The arts at Stanford are flourishing. And with this summer's donation of 121 major works of postwar American art from Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson and their daughter, Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, the visual arts are generating a buzz of excitement on campus and off.
The Anderson Collection—one of the premier private collections of 20th-century American art—is a historic gift of art to Stanford. Included among the donated works is Jackson Pollock's Lucifer, a masterpiece of his drip-painting style, as well as works by Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston and Ellsworth Kelly, among others.
The collection will provide our students with extraordinary research and curating opportunities, as well as strengthen Stanford's reputation as an arts destination. The Anderson family has long sought opportunities to share its collection through exhibitions and loans to museums and to foster art education through access to this superb collection. Over the years, more than 30 Stanford doctoral candidates—including Neal Benezra, MA '81, PhD '83, director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—have interned at the collection. We are honored to have the Anderson Collection in a new home at Stanford. For more details about the collection and how it came to Stanford, see "A 'Transformative' Bonanza" in Farm Report.
The Anderson gift is the most recent among many gifts helping us make the arts a more central part of a Stanford education. Through the arts initiative launched in 2006, and the support of many alumni and friends, we are developing an arts district, anchored by the Cantor Arts Center and the Bing Concert Hall. Earlier this year, we chose the architects for the new Burton and Deedee McMurtry Building, which will be the home of the department of art and art history with state-of-the-art studios and classrooms. Of course, the arts initiative goes beyond facilities and includes a vibrant new set of programs to engage our students in the arts both on campus and throughout the Bay Area, a greatly needed expansion of faculty in several arts departments, as well as a large increase in support for students pursuing a master's degree in fine arts.
The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford has become one of the University's greatest assets, providing our students with significant opportunities to experience the arts firsthand even as it welcomes some 180,000 people annually to its collections and exhibitions. Over the past two decades, it has thrived under the leadership of Thomas Seligman. As the Jill and John Freidenrich Director of the Cantor, he oversaw the museum's rebuilding, the strengthening of its collections and expansion of its education program. As he prepares to retire after 20 years of leading Cantor from a closed, earthquake-damaged museum to a vibrant jewel in Stanford's art scene, we extend our thanks for his vision and passion. On January 1, 2012, Connie Wolf, '81—who brought national recognition to San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum as its director and CEO—will join us as the new director of the Cantor.
The arts are essential to the Stanford experience, fundamental to our tradition of innovation and risk-taking—whether those breakthroughs occur in the laboratory, the classroom, the studio or onstage. Our goal is to create an environment that celebrates and stimulates the creative process in every student, whatever path he or she chooses. We are educating the next generation of leaders—artists, arts scholars and arts patrons, researchers, educators and business people—and creative thinking will be vital to their success in this century.
John Hennessy is the former president of Stanford University.
