This is the full text of the speech I gave at Stanford's Phi Beta Kappa ceremony during Commencement weekend. I was given the honor of addressing the cohort and their mentors, professors, and loved ones. Three speakers told the stories of an academic adventure they had at Stanford, and my story centered on the relevance of museums in my Stanford education and, more broadly, the relevance of museums in the humanities.
UNSEEN STORIES: MUSEUMS, OBJECTS, AND THE VIBRANCY OF CULTURAL HISTORY
June 16, 2017
Museums have always been part of my education. This goes all the way back to childhood when my family and I would take weekend trips to local museums, wandering through their large hallways and getting the “greatest hits” from each site. But at Stanford, museums became deep dives into a handful of objects, rather than rapid-fire surveys of vast collections. Stanford students are fortunate to have two great art resources on our campus—the Anderson Collection, built in 2014, and the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts, an institution almost as old as Stanford itself, existing in some form through earthquakes and institutional changes since 1894. The Cantor contains art from ancient times to the contemporary moment (some of which was collected by Jane Stanford herself), while the Anderson Collection immediately adjacent to it houses a prolific private collection of post-war American Art, with modern masterpieces like Jackson Pollock’s Lucifer.
One of my two majors was Art History, so it is unsurprising that for the past few years, I spent a lot of time in these buildings. Every week, I would attend a section or a seminar in one of their galleries. In many Art History courses, the first assignment simply asks students to look at an artwork for ten or twenty minutes. At first you see what the object is trying to represent, but then you begin to notice how vivid a certain color is, or you spot small scratches on a statue. While museums have labels full of information, art history classes train us to look closely and look profoundly for ourselves before we ask questions about who painted it, when and why.
But it was not just my coursework in art history that took me into these institutions. Rather these museums were the hub of humanities life for me. Classes of queer comparative literature, the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, and the history of 20th century innovation all made their way into Stanford’s collections to enrich the literary and historical stories these courses were sharing. Guided by professors like Michele Elam who would carefully select several objects for students to see, these interactions forced me to really look at artworks, reinserting the intimacy and passion that first drew me to the humanities. A small group of students, no bigger than twenty, would have the opportunity to enter a private viewing room full of famed art. Inside this classroom, we then had a chance to lean into the works, peering over every surface. I vividly remember examining a small sketch by Pablo Picasso. For me, each dashed line recalled the scattered fragments of Gertrude Stein’s prose—a connection that had been stated in class discussion but that remained too opaque and theoretical until an actual object was directly before me.
Beyond growing as a student in the museum as a recipient of knowledge, I also was fortunate enough to curate an exhibition my junior year at the Cantor—participating first hand in this process of public education from which I have so benefited. Museums are guides to objects and the objects themselves are portals to vast, diverse histories.
One such history came to me in a sketch by Gustav Klimt—a prominent Austrian artist who worked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Looking at his sketch of a woman’s figure, I noticed a faint mark on the reverse side of the sheet. It was an inch across but it spoke volumes about his portrait process. He had begun drawing her face, starting with the eye-ridge, and then gave-up. In that one mark, something was already wrong, so he flipped the sheet to draw her on the reverse side. This discovery gave me insight into the careful deliberation with which he approached his art. In the resulting image, there were no sketched parts of her figure, there were only perfect lines. I recognize that this is one work and one artist but this attention to detail resonates more broadly with early 20th century values about the representation of women and the gendered anxiety of the artists producing them. In an era when women spent more time out of the home and myths of femme fatales ran rampant, the care with which this man attempted to delineate, and thus reimagine and control, female representation speaks more broadly than a single mark on a single work would otherwise.
These two museums at Stanford have structured my own journey as a student, but museums are particularly important resources for any students of the humanities and more broadly all well-rounded, inquisitive people like the graduates of Stanford honored here today. The stories they tell are diverse—recent exhibitions at the Cantor have displayed everything from Roman glasswork to contemporary documentaries and have even had exhibitions related to science like the history of photography and paintings of early naval exploration.
As important centers of cultural history, museums tell the stories held in the stones of the grandest buildings and the smallest marks on the tiniest sheet of paper. But museums also offer themselves up as laboratories to train people to look critically. By housing paintings and sculptures that visitors can examine, museums have the capacity to train patrons of the arts to become more willing and able to engage with profound questions of history, culture, and identity in the world and mediascape that surrounds us.
So by way of conclusion, I encourage everyone at some point this weekend to walk just across the way to the Cantor or the Anderson to take time to observe and hopefully discover one of these unseen stories in the objects before you.
Thank you.