STANFORD, CA.- Fall at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University will include three major exhibitions that highlight the work of two of the most exciting artists working today and two American photographic legends.

“Presenting the large-scale, deeply empathetic portraits of Jordan Casteel, the photographs of celebrated American icons Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, and the thoughtful reinstallation of our Stanford Family Collections by Mark Dion allows us to be the center of engaging conversations in the Bay Area about our past and present and to tell the stories of peoples and places that have notalways been fully explored,” said Susan Dackerman, John and Jill Freidenrich Director at the Cantor.

Jordan Casteel: Returning the Gaze, the celebrated young artist’s first solo museum show, has its West Coast premiere at the Cantor. Casteel, 30, widely recognized as one of the most important emerging artists working today, has rooted her practice incommunity engagement. Based in Harlem, New York, Casteel’s nearly life-size portraits and cropped compositions chronicle personal observations of the human experience. The exhibition, on view at the Cantor from September 29, 2019, to January 6, 2020, features 29 paintings made in the last five years.

“Her monumental, exquisitely tender paintings remind us that everyday existence can also be extraordinary,” said Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, assistant curator of American art.

West x Southwest: Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, The Capital Group Foundation Gift, features landscapes, still lifes, nude studies, and portraits by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, the definitive photographers of Northern California and the American landscape in the 20th century. The photographs are part of the of over 1,000 photographs given to the Cantor by the Capital Group Foundation. The first of a three-part exhibition is on view September 26, 2019, to January 6, 2020.

Despite their friendship and overlap in their professional lives—including being founding members of the Bay Area photography collective Group f/64 in the early 1930s—Weston (b. 1886) and Adams (b. 1902) were very different artists from different generations. Scholars have long observed that Weston’s most profound formative experience as an artist happened in Mexico between 1923 and 1926. For the younger Adams, exploration of New Mexico in the late 1920s and subsequent trips farther into the American Southwest similarly shaped his life and career. This exhibition includes work from Weston’s focused time in Mexico and Adams’s many journeys into the American Southwest to examine their distinctive approaches to photography.

The second and third exhibitions of photographs from the Capital Group Foundation Collection at Stanford University are Outside Looking In: Photographs by John Gutmann, Helen Levitt, and Wright Morris, which opens Jan 22, 2020, and Gordan Parks: A Loaded Camera, which opens May 13, 2020.

The Melancholy Museum: Love, Death, and Mourning at Stanford, the reinstallation of the Stanford Family Collections at the Cantor, by Mark Dion, will open September 18, 2019. Dion, this year’s Diekman Contemporary Commissions Program artist at the Cantor and a recently named John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, has spent hours culling through the over 6,000 objects in the collections, amassed by Leland Stanford Jr. and his parents. Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. He is known for atypical orderings of objects and specimens.

The exhibition includes a mourning cabinet to highlight some of the over 700 objects and explore the Victorian-era fascination with death and mourning. This is of particular interest to the artist, who sees young Leland’s death, just before age 16, as a unique and compelling origin story for the museum and university—and by extension, the entire Silicon Valley. Dion’s installation will include the Golden Spike used by Leland Stanford Sr. at Promontory Summit, Utah, to connect the two halves of the intercontinental railroad 150 years ago. The exhibition also will examine those whose stories have been less told in the dominant narratives about the Stanford family, including those who worked to build the railroads and to help the Stanfords amass their wealth.