Displaying items by tag: stanford university

Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn kept sketchbooks for his entire career; they served as a sort of nomadic studio where he experimented with visuals that bridged figurative and abstract ideas. Recently the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University acquired 29 of Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks, and this September they’re going on view to the public for the first time in Richard Diebenkorn: The Sketchbooks Revealed.

“The books are filled with stunningly gestural sketches of bits and pieces of daily life, both mundane capturing of everyday things, and powerful vignettes of intimate family moments,” Alison Gass, the Cantor’s associate director for collections, exhibitions, and curatorial affairs, told Hyperallergic.

This fall, Stanford University will open the McMurtry Building, an innovative new facility to house Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History as well as the Art & Architecture Library. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the 100,000-square-foot space will unite the making and studying of art at Stanford under one roof for the first time. Open to students in time for the fall quarter and with a dedication ceremony on October 6, 2015, the $85-million building is the newest addition to Stanford’s burgeoning arts district at the entrance of campus.

Thanks to the extraordinary generosity of the late Dr. Herbert J. Kayden of New York City and his daughter Joelle Kayden, Stanford MBA ’81, of Washington, D.C., the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University now holds one of the largest collections in any museum of the work of Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000). Lawrence is among the most important artists of the 20th century and is a leading voice in the artistic portrayal of the African American experience. Staunch supporters of Stanford and the Cantor’s educational mission, the Kaydens have gifted to the museum an unparalleled collection of 56 works by Lawrence and one by his wife, Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence. The gift is comprised of five paintings, 11 drawings, 39 prints and one illustrated book, all dating between 1943 and 1998 and all given in memory of Dr. Gabrielle H. Reem, who is Herbert Kayden’s wife and Joelle Kayden’s mother.

At its recent meeting, the Stanford University Board of Trustees took an early evening stroll among the modern and contemporary American paintings and sculptures in the new Anderson Collection at Stanford University.

Their visit followed an in-depth presentation by Alexander Nemerov, a Stanford scholar of American art, on Jackson Pollock's "Lucifer," one of its most important works, and a talk by Jason Linetzky, the inaugural director of the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, on the history of the collection, which includes more than 100 works of art.

On September 21, Stanford University will reveal the Anderson Collection, one of the most valuable gifts in its history. Assembled over the course of fifty years by Bay area collectors Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson along with their daughter Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, the collection features 121 works by 86 artists, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Ellsworth Kelly. While Abstract Expressionist works form the collection’s core, the Andersons’ gift also includes a number of works from California art movements such as the Bay Area Figurative School, which started in San Francisco in the 1950s, and the Light and Space movement, which originated in Southern California in the 1960s.

The Andersons began collecting art after their first visit to the Louvre in 1964. Before focusing on works by Abstract Expressionists, Color Field painters, and Pop artists, they acquired a number of works by French Impressionists and American modernists.

An unprecedented exhibition at Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center will present Robert Frank’s American photographs from the 1950s as a cohesive whole. Frank, a Swiss-born photographer, is best known for his profoundly influential book “The Americans.” In 1955 and 1956, with support from a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frank traveled throughout the United States photographing ordinary people in their everyday lives. The book, which was published in France in 1959, features 83 photographs, mostly from those travels. Frank explored the various levels of the country’s social strata, both high and low, unveiling a ubiquitous sense of loneliness, alienation, and angst. For the first time ever, the exhibition at the Cantor Arts Center will explore the largely forgotten photographs that pre-dated and followed Frank’s canonical work.

“Robert Frank in America” features 130 photographs drawn primarily from the Cantor’s collection. Donated to the institution in the mid-1980s by Stanford alumnus Bowen H. McCoy and his colleague Raymond B. Gary, the Cantor’s holdings span the full range of Frank’s photographic career before he turned to filmmaking in the early 1960s.

The Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University announced that it has received three significant gifts from separate donors. The bequests greatly increase the museum’s holdings of works by the postwar artist Richard Diebenkorn, Pop art pioneer Andy Warhol, and the African-American painter Jacob Lawrence. The Cantor Center, which opened in 1894, houses one of the largest collections of Auguste Rodin sculptures in the world. The institution also has a sizeable collection of postwar American art.

Phyllis Diebenkorn, a Stanford alumna, donated 26 of her late husband’s sketchbooks, which contain well over 1,000 drawings, to the museum. The sketches, which span Diebenkorn’s long and varied career, will be converted into digital scans, making them readily accessible to students and scholars.