Stuart Collection (Video)

Artist Jeppe Hein discusses Breathe with Me, a participatory artwork that invites the public to paint their breath on large canvases, visualizing the invisible act of breathing. Through an interview with Jess Berlanga Taylor, Hein reflects on the work’s themes of interconnectedness and cooperation, drawing from his own mental health journey to emphasize the importance of mindfulness and presence....

An 800-foot-long stone path of words, KAHNOP • TO TELL A STORY is the 22nd public artwork commissioned by the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego. The text for the UC San Diego walkway draws from the writing of authors and scholars with ties to the University and its history. Organized by a spine of keywords composed by Ann Hamilton, this concordance of documents weaves together threads of thinking...

An 800-foot-long stone path of words, KAHNOP • TO TELL A STORY is the 22nd public artwork commissioned by the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego. The text for the UC San Diego walkway draws from the writing of authors and scholars with ties to the University and its history. Organized by a spine of keywords composed by Ann Hamilton, this concordance of documents weaves together threads of thinking...

This functional, polished, granite drinking fountain is an exact replica in granite of commercial metal fountains typically found in schools, business offices and government buildings. Instead of its usual context as interior office furniture, the fountain is placed monument-like on a grass island in the center of UC San Diego's Town Square. The siting of his work is fundamental to its meaning; it...

John Baldessari decided first to transform the main doors of UCSD’s iconic Geisel Library and then to incorporate the entire lobby space, choosing students as his subject. The existing clear glass of the doors was replaced with glass in primary colors, perhaps suggesting primary sources of information. As the doors open and close, the colored panes cross over each other, visually mixing into new c...

In 1992, for the Stuart Collection, Jenny Holzer created "Green Table," a large granite picnic or refectory table and benches inscribed with texts. Holzer's table and benches monumentalize an ordinary and functional set of objects. Like all tables, Holzer's work serves as an informal gathering place for students and faculty to eat, study, or play. But the various attitudes Holzer adopts in her wri...

The female figure atop "Standing" calls forth thoughts of human strength and frailty, and both the power and the limits of medicine. Serene and ageless, she stands in a Madonna-like pose that is both vulnerable and generous. Ribbons of water - the source of life - flow from her hands into the rock-lined pond below, with a soothing sound. The skin surface of the body itself is violated to reveal th...

"Red Shoe" has brought to life a formerly forgotten corner of campus. It is an alluring place for children to climb, its smooth exterior giving way to a roughly hull-like interior, hinting at the enclosure of a nest or fort. Narratives come to mind as fantasy evokes the resonance of childhood rhymes and tales. In the words of Robert Storr, Dean of the Yale University School of Art, "Reason preside...

Do Ho Suh’s work explores the notions of home, cultural displacement, one’s perception of space and how one builds a memory of it. What is home, after all? A place? An idea? A sentiment? A memory? A small cottage has been picked up, as if by some mysterious force, and “landed” atop Jacobs Hall at UC San Diego, where it sits crookedly on one corner, cantilevered out over the ground seven stories be...

Jackie Ferrara designed a series of three distinct spaces at UCSD's Cellular and Molecular Medicine Facility. Each area is paved with a similar linear pattern of green, red, and black slate and surrounded by compacted gravel. Each has a unique character, but the terraces flow into one another becoming one continuous space. She has placed Australian willows and benches in lines that echo the grid o...

A 199-foot tall metal flag-pole-like sculpture is mounted with a flashing light which playfully spells out “What Hath God Wrought” in Morse Code. The titular phrase is notably the first message Samuel Morse tested and transmitted across 41 miles in 1844. The sculpture reflects both the origins of the university as well as the origins of present-day communications: Morse Code is at the root of our...

Bruce Nauman's "Vices and Virtues" for the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego consists of seven pairs of words superimposed in blinking neon, which run like a frieze around the top of the Charles Lee Powell Structural Systems Laboratory. Seven vices alternate with seven virtues: FAITH/LUST, HOPE/ENVY, CHARITY/SLOTH, PRUDENCE/PRIDE, JUSTICE/AVARICE, TEMPERANCE/GLUTTONY, and FORTITUDE/ANGER. The virt...

Terry Allen's diverse talents and experiences are highlighted in his first outdoor project, "Trees," for the Stuart Collection. He remarks upon the continual loss of natural environment at UC San Diego by salvaging three eucalyptus trees from a grove razed to make way for new campus buildings. Two of these trees stand like ghosts within a eucalyptus grove between the Geisel Library and the Faculty...

Finlay created a one-word poem installed at one edge of the north playing field at UC San Diego. "UNDA" consists of five stone blocks into which are carved, in various sequences, the letters U, N, D, A, and an S-like mark which is the editor's notation for "transpose these letters." The letters on each block in the sequence carry out the transpositions indicated by this curved mark so that regardl...

"Another" is in the vast atrium of the UC San Diego Price Center East. The large interior wall bears a massive double image of clocks which is punctuated by terrazzo-like areas that contain phrases. Two LED displays show live current news, adding another level of interest, as well as meaning, and suggesting how our lives are, to some degree, culturally inflected, constructed and contained. This co...

Snake Path consists of a winding 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide footpath in the form of a serpent, whose individual scales are hexagonal pieces of colored slate, and whose head is inlaid in the approach to UC San Diego's Geisel Library. The tail wraps around an existing concrete pathway as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent's slightly crowned body circles around...

For the Stuart Collection at UC San Diego, William Wegman created his first major outdoor permanent sculpture: he installed a scenic - or nonscenic - overlook at one edge of the campus, near the location of the university's theater and dance complex. The site commands a view not of the Pacific Ocean, but of La Jolla's suburban sprawl. Wegman's overlook makes a simple cartoon-like connection betwee...

A bear constructed of boulders. Eight granite stones, together they make a bear 23.5 feet high with a total weight of 180 tons. Bear pushes the bounds of credibility. Questions arise. Where did they find these rocks? How did they get them here? Are they real? How are they held together? On one hand, the sculpture is massive, permanent, thoroughly engineered. At the same time, it has a form (a toy...

For the Stuart Collection, "Two Running Violet V Forms," Robert Irwin was drawn to the eucalyptus groves so characteristic of the UC San Diego campus. Irwin installed two fencelike structures in V-forms amidst the trees. The "fences" are blue-violet, plastic-coated, small gauge chain-link fencing supported by stainless steel poles that average twenty-five feet in height. At no point is the fence a...

Same Old Paradise, a mural painted by Alexis Smith, was commissioned by Brooklyn Museum in 1987 as a temporary installation and then remained rolled-up for thirty years. Alexis worked with Lucia Vinograd to develop the five-point perspective of the orange grove and the colors in the scales of the snake that turned into a paved road. Alexis loved to drive, and when you drive and look out the window...

Nam June Paik's "Something Pacific" at UC San Diego relates specifically to its site, which includes outdoors, where the work features several ruined televisions embedded in the landscape. In striking contrast to this video graveyard, the lobby of the UCSD Media Center houses Paik's lively interactive bank of TV monitors. Viewers are able to manipulate sequences of Paik's own tapes and broadcast T...

Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) is best known for her oversized figures that embrace contradictory qualities such as good and evil, modern and primitive, sacred and profane, play and terror. De Saint Phalle's "Sun God" was the first work commissioned by the Stuart Collection and was her first outdoor commission in America. Sun God has become a landmark on the UC San Diego campus, with the annual...

For the Stuart Collection at the UC San Diego, Adams created a musical composition with and within the signature landscape of the campus: the eucalyptus grove. There are no pre-recorded elements, everything that occurs in "The Wind Garden" is driven by the wind and the light conditions on the site, in real time. This work never repeats itself. Hidden in the trees are 32 small loudspeakers and 32 a...

Richard Fleischner's "La Jolla Project" is located on the Revelle College lawn at UC San Diego. Seventy-one blocks of pink and gray granite are arranged in configurations that refer to architectural vocabulary: posts, lintels, columns, arches, windows, doorways, and thresholds. These elements transform an ordinary, nearly flat lawn into a space with allusions ranging from an ancient ruin to a cont...

Alexis Smith originally created the mural "Same Old Paradise" in 1986 for temporary display at the Brooklyn Museum, after which it was stored for over 30 years. Now the massive mural - 62 feet long and 22 feet tall - has been permanently installed at the North Torrey Pines Living & Learning Neighborhood as part of UC San Diego's Stuart Collection. "Same Old Paradise" also served as the inspiration...