Evelyn Anderson, '16, has been pushed to her feet, driven into a scurry and stirred passionately by the creative impulse. One result hangs on a second-floor wall in the Old Union: an oil painting of an older man's brooding visage, starkly juxtaposed on a background flag of mottled yellow. It is Anderson's interpretation of a photo of writer Samuel Beckett, and it poured out of her after she'd rushed around to find something, anything, that she could immediately use as a canvas.
The portrait, April, is on display as part of Your Art Here, a program that showcases works by students, regardless of what they're formally studying or planning to do professionally. Six sites provide gallery space: the CoHo, Wallenberg Hall, Lakeside Dining, the Cool Café at the Cantor Arts Center, Old Union and the newly added Hume Writing Center in Building 250.
The program has been growing incrementally since 2010, when its launch was spearheaded by Megan Miller of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts and the Student Organizing Committee for the Arts. This fall, Paula Salazar, '13, the new arts in student life coordinator for the Stanford Arts Institute (formerly SICA), is piloting a significant expansion. She will introduce what amounts to a learning workshop for students interested in the "curatorial and administrative side of the arts."
The plans call for using two curators instead of one for most sites; adding someone to handle publicity and social media; and introducing an exhibitions coordinator, whose duties will include installation of the art. Salazar is starting training workshops with help from Judy Dennis, a curatorial assistant at Cantor, and Liz Celeste, gallery and exhibitions manager in the art and art history department.
Anderson's scamper to paint her Beckett rendition was ignited by an email soliciting entries for an exhibition at last year's New Student Orientation. When she didn't reclaim the piece after the event, it was placed in Old Union. It isn't slated for replacement by the next wave of Your Art Here selections later this year. Students can request to have art displayed; curators also can "discover" it—perhaps when people like Anderson forget to retrieve their stuff.
"That was a good thing that happened to me because I was irresponsible," she concludes.
