Arts District
The Arts District is located at the entrance to campus on either side of Palm Drive, with performing arts on the east side and visual arts on the west. The opportunities to enjoy or create art at Stanford are abundant both for students enrolled in arts programs and not. World class museums, a premier concert hall, a gorgeous tree-lined amphitheater, and an expansive academic space dedicated to Art & Art History have joined other existing campus venues to create a thriving home for the arts at Stanford.
Media Gallery
Arts Initiative
Arts District Facilities
Makerspaces
🎭 Arts Initiative
In 2006 the Stanford Arts Initiative was launched, a far-reaching plan to bolster the arts at Stanford through the creation of new facilities, programs, opportunities, and infrastructure, all with the goal of making the arts a fundamental part of both a Stanford education as well as the broader
campus culture.
Among the initiative’s multiple objectives was the creation or renovation of five major facilities for the Arts. The period from 2012-2019 witnessed the opening of the Bing Concert Hall, the introduction of the Anderson Collection (a contemporary art museum), the creation of the innovative Roble Arts Gym (located in west campus), the renovation and modernization of Frost Amphitheater, and the dedication of the fabulous new academic home for the arts at Stanford, the McMurtry Building for Art & Art History.
These facilities joined the existing Rodin Sculpture Garden, Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Memorial Auditorium, and the Stanford Art Gallery exhibition space, formalizing the development of Stanford’s Arts District.
🏛️ Arts District Facilities
Due in large part to the Arts Initiative, the majority of academic facilities and performance venues for the arts (both performing and visual) are located in or adjacent to the Arts District. Exceptions are the Braun Music Center and the Roble Arts Gym. The proximity of Stanford’s arts facilities to each other allows for productive interactions, and their location at the front of campus highlights the importance the university has placed on the arts.
McMurtry Building for Art & Art History
Housed on multiple levels but under one roof of the fabulous McMurtry Building are programs in art practice, design, art history, film and media studies, and documentary film and video. The building includes art studios, screening spaces, film editing rooms, exhibition space, the Experimental Media Art Lab and Sound Studio and the Art & Architecture Library. Beyond the expansive new spaces for lecturing, exhibiting and practicing art, McMurty also has a wonderful rooftop perfect for studying, catching up with friends or seeking inspiration from the panoramic campus views!
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, along with Boora Architects, designed not only a new home for the Department of Art & Art History but an interdisciplinary hub for the arts at Stanford that is fostering interaction and collaboration among students and faculty, and support the integration of the arts into university life. Students were welcomed into the new building the first day of fall term 2015.
Cantor Center for the Visual Arts
Built originally as the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum, this expansive world-class museum re-opened in 1999 as the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts. In addition to historical exhibits in the Stanford Family Gallery, the Center holds numerous important artistic works from all around the world. The varied collections include Native American, African, and Asian art; one of California's largest collections of prints and photographs; objects from Oceania and the Ancient Mediterranean, some of which date back as far as 4000 years; European and American artists of the 18th-21st centuries; and a featured collection of sculpture by Auguste Rodin. The Cantor's Rodin collection is one of the largest in the world.
Beyond the wonderful permanent collections and rotating exhibits that are shown at the Cantor Arts Center, there are a number of ways students can enjoy and get involved with the museum. Each fall an event for new students called Party on the Edge is thrown to expose students to art on campus ranging from a cappella groups to dance. Further, on the first Friday of each month, the museum is open late for special events involving art-making, music, food and more.
Rodin Sculpture Garden
The meditative and inspiring Rodin Sculpture Garden is situated adjacent to the Cantor Arts Center. A central focus of its 20 outdoor works is the massive Gates of Hell sculpture, based upon Dante’s "The Inferno" and representing Rodin's personalized vision of humanity's fate. When it is on campus, The Thinker — perhaps his most recognized and revered work — is on display in the south rotunda of the Cantor, along with many more of the French master’s works. The Garden, dedicated in May 1985 and re-landscaped in 1998, is open year-round, 24 hours a day.
Anderson Collection at Stanford
Stanford University is home to the core of the Anderson Collection, one of the world’s most outstanding private assemblies of modern and contemporary American art, including original works by Pollack, Rothko, Diebenkorn, and many others. Each work is exemplary of its movement, which include Bay Area Abstraction, Bay Area Figuration, California Light & Space, Color Field Painting, Contemporary Painting, Funk, Hard-Edge Painting, New York School, and Post-Minimalism.
The collection is a gift from Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson and Mary Patricia Anderson Pence, the Bay Area family who built the collection over the last 50 years. At the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, visitors can explore the breadth of post-war American art and experience the distinctive art collecting vision of the Anderson family.
Bing Concert Hall
Referred to upon its 2013 opening as the "top acoustic performance facility in the nation," Bing Concert Hall’s 2,375-square-foot studio facilitates the practice and study of the performing arts. A nexus of community and campus, it provides the community with an exceptional resource for live performance and creative exploration and serves as an essential rehearsal, training and performance venue for students and other campus partners — including the Stanford Symphony and Philharmonia Orchestra — in addition to presentations by visiting artists as part of Stanford Live, which presents a wide range of the finest performances from around the world.
Bing Concert Hall was created with the total audience experience at the forefront. Its 842 seats are arranged in a “vineyard” format, with seating sections ringing the stage and beginning on the same level as the performance platform. Bing has welcomed such artists as Yo-Yo Ma, Kristin Chenoweth, Anna Deavere Smith, Emmylou Harris, Frederica von Stade, and the San Francisco Symphony.
Frost Amphitheater
Frost Amphitheater was completed in 1937 and was designed to create the pleasant, naturalistic feel of a forested area. The bowl-shaped amphitheater is lined with a variety of trees and has a 50-foot rise from its lowest point to the top of its rim that is 30 feet above ground level. Following a significant restoration and modernization as part of the Stanford Arts Initiative, Frost reopened in 2019 boasting a beautiful, state-of-the art stage and equipment, improved accessibility, and modern amenities for both audiences and performers.
When Frost wasn't hosting the university's commencement ceremonies from 1937 to 1983, it was hosting the music of the day: Arthur Fiedler, the San Francisco Symphony, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Jefferson Airplane, Tower of Power, Miles Davis, Joan Baez and the Grateful Dead. More recently, Frost acts have included Lionel Richie, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Mos Def, Kendrick Lamar, Modest Mouse and MGMT.
Roble Arts Gym (located outside the Arts District)
The Roble Arts Gym is a drop-in creative space for art-making open to all Stanford students. Students have access to spaces for informal performance and rehearsal, project materials and storage for artworks, and a community of art-makers. The "messy arts" space is particularly popular!
The Roble Arts Gym was originally built in 1931 as the women’s gymnasium. The renovation of the old Roble gymnasium was completed in 2016 and created new theatrical performance spaces and updated several dance studios, rehearsal spaces, and classrooms. Roble houses the Harry J. Elam, Jr. Theater, a large black box theater; the Roble Dance Studio, a beautiful dance performance space in keeping with its original Spanish architecture; several acting, dance, and music rehearsal spaces; a VR room; and the main departmental office for Theater & Performance Studies (TAPS).
Stanford Art Gallery
The Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery (separate from the campus' main art museum) is a 1,900-square-feet exhibition space administered and curated by the Department of Art & Art History that functions as a dynamic teaching and learning resource for faculty, students and guest artists. In addition to the department’s MFA shows, high-quality exhibitions are sponsored by the department and are presented to engage the university and wider community in stimulating dialogue facilitated by historical and contemporary visual language and culture. Admission is free and open to all.
Constructed in 1917 and named for the younger brother of Leland Stanford, the gallery was originally built as the first structure to anchor an originally planned library quadrangle just east of the University’s center. It remains in its original location, adjacent to the campus’ newer Arts District.
Memorial Hall & Memorial Auditorium (“Mem Aud”)
Memorial Auditorium (usually referred to just as “Mem Aud”), is the largest indoor performance space at Stanford (1705 seats) and part of the larger Memorial Hall facility, which also includes Prosser Theater (192 seats) and the intimate Prosser Studio (seating 30 to 55). KZSU, Stanford’s radio station broadcasting across the Bay Area on 90.1 FM, is located in the basement level.
Mem Aud is primarily used to present TAPS’s largest musicals and dance shows, including the traditional Big Game “Gaieties” production each year. In addition to the main large proscenium stage and auditorium, Memorial Hall houses the TAPS department’s costume shop, scene shops, and light lab, as well as faculty offices, production staff offices, and other classrooms.
Mem Aud also hosts University special events, including New Student Orientation, presidential addresses and roundtables, and a wide range of guest speakers. Past notable speakers and addresses have included Martin Luther King, Jr’s “The Other America” speech in 1967, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, the Dalai Lama, and Barack Obama.
Memorial Hall was dedicated in 1937 to commemorate students and faculty who died in World War I. Since that time, the names of those who have died in subsequent wars have been added to the chiseled list in the main lobby.
Braun Music Center
The Braun Music Center is the main academic building for the Department of Music, and is located near White Plaza, across from the Stanford Post Office. Braun was specially designed with both acoustics and soundproofing in mind — it is a building within a building. The Music Library, in addition to printed matter, contains the amazing Archive of Recorded Sound, a collection of more than 150,000 records and CDs of classical and popular music, literature, drama, interviews, public addresses and radio broadcasts from the late nineteenth century to the present.
Located on the first floor of Braun is Campbell Recital Hall, which seats 215 and is a popular spot for small ensemble and student recital performances. The adjacent Dinkelspiel Auditorium, a large 710-seat performance and lecture hall, was built earlier in 1957, but serves the Department of Music and the rest of the University for large performances, lectures, symposia, and rehearsals.
🛠️ Makerspaces
Stanford University has a variety of makerspaces spread throughout the campus, ranging from general facilities designed to provide opportunities for creative expression and practical construction to specialized spaces to support research, courses and thousands of students.
Makerspace - McMurtry Arts Practice Studios
The McMurtry building, which houses the Department of Art & Art History, has spaces and facilities for coursework in experimental media art (audio, video, and a tinker lab), sculpture (metalworking, woodworking, molding, and welding), and printmaking.
Makerspace - Roble Arts Gym (located outside the Arts District)
The Roble Arts Gym is a drop-in creative space for art-making open to all Stanford students. Students have access to spaces for informal performance and rehearsal, project materials and storage for artworks, and a community of art-makers. The "messy arts" space is particularly popular!
The Roble Arts Gym was originally built in 1931 as the women’s gymnasium. The renovation of the old Roble gymnasium was completed in 2016 and created new theatrical performance spaces and updated several dance studios, rehearsal spaces, and classrooms. Roble houses the Harry J. Elam, Jr. Theater, a large black box theater; the Roble Dance Studio, a beautiful dance performance space in keeping with its original Spanish architecture; several acting, dance, and music rehearsal spaces; a VR room; and the main departmental office for Theater & Performance Studies (TAPS).
Makerspace - "The d.school"
The “d.school” (officially: The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) is a recognized thought leader in human-centered design, and a leading teaching center for design and experiential learning. Despite its nickname, it is not a “school” of the university, but an internationally acclaimed institute, providing offerings to students from all seven of its schools, both graduate and undergraduate. In 2012, the d.school started the ‘Project Fellowship,’ inviting professionals with expertise in their respective fields to join the d.school to advance an ambitious project to create systems-level change in the world.
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