20.8% of the 2017 MacArthur Fellows were Stanford guest artists within the last year

Stanford congratulates the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winners who recently spent time on campus engaging with students, faculty and the public.

Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY, whose work tells elaborate and delicate stories of her life, was in conversation with Jodi Roberts, the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Cantor, and Catherine Hale, curator at Creative Campus Galleries at Sheridan. This public talk, held at CEMEX Auditorium in April 2017, was part of the Intersection speaker series presented by the Cantor Arts Center, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University and the Department of Art and Art History.

RHIANNON GIDDENS, previously known as the stunning vocalist and dazzling banjo and fiddle player with the Grammy-winning trio Carolina Chocolate Drops, performed as a duo with Dirk Powell at Bing Concert Hall in November 2016, under the auspices of Stanford Live.

Last month, Stanford Live also presented theater artist TAYLOR MAC in an abridged version of A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, winner of the 2017 Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History and a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Prior to the presentation at Bing Concert Hall, as well as the full 24-hour performance at the Curran in San Francisco, a select group of students from Stanford’s Arts Intensive were immersed in a three-week workshop with Mac’s creative team.

VIET THANH NGUYEN, author of the novel The Sympathizer, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, delivered the public lecture “Writing War, Writing Refugees” at CEMEX Auditorium, followed the next day by participation in a roundtable discussion on Asian American literature at the Humanities Center in May 2017.

TREVOR PAGLEN, who was the Cantor’s first artist-in-residence, was on campus January through May 2017 to engage with faculty to deepen his ongoing research into artificial intelligence, machine vision technology and the ethical considerations of such potential new ways of seeing. His residency projects included Sight Machine, a multimedia performance in collaboration with the Kronos Quartet and Obscura Digital at San Francisco Pier 70, and an exhibition at the Cantor, The Eye and the Sky: Trevor Paglen in the Cantor Collection. The exhibition positioned Paglen’s 2010 work Time Study (Predator; Indian Springs, NV) alongside the work of seminal 19th- and 20th-century photographers in the museum’s collection.