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Exhibition Schedule
Opening February 18, 2009, then ongoing
Rodin! The Complete Stanford Collection
The Cantor Arts Center expands the display of Rodin’s work, with the Center’s entire collection of Rodin’s bronzes, plasters, and waxes on view. The majority of the collection remains on the ground floor, occupying the south rotunda, much of the present Rodin gallery, and extending into a second major gallery. One gallery includes youthful works, a rotating selection of works-on-paper, and objects directly associated with the Gates of Hell. In the new second gallery, sculptures are divided thematically, either by project (Burghers of Calais, for example) or subject (portraiture, mythology). This new installation better serves students and visitors by making the smaller works as immediately accessible for study as the large scale works that remain perpetually on view in the B. Gerald Cantor Rodin Sculpture Garden adjacent to the museum.
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March 18 – August 16, 2009
Pop to Present
This exhibition features collection highlights, a selection of the most noteworthy works acquired over the 10 years since the museum reopened in early 1999. Each work has been chosen for its aesthetic strength, historic significance, rarity, and/or other exceptional quality that prompted its initial choice and presentation for acquisition. We chose with the intent to benefit visitors and researchers. Learn more
April 15 – July 5, 2009
Splendid Grief: Darren Waterston and the Afterlife of Leland Stanford Jr.
Despite their reputation for emotional restraint, Victorians indulged in complex and elaborate rituals surrounding death and mourning. No better example is the case of Leland Stanford Jr., the only son of Leland and Jane Stanford, who died at the tender age of 15 from typhoid fever and whose demise inspired the Stanfords to found the university. This exhibition examines the Stanford family's grief and mourning as interpreted by contemporary artist Darren Waterston. Waterston will use works from the museum's collection and create new paintings to transform the gallery space into a mourning parlor. The installation will create a dialogue between the 19th-century objects and new paintings that are inspired by them.
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April 15 – July 26, 2009
Appellations from Antiquity
This small exhibition, drawn from the university's collections, is derived from a proposal by Rachel Patt, student curator selected from the spring 2008 seminar taught by Jennifer Marshall, "The Art Museum: History and Practice." Learn more
July 29 – October 18, 2009
From the Bronze Age of China to Japan’s Floating World
During the last decade, significant donations and selective purchases of works from the second millennium BCE to the 20th century have expanded the Asian art collection at the Cantor Arts Center. Since important examples of works from other regions and cultures, including India, Indonesia, and Tibet, are presently on display in collection galleries, the exhibition will focus on acquisitions of Chinese and Japanese works of art. Highlights include ritual bronzes from central China, as well as prints depicting urban life from Edo period Japan. The exhibition's development will include an art history course on exhibition organization taught by Richard Vinograd and Xiaoneng Yang. Learn more
September 16, 2009 – January 3, 2010
From Their Studios
This exhibition showcases the excellence of current faculty studio art practice at Stanford while also connoting the exchange of ideas among faculty and students and the quality of the campus art studio experience. While some work is in traditional formats such as oil on canvas or straight photography, often the media have been filtered through modern technology to be displayed as digitally scanned or computer-assisted photographic prints, custom-shaped canvases, video footage incorporated into sculpture, or mechanical projection devices that defy description.
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November 11, 2009 – February 21, 2010
Frank Lobdell Figure Drawings
Although he is known primarily as a San Francisco abstract expressionist painter, Frank Lobdell participated in weekly figure-drawing sessions throughout his career. Lobdell used these weekly drawing sessions as a springboard to develop a vocabulary of abstraction that was informed by the study of the human body and grounded in the formal issues of expressionist gesture and line. This exhibition, organized by Anne Kohs & Associates, will feature approximately 60 figure drawings in ink, pencil, crayon, and wash dating from the 1960s and 1970s, including several works by Lobdell’s former sketching partners Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff that illustrate how each artist approached the figure in a unique way.
February 17 – July 4, 2010
Tracing the Past, Drawing the Future: Master Ink Painters in 20th-Century China
This landmark exhibition illuminates a turning point in the development of Chinese ink painting during the 20th century. Drawing upon paintings and calligraphy on loan from Chinese collections new to American audiences, the exhibition highlights the monumental portraits, vibrant bird-and-flower painting, and spectacular landscapes by Wu Changshuo (1844-1927), Qi Baishi (1863-1957), Huang Binhong (1864-1955), and Pan Tianshou (1897-1951). Collectively known in China as the "Four Great Masters of Ink Painting," these artists faced the dual challenges of negotiating the impact of encounters with the West, while inventing new directions for long-held practices of ink painting.
June 23 – September 26, 2010
William Trost Richards–True to Nature: Drawings, Watercolors, and Oil Sketches at Stanford University
In 1992, M. J. and A. E. van Löben Sels gave the museum more than 230 works by William Trost Richards (1833–1905), an accomplished landscape and marine painter. This exhibition includes approximately 75 works, including pen and pencil drawings, watercolors, small oil studies, and a sketchbook, that reveal both his precise technique and his devotion to nature. Richards began to draw in his childhood, and although he lived on the East Coast most of his life, he traveled to Europe more than 15 times, producing numerous studies in fair and foul weather. Seascapes were his favorite subject, and his watercolors and oils contain views of both smooth and turbulent waters and the luminous sky.
August 4, 2010 – January 2, 2011
Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas
This exhibition is the first major American exhibition to present a comprehensive examination of the dynamic visual arts associated with water spirits. More than 200 works present a compelling range of art forms that portray the water deity widely known as Mami Wata (pidgin English for “Mother Water” or “Water Mistress”). The exhibition highlights both traditional and contemporary images of Mami Wata and her consorts from across the African continent, as well as from the Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States. It offers a rich variety of media including magnificent masks, kinetic sculptures, vibrant paintings, and inspired shrine recreations.
October 13, 2010 – March 20, 2011
Vodoun/Vodounon: Portraits of Initiates
This exhibition presents compelling diptychs by the Belgian photographer Jean Dominique Burton, who sensitively portrays Vodoun practitioners in Benin and their sacred shrines. The images provide an exceptional glimpse into the esoteric domain of this traditional Fon religion, which is now variously called Vodou, Vodun, Vaudou, or Vaudoux and practiced throughout West Africa and the African diaspora. Burton combines black-and-white with color photographs to reveal a fascinating blend of his subjects' personal charisma and the union of sculpture, painting, and installation art in the interpretation of creation laws that visibly manifest themselves in spirits of plants, animals, humans, and ancestors.