THE ASK: Create an overarching umbrella for all of the arts at Stanford.

THE IDEA: It’s not just hung on white walls, or sung into a microphone, or pranced across a stage. It’s creating the world’s most sensitive radio to boogie to dark matter. It’s using a Jackson Pollock as an engineering blueprint. It’s helping invent the motion picture, because someone had to.

At Stanford, art is all around us. It’s within us. It connects us. It’s our inherent and undying need to make an impression, to speak our truth, to share a moment, to open minds, and to change the world for the better. And at Stanford, this drive takes shape in uniquely profound and creative ways — in a collaborative dance spanning continents, at the intersection of ceramics and theoretical physics, and in a four-line poem written to rehabilitate.

And by connecting art and artists of all kinds in one place, we spark more inspiration, we bridge cultures and connect communities, and we empower the curious and the passionate to see and be seen, to listen and be heard, to feel and be felt.

Together we’re finding the art in anything and everything and drawing it all together under one inclusive spotlight. Because it’s all art.
And it’s all here.