Current & Upcoming Exhibitions
Korakrit Arunanondchai, Shore of Security, 2022. Courtesy the artist and C L E A R I N G, New York / Brussels / Los Angeles. Photo: JSP Art Photography
Spirit House
September 4, 2024–January 19, 2025
Throughout Southeast Asia, various belief systems and cultural practices make the consideration of life and death—and the permeability between these worlds—a daily exercise. In Thailand, a commonplace mode of engagement with the spiritual realm comes in the form of spirit houses, dollhouse-size devotional structures rooted in Buddhist and animist beliefs and found outside virtually every home or building.
Inspired by these structures, Spirit House surveys how thirty-three contemporary artists of Asian descent are exploring modes of making that exceed rational understanding and enter haunted dimensions. Challenging the privileging of data-driven, scientific methods of understanding the world around us, the artists represented in Spirit House instead foreground inherited, embodied, and psychic forms of knowledge.
Livien Yin, Thirsty No. 1, 2022. Collection of David Liu and Michael Fountas. Image courtesy of the artist and Micki Meng.
Livien Yin: Thirsty
August 21, 2024 - February 22, 2025
Livien Yin: Thirsty is the first museum solo exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist Livien Yin, a 2019 Stanford MFA. This single-gallery exhibition showcases new and recent paintings by Yin and their sensitive, researched-based approach to creating scenes of contemporary subjects alongside historical Asian Americans and their environments. In their paintings, Yin often casts their friends as models, collapsing the distance between the past and present to create new connective threads between Asian Americans across generations.
Left: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Contact sheet from Forming a Sculpture Drama in Manhattan, 1974. Courtesy of Special Collections at Stanford University. Right...
Archive Rooms: Selections from Special Collections at Stanford Libraries
July 17, 2024–Ongoing
The Cantor’s Archive Rooms—a new, pilot presentation at the museum—highlights the rich art historical resources available right here at Stanford. These small, single-gallery, single-artist installations feature engaging selections from the robust holdings of artist archives at Special Collections at Stanford Libraries and enhance our understanding of the artistic process. The inaugural Archive Rooms installations will feature Lynn Hershman Leeson and Bernice Bing, two individuals deeply influential in the history of art in the Bay Area, United States, and beyond.
TT Takemoto, Looking for Jiro, 2011. © TT Takemoto. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco. Photograph by Maxwell Leung.
TT Takemoto: Remembering in the Absence of Memory
June 19 - December 1, 2024
This single gallery exhibition features two video works and two complementary series of small handmade objects and works on paper by San Francisco Bay Area-based artist TT Takemoto. Takemoto’s videos Looking for Jiro (2011) and On the Line (2018) uniquely center queer experiences of intimacy in prewar and WWII contexts. The Gentleman’s Gaman series (2009–23) and an installation of handcrafted kokeshi dolls (2023) offer sculptural, expanded modes of engagement with challenging and overlooked narratives in Asian American history, as reimagined by Takemoto.
Artwork © 2024 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy David Zwirner. Photo by Terry Schmitt.
The Faces of Ruth Asawa
July 6, 2022–Ongoing
The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University acquired Untitled (LC.012, Wall of Masks) in 2020. These 233 masks, which originally hung on the exterior of Ruth Asawa’s family home in Noe Valley, have never been shown in their entirety outside their original context. After two years of conservation treatment and careful planning, they were mounted as part of the long-term installation, The Faces of Ruth Asawa, at the Cantor. This focused exhibition, curated by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, PhD, Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and co-director of the Asian American Art Initiative, explores Asawa’s intimate relationship with clay and offers a new context with which to understand her diverse body of work.