South SFV Today

Stanford University's Public Art Committee has announced two major art installations to be unveiled on campus in the next academic year. The renowned sculptor and filmmaker Alia Farid has been selected to create a temporary work as part of the Stanford Plinth Project, while interactive installation artist and Stanford faculty member Camille Utterback has been commissioned to develop a permanent work for Stanford’s new Data Science and Computation Complex (DSCC).

Farid’s work is expected to be installed on Meyer Green’s plinth in the fall of 2024 and will remain on view for three years. Utterback’s work is scheduled to be installed in the winter of 2025. Both works will be accessible to the public.

“Public art is so meaningful for how it brings creative vitality to the Stanford campus in a way that is tangible and open to everyone,” said Deborah Cullinan, vice president for the arts and co-chair of the Public Art Committee with David Lenox, university architect and executive director of campus planning. “It’s thrilling to welcome Alia and her thoughtful work to the university environment and to celebrate Camille as an extraordinary artist already in our midst.”

These publicly accessible projects promise rich engagement opportunities with students and the Stanford community.

“Amulets brings into view an inconspicuous yet significant object of Mesopotamian material culture,” writes Farid about her proposal of two large-scale amulets held up by one another, made of polyester resin, a modern material, and blue faience, an ancient form of ceramic glaze invented more than 6000 years ago in what is today Iraq.

Working with a group of alum curators, the Public Art Committee selected Farid’s proposal based on its formal beauty, its resonance with themes significant to Stanford and the Bay Area such as social and environmental impact of extractive industries, and its direct engagement with collections from Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center and Hoover Institution. Her work will replace the inaugural Plinth Project commission, Helloby, by Shanghai-based conceptual artist Xu Zhen.

In connection with work Farid has been developing on the social and environmental impact of extractive industries in southern Iraq and Kuwait, Amulets also comments obliquely on the environmental degradation and cultural erasure resulting from coalition wars in Iraq. The work’s focus on material history is a contemplation of plastics as a byproduct of oil and the oil reserves that lay beneath the subsoil of the Iraqi marshes.

For the DSCC commission, an ad-hoc committee sought dynamic artwork that employed data-based and computational techniques. They determined that Utterback’s interactive installation, which links computational systems to human movement and gesture, was an ideal fit for the new complex.

Utterback’s permanent installation of hand-painted glass panels layered with live, responsive, computer-generated projections will span a four-story stairwell connecting two buildings in the Data Science and Computation Complex. The installation raises questions regarding the connections between physical bodies, data, and how humans seek to understand and depict themselves in the world.

Utterback has been a faculty member at Stanford since 2013. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Media Arts Grant from the Creative Work Fund (2015) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009).