Let There Be Art



		LIGHTS UP: The restored atrium gets a final polish for the January opening.

She is the stuff of legend -- a guardian angel in graceful marble who survived two major earthquakes to keep watch over Stanford’s art treasures. The first time the bricks came tumbling down, in 1906, three galleries at the Stanford Museum of Art were demolished. But Athena, a life-size sculpture by Antonio Frilli, stood her ground on a second-floor perch overlooking the main lobby. The 1989 Loma Prieta temblor proved less ruinous, damaging only five of the collection’s 30,000 pieces. Rather than simply make structural repairs, University officials seized the opportunity to expand the museum and rethink its purpose.

Nine years later Athena is getting ready to face the crowds again. She’s drawing good-luck winks and friendly pats from curators and construction crews as they prepare for the museum’s reopening in January. The original bronze front doors depicting artistic stopovers on the Stanford family’s tours of Europe–the Louvre in Paris, Siena’s Palazzo, St. Sophia in Constantinople–are freshly buffed and polished. Mosaics that Jane Stanford commissioned in Venice were exhumed from under layers of paint in the north rotunda and restored to splendor by specialists in architectural conservation. A massive Native American canoe has been assigned a new berth in Gallery 205.



		STEP BY STEP: It took some 200 workers to finish the new wing’s interior and renovate and restore the old museum.

The result is more than a mere revival. The $38 million effort has created a whole new arts complex. The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts boasts 50 percent more space than the old museum–and a bolder, more expansive mission. Director Tom Seligman envisions a cultural hub whose enhanced resources will attract artists, scholars and scientists alike. He also sees the center as a place for experimentation. "Research and development is expected everywhere in this university, and it should be expected in the museum, as well," Seligman asserts.

At this pivotal point in the museum’s development, the director must play a dual role as visionary and drill sergeant. Seligman relishes detail. Decked out in a white hard hat, he was a peripatetic fixture on the construction site throughout the renovations. He schlepped through winter muds, climbed an occasional scaffold and studied blueprints in his trailer, picking design nits or approving the etching on a piece of transom glass. One day, he had the newly poured concrete steps outside the auditorium torn out with jackhammers and replaced because architectural specifications weren’t precisely met.



	MOVING IN: Cantor Center staff unpack artworks for installation. In preparation, during the nine-year hibernation of the 30,000-piece collection, they took inventory for the first time ever.

Polshek & Partners of New York won the architectural competition for the Center, with Richard Olcott as principal designer, and the groundbreaking ceremony took place on October 26, 1995. A topping-off celebration in August 1997 marked the completion of the project’s structural-steel phase. Work crews went on to beat the El Ni

by Diane Manuel photography by Jason Grow

by Diane Manuel
photography by Jason Grow