Freeform: Exhibition launch and artist talk

Freeform, an online exhibition presented by the Department of Art & Art History, will be on view at artexhibitions.stanford.edu beginning Friday, November 20, 2020. Join us for the exhibition launch and artist talk at 3 pm PST. Please register in advance. 

History is often understood in linear terms—one event precedes the next, and so on, resulting in a cultural memory and consciousness pin-pricked and incomplete. Memory has suffered through a successive recalling, when its true form is more abstract. Abstraction can be seen as a skewing, transforming, and reshaping of images and stories that we have always known.In Freeform, Laneya Billingsley, Richard Jonathan Nelson, Stuart Robertson, and Sam Vernon use images—found, heavily circulated, and vernacular—and those rendered after their own visions. At times stitching together something familiar; at other times creating something entirely new. It is in this way that the artists in this exhibition look to both the past and the future concurrently.Reworking and morphing histories simultaneously to invent worlds anew, these artists utilize abstraction in a way that allows them to expand the canon and introduce a new line to understand, to recall, and to project through.

Image: Richard Jonathan Nelson. Crashing against imagined pigment, Lowkey, 2018 . Digital collage photography on paper. 20”x24”.

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Visitor InformationThe Department of Art and Art History's galleries are currently closed as a precautionary measure in response to the coronavirus. Thank you for your understanding. Please follow Stanford's Health Alerts for the latest information regarding university operations and policies. 

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