Virtual Tours

In this space you can explore the Cantor's galleries from wherever you are. Make sure to check back frequently, as we will be adding different tours so you can walk the spaces, learn more about the art on display, and engage with content to enrich your experience of this 21st century art museum.

Spirit House

Spirit House considers how art can bridge the gap between this world and the next. This exhibition is inspired by spirit houses, small devotional structures found throughout Thailand that provide shelter for the supernatural.

Livien Yin: Thirsty

This exhibition showcases new and recent paintings by artist Livien Yin and their sensitive, researched-based approach to creating scenes of contemporary subjects alongside historical Asian Americans and their environments.

Day Jobs

This exhibition examines the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts, and is comprised of more than 90 works by 36 established and emerging artists based in the United States.

Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered

This exhibition reintroduces a singular self-taught artist to contemporary audiences. A Jewish immigrant, tailor, and slipper manufacturer in Brooklyn who took up painting at the age of 65, Morris Hirshfield (1872–1946) attracted a great degree of attention during his brief career as an artist.

Beyond Here: The Judy and Sidney Zuber Collection of Latin American Photography

This exhibition features 34 works by Latin American photographers who foreground the figure’s natural capacity for storytelling and craft compelling narratives about the profound changes of the 20th century.

A Change of Scenery: Photographs of Leisure in the Landscape

This exhibition surveys ways of “being” in the landscape, encompassing common activities like sight-seeing, recreation, and play, and affective states like joy, intimacy, affinity, and belonging.

The Early Twentieth Century

The Cantor Arts Center's collection of art created in the first half of the twentieth century explores how artists broke radically with the past by experimenting with new and modern styles.

Yinka Shonibare CBE, RA: The American Library

An imaginative portrait of a nation, The American Library explores how ideas of citizenship, home, and nationalism acquire complex meanings.

The Melancholy Museum: Love, Death, and Mourning at Stanford

"What is exciting and interesting about the Cantor is that it has an origin story that is really clear and precise, where the pivot point is the tragic death of Leland Stanford Jr. His mother's reaction is 'I lost my child, the children of California will be my children, and I will build something to sustain them.'"

Mark Dion, Visual Artist

In the wake of Leland Stanford Jr.’s death at fifteen years-old, his parents founded both Leland Stanford Junior University and the Leland Stanford Junior Museum. When the latter was built, its grandeur and scale were rivaled only by its East Coast contemporaries—the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Through objects alone, Dion’s installation tells the story of how one family’s rush West to sell hardware to prospectors resulted in the accumulation of vast wealth and power.

The furniture, photographs, Native American objects, menus, and other artifacts of material life at the turn of the twentieth century that comprise the artwork show how the family upgraded its business interests to politics, the railroad, and a horse farm, and how those interests were enabled by land previously inhabited by the Ohlone people and the labor of Chinese and other immigrants.

The grand Victorian mourning cabinet, the heart of Dion’s work, demonstrates how one teenage boy’s death resulted not in the creation of the nation’s largest museum but in a museum where love, grief, and mourning are forever entwined, The Melancholy Museum.

Medium is the Message: Art Since 1950

Using works created since 1950, this exhibition explores the relationship between subject, content, and the materials that informed each object’s production.

Medium is the Message: Art Since 1950 is divided into three broad categories that explore the notion of “medium” in its various contexts: a means of communication, the materials from which an art object is created, and a mediating apparatus between objects and subjects.

Rodin at the Cantor

"What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes."
Auguste Rodin

The Cantor Arts Center proudly possesses one of the largest groups of bronze sculptures by Auguste Rodin (France, 1840–1917) in an American museum, numbering almost 200 objects of both monumental and intimate scale.

Perhaps one of the best-known works of Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, was one of the first figures that Rodin conceived for the 1880 commission The Gates of Hell. This sculpture began as a symbolic depiction of Italian author Dante Alighieri and was originally named The Poet. Over time, Dante evolved into The Thinker, a freestanding work honoring the power of the human intellect.

The name The Thinker is credited to foundry workers who felt the sculpture bore a notable resemblance to Michelangelo's sculpture of Lorenzo de Medici called Il Penseroso. The scale and detail of this piece took nearly 40 years to complete, and is recognized today as one of the most iconic works of modern art.

Of The Thinker's evocative emotion of being lost deep in thought, Rodin explained, "What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes."

The Thinker is a critical piece in the Cantor Arts Center's impressive collection of Rodin works, assembled thanks to the close working relationship and friendship between Albert Elsen (1927–1995), the Stanford University curator, professor, and Rodin scholar, and B. Gerald Cantor (1916–1996), the American financier and philanthropist.

Mr. Cantor's initial gift of 89 works by Rodin to Stanford in 1974 became the largest ever gift of sculptures to a university art museum. His commitment to sharing art with the public and making it available for teaching purposes remains today.

Richard Diebenkorn at the Cantor

"All paintings start out of a mood, out of a relationship with things or people, out of a complete visual impression. To call this expression abstract seems to me often to confuse the issue. Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract... a realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts."
Richard Diebenkorn

This virtual tour explores the ongoing exhibition Richard Diebenkorn at the Cantor, an intimate and interactive installation that presents works by famed Bay Area artist and Stanford alumnus Richard Diebenkorn, ’49.

First an art student and later an artist-in-residence at Stanford, Diebenkorn always carried a sketchbook, often capturing what he saw before him, including landscapes and figures, mostly in graphite, and black and white.

The paintings and sketchbooks featured shed new light on the artist’s process, including his shift in style from figuration to abstraction. Included in this virtual tour are Ocean Park #94 (1976), part of Diebenkorn's expansive Ocean Park Series; Window (1967), Disintegrating Pig (1950) and Buildings—Hill Background (1961).