The public art program at Stanford has been in existence for over a century and consists of more than 80 outdoor art installations that can be enjoyed by the public at any time. Pieces such as the Auguste Rodin sculpture garden, the Richard Serra “Sequence” sculpture, and Andy Goldsworthy’s “Stoneriver,” all located near the Cantor Arts Center, are probably well known; but others, in particular newer ones, probably less so.
“We are trying to integrate the arts across the university so it becomes part of our systems and structures and Stanford’s daily life for students, faculty, and visitors. Public art is one of the ways that we can really see that integration and bring forward this vision that art should be everywhere and for everyone,” Assistant Vice President for the Arts at Stanford University Anne Shulock said on the role of the arts at Stanford in an interview with this publication.
Stanford public art can be enjoyed both for its beauty and for its learning opportunity, Shulock noted, “Public art can meet audiences who might just be walking across campus and want to see something beautiful and also if you are a student or a faculty member, there might be lots of layers for your own learning or your own research.”
‘Amulets’
The Stanford Public Art Program consists of both permanent and temporary art projects. As part of the temporary art projects, the Stanford Plinth Project commissions artworks for display on an elevated plinth on Meyer Green funded by private family donations. The project is named and modeled after the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square, which stood empty for 150 years due to lack of funds before becoming a showcase in the late ’90s for commissioned temporary art projects. The Stanford Plinth Project, which was inaugurated in 2021, installed its second temporary art project in 2024. The piece, called “Amulets,” by Alia Farid will be in place for three years.
Farid is a Kuwaiti-Puerto Rican sculptor and filmmaker, whose “Amulets” project is her first public art commission in North America. The project consists of two large, pale green hexagons leaning against each other, each with seven holes or “eyes.” It is made of blue faience, a ceramic glaze invented in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq), more than 6,000 years ago, as well as polyester resin, which is a byproduct of modern petroleum production.
In an October 2024 interview with the Stanford Report, Farid encouraged viewers to reflect on the political and material relationships explored in the piece, including the extraction of resources such as water and oil from the Arab Peninsula.
A group of Stanford alum museum leaders and curators in the field collected and reviewed artist nominations, which were submitted to the Stanford Public Art Committee. The Public Art Committee oversees the selection and implementation of the public art program and consists of 13 members with representatives from across the university, including faculty, students, staff, board members, and members of the Stanford art community. The Committee chose “Amulets” based on its beauty and its dialogue with objects found at Stanford, such as blue faience art pieces at the Cantor Arts Center and Iraqi government records related to Saddam Hussein’s Ba’th Party at the Hoover Institution.
Shulock describes the artwork as “glowing,” in particular in the “late afternoon golden hour,” reminding her of “stained glass” when looking at it from a certain angle.
‘The Stanford Columns’
Several permanent art projects have also been installed on campus in the last few years since the pandemic. In 2022, “The Stanford Columns” by American sculptor Beverly Pepper, were installed across from the Anderson Collection. These four, large, irregularly shaped steel columns, each weighing between three and five tons, resemble tree trunks with their brownish color. The Stanford Columns” were inspired by Pepper’s 1979 sculpture “The Todi Columns” in Todi, Italy, where the artist lived for decades. The piece is a gift from the Fisher Family in honor of Doris Fisher — a Stanford alumna and co-founder of GAP — and her lifelong friendship with the artist.
“What is really lovely about this piece is how it sits within Stanford’s natural environment. So, we have these monumental four different columns within this oak grove, right opposite our museums, and really creating a stronger sense of place in the arts district and in this part of campus,” Shulock said of “The Stanford Columns.”
‘Tree of 40 Fruit’
Another very different permanent art installation is the “Tree of 40 Fruit,” which was planted in 2022 next to the Rodin sculpture garden. The “Tree of 40 Fruit” was created by American artist and Syracuse University professor Sam Van Aken, and is capable of growing 40 different kinds of stone fruit, such as plums, peaches, nectarines, cherries, apricots, and almonds. Shulock noted, “that this is just a completely different way of looking at public art and thinking about what public art can be.”
Van Aken grafted the tree using local fruit varieties, including Santa Rosa plum, to conserve and honor the agricultural history of Silicon Valley and California. In fact, when the tree was initially planted, the artist was on campus doing grafting workshops with students, which offered an opportunity for student engagement, Shulock said.
‘Pars pro Toto’
A final, relatively new permanent art installation is “Pars pro Toto” by Polish-German visual artist Alicja Kwade, which was installed in the Science and Engineering Quad in 2021 as COVID pandemic restrictions were winding down. “As people were coming back to campus and were thinking about ‘how do we connect in physical space again,’ that piece was actually very meaningful on this campus,” Shulock said.
The artwork consists of 12 stone spheres in different colors and sizes (ranging from 16 to 98 inches), representing three continents and eight countries, and are made up of 12 different types of stone, such as Visconte White granite from India, Rosa Portogallo marble from Portugal and Macaubas Blue quartzite from Brazil.
Since Stanford also aims to integrate public art into its academic mission, the project included the work of a geology professor, who prepared information about the specific stone that was used for each sphere for educational purposes, according to Shulock. This information is also available to the public online.
The position of the stone spheres is random, since the artist threw tiny balls onto a model of the quad to determine their placement. Thus, the spheres resemble both giant marble balls and a galaxy of small planets, and the piece’s Latin name, “Pars pro Toto,” meaning “a part for the whole,” reflects life on those two very different scales.
As Kwade told the Stanford Report in 2021, the piece “allows us to become giants roaming a human-scale solar system, but it also reminds us to be dwarfed by the ever-expanding universe. We become aware that our Earth is but a minute sphere, a marble suspended in our geocentric horizon.”
The artwork was selected by an ad hoc committee of faculty, staff and students from across the university and was funded by a Stanford alumni family. “We’ve heard that that specific piece just totally changed how that Science and Engineering Quad is experienced. People feel able to linger a little bit longer. It creates more of a sense of a distinctive place,” Shulock said of the piece.
For more information about public art at Stanford, visit arts.stanford.edu/for-visitors/public-art. The Cantor Arts Center also regularly hosts tours of campus public art and the sculptures surrounding the museum. For more information about tours, visit museum.stanford.edu/visit/tours-and-group-visits.