Used to check and adjust color, they center whiteness in our sense of what makes a picture correct or true. Rogue States, the first thing you see inside the museum, includes flags suspended from the ceiling in rows that turn the atrium into a hall…

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…

…ption.”, she explains. The installation consisted of blue fibre glass spheres of varying dimensions representing the constellation of the most luminous stars in the vault of the Antarctic sky. The sizes corresponded to the respective brightness of each star in the constellation and their placement was mirrored from space at an earthly scale creating a celestial map on ice. “The largest will be Sirius, the Dog Star in the constellation Canis Major…