Marci Kwon got the idea for the initiative after creating a class she had always wanted to take but had never found in graduate school: one on Asian American art.
Cantor Arts Center
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A Visual Alphabet for an Oral Language from the Ivory Coast
The Bété people did not have a writing system for their spoken language, so Frédéric Bruly Bouabré created one and used it to describe the scenes in his artworks.
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The American Landscape Photographers Who Focused on the Environment in the ’70s
A desire to avoid romanticizing the landscape is fundamental to the shifts in landscape photography that occurred in the late 1960s and 1970s.
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Midcentury Modern Design and the Anxiety of Selling Out
Behind each innovation of the period was a negotiation between a company’s needs and a designer’s creativity.
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Hunting for the Magic Mushrooms of Ancient East Asian Art
A Mushroom Perspective on Sacred Geography explores the visual history of the lingzhi mushroom in art from China, Japan, and Korea.
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A Lakota Sioux Warrior’s Eyewitness Drawings of Little Bighorn
One of the most popular images of the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn is “Custer’s Last Stand” by Cassilly Adams, who ditched historical accuracy for a romanticized George Armstrong Custer standing tall against the encroaching horde of horseback warriors.
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Inside Richard Diebenkorn’s Revelatory Sketchbooks
STANFORD, Calif. — A small gallery at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center is currently offering a deeply personal glimpse into the life and work of Bay Area artist Richard Diebenkorn.
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A Lifetime of Sketchbooks from Postwar Painter Richard Diebenkorn
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.
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Satan, You’ve Changed
The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is opening an exhibition this week — Sympathy for the Devil: Satan, Sin and the Underworld — that explores the evocation of the devil over 500 years.
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How the West Was Won by a 19th-Century Photographer
Back in the 1860s, the capital of the United States was glimpsing two visions of its country: one of brutality, and one of beauty. The latter was captured by Carleton Watkins in his photographs of an untouched wilderness in the West.
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Diagnosing Rodin’s Grotesque Hands
French sculptor Auguste Rodin would frequently find his models out in the streets of Paris, drawn to hands and bodies gnarled by the often grueling nature of 19th century life and labor.
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Watching the Art Watchers
There is something about art that begs us to get closer, which is why museum guards often stride up to visitors with a warning: “Please don’t touch the artwork.” To many, guards can be a nuisance, but to San Francisco–based photographer Andy Freeberg, they are an inspiration.