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Breakdown (2018) by Jeffrey Gibson (U.S.A., b. 1972), who is of Mississippi Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, is the first object by the artist to enter the Cantor’s collection. Gibson’s piece adds to the Cantor’s representation of Native American artists and diversifies the museum’s contemporary American art offerings.

Now on view in the courtyard

Artist Katharina Fritsch (Germany, b. 1956), part of a select group of prominent female sculptors working today, draws on iconography from many different sources for her work. These include religion, folklore, art history, and most importantly personal experiences from her native Germany. Her sculptures are both playful, due to vibrant monochromatic matte colors, and disorienting, due to the larger-than-life scale she utilizes.

Fritsch often uses recognizable images that she meticulously handcrafts into sculptures through a process that entails sketches, models...

See an eclectic selection of prints and drawings that highlight different ways of thinking about works as both images and objects.

Read the Stanford Report article, the Stanford Arts story about the gift, and the Stanford Arts Q&A with curator Elizabeth Mitchell on gifts to the Cantor. 

Brooklyn-based painter, printmaker and sculptor Deborah Kass is known for working at the intersection of art history, popular culture and identity -- particularly related to Jewish culture and elements of difference – all three of which come together in OY/YO. Commissioned in 2019, OY/YO greets visitors to the Cantor at its front entrance.

OY/YO explores the combination of imagery and language: “oy,” as in “oy vey,” is a Yiddish term of fatigue, resignation or woe; “yo,” is a greeting associated with African American slang. In addition, “yo” in Spanish means “I.” Each usage has been co...

Crossing the Caspian explores the golden age of artistic exchange between the Safavid Empire of Persia and Europe. Featuring prints, drawings, miniature paintings, rare books and maps, as well as objects of porcelain and silk, this exhibition examines the opening of new geographic, diplomatic, and mercantile routes between Persia and Europe in the seventeenth century. The pieces assembled here include works by artists from Antwerp, Amsterdam, Paris, Hollstein, Qazvin, Isfahan, and Shiraz. Together, the works represent the process of coming to know a foreign culture through the medium of visual...